The bidding structure was set up to have provoked a bidding war. 18f tried a bold experiment with unconventional ways. It might be good to take a leaf out of th

The bidding structure was set up to have provoked a bidding war. 18f tried a bold experiment with unconventional ways. It might be good to take a leaf out of the conventional system...at least for things that work well. There isn't much broken in the way the govt takes bids for work: They release an RFP, vendors review it, ask questions, govt. answers the questions, vendors send their bids for the work. All that works well. What doesn't work well is when the govt. teams assigned to review the bids from the vendors don't have the engineering know-how to assess which vendor can actually deliver on what they want. I've seen a CMS system being proposed and go on to win the work to solve the need for keeping scattered databases of submarines in-sync.