13 ms·

18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1

233 points by brensudol 11y ago

ac2u 11y ago
>It didn’t seem controversial to me. Writing some code to help out the government and the general public—what a unique opportunity! Y'know, if the author explained it along the lines of "I wanted to have a record of government work as a foot in the door", I think it would be an easier pill to swallow for the folks bidding at reasonable prices. However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. But at the end of the day, it's the way that system was set up. Hopefully 18F sees this as an opportunity to improve the auction system (secret minimum and other suggestions in the other thread), rather than a way to get cheap labour.
- luma 11y ago
  Why would anybody be against competent coders wanting to donate time to public use? I get that other people were hoping to be paid for this, but would you end all volunteer programs on account of them interfering with paid labor?
  - ac2u 11y ago
    No I wouldn't. But volunteer work is usually commissioned without a price incentive in mind rather than an auction style format.
  - anm89 11y ago
    No one is. If you want to donate your time there are a million non profits that will gladfully take the donation. There is no reason this process has to devalue everyone else's work on a paid job.
    - fineman 11y ago
      Then get another job. We don't owe you your line of work. If you literally can't compete with volunteers maybe you should see what they says about your niche and then find a new one. Once when replacing a server (and fixing the wiring, etc, etc) I also replaced a router and dual-homed the company's site as a freebie because it made my job easier (the new router had diagnostics, managed-switch features, etc). It was a line-item I could have billed for separately, or it was a new level of service. By the "save the work for the guy feeding the starving children" philosophy we should nickel-and-dime our clients instead of providing our true value. I don't like that.
      - fineman 11y ago
        btw, I'm a supporter of unlimited (ie, not limited - I would try to encourage you to not need it though) welfare to let society say "tough" things such as "Oh well, I guess we don't need many buggy whips." And as to why I didn't charge anyways - the change actually made my other work faster.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      There are lots of non-profits that will gladly take the donation. Very, very few have made it as easy to donate as 18F has. Perhaps the lesson here is that non-profits need to make it as easy and clearly-defined as 18F has in order to receive more donations.
  - username223 11y ago
    > Why would anybody be against competent coders wanting to donate time to public use? Ayn frowns upon altruism, and lots of coders (heart) Ayn.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Volunteer programs? No, not at all. But this is NOT a volunteer program. It is supposed to be a way to better bid out government work, which I will point out is very much not charity.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  So I take it you believe government should in general be an "employer of last resort", aka using public works projects as mediums of social services.
  - ac2u 11y ago
    Nope. Made the assumption that because the price was going down rapidly that there were perhaps a few one-man/woman shops that wanted to do work for a price which was more reasonable than $1. Edit: Also you took a massive leap of extrapolation on what my views were on a short paragraph. Beyond guessing a possible motivation (foot in door as government contractor), there's nothing pinning my views here on the auctioneer being a government contractor rather than private sector.
- afarrell 11y ago
  > if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. This line of argument would hold water if the federal government had any kinda of monopsony power on software consulting services. They do not.
  - ac2u 11y ago
    My thoughts weren't really centred around arguing that to be honest. It was more to do with the author's tone, which took a rather tone-deaf attitude as to why certain folks were disappointed with the outcome. The outcome of the auction happened in a way which was allowed by the parameters which defined it.
- tomcam 11y ago
  However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. Didn't seem the slightest patronizing to me. Brendan just seemed delighted that he could help out. I love that. More important, any bidder in any circumstance can be outbid by someone else and lose rent money in the process, right? To dictate any other outcome would require a depth of knowledge about the market and its bidders that no one party could possibly acquire reliably.
zeckalpha 11y ago
Given the tendency of HN toward libertarian and free market approaches, I've been consistently surprised at the suggestions being made around this. This is free markets gone right: A buyer and seller finding the most efficient price for each.
- x5n1 11y ago
  The seller wasn't going for the profit motive however. The seller simply wanted to work on the project as a volunteer. This is how he facilitated that. There is no profit motive here, and so really it's not even a business transaction, it's a volunteering oppurtunity.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    There are more value systems than just monetary. This is basic, relative, marginal utility.
  - Navarr 11y ago
    It's still 100% free market.
    - iaw 11y ago
      There's a lot of crappy things that are 100% free market. Oligopolies come to mind. Just because it's a free market solution doesn't mitigate the negative experiences this person created for the other bidders.
      - x5n1 11y ago
        Well the problem is self correcting. People will stop giving quality bids if they don't think that there is any profit to be made because a bunch of volunteers have destroyed the market. There is no problem here. Only that anyone bidding should be aware that they won't get properly compensated for their work and time.
        11y ago
USNetizen 11y ago
The problem with this isn't that the bidder wanted to do something noble, it's that it set a precedent that the government is going to expect on future bids moving forward. "Buying a contract" is nothing new - companies do it all the time (i.e. deliberately dramatically underbidding just to get the past performance). However, reverse auctions are a lose-lose for the government and commercial sector. This approach assumes that the only thing that separates vendors is price alone, which is incorrect. For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Just ask the other numerous agencies backing away from the reverse auction model due to disastrous lowest-bidder contractor performance. I do, however, wholeheartedly embrace the pilot-model approach to IT procurement (i.e. MVP for government). It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing innovators to shine in practice, not through proposals.
- JumpCrisscross 11y ago
  > For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Is the government bound to accept the lowest bid? When bidding closes, it would make sense to review the lowest bids for noticeable differences in expected quality. If it isn't worth doing that, because expected quality is always high, and prices keep coming low one must consider that the task has become commoditised.
  - Bedon292 11y ago
    It would depend on the situation. This one, I believe, they were bound to accept the lowest bid. However if the lowest bidder failed to complete the work they could move up the ladder. Most major contracts are, I think, 'Lowest bidder technically acceptable'. Which requires the bidder to meet minimum guidelines in their quality of work. So price is not the only factor, though it is a major one.
    - tssva 11y ago
      Most large federal contracts state the criteria for judgement in the RFP. It is usually some combination of technical solution, cost and past performance with the weight of each varying between RFPs. Also for large contracts the government will have done some due diligence to determine a range which the contract should cost. If your bid is significantly below this range and your solution doesn't show some innovation to support the lower cost the government is likely to reject it as unrealistic.
davideous 11y ago
This appears to be working so far. One sample doesn't really establish a "market rate" yet, so I don't worry about the seller not being motivated by financial profit motive. Sometimes the value provided to the seller goes beyond the financial payment. 18F gets a good deal here because of the intangibles they have to offer. If they put out more projects than the amount of work people are willing to do at the "$1 volunteer" or "$1 build my portfolio" rate, then the price should go up. How deep is this pool? I guess they will find out. The big challenge, I think, will be if bad actors start coming in and making crazy bids and then doing sloppy work. Time will tell. I'm excited to see how this develops.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not directly from 18F. 18F has heavily promoted recently, and that along with them being a part of the government and the project being open source all contributed to the volunteer feeling it was a worthwhile endeavor at that price. It's an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at purely monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is extremely liquid.
ksk 11y ago
Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technologies on a daily basis, and this seemed like a great opportunity to give back a little. If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.
- ac2u 11y ago
  Put more succinctly that I did in my comment, where a lot of folks extrapolated my comments on the tone of the article to a full blown commentary on the free market.
- kbenson 11y ago
  > and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist Saying that about someone who wants to help out so essentially volunteers their time to help a government project, which in essence means it helps everyone, seems a bit entitled and ill-informed. I'm sure many people want to get paid to work on open source, but it's a free market, and people will bid what they think a project is worth, and worth isn't always about monetary compensation. Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free. > If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project. The people that start/work on a specific open source project have the right to ask for compensation in whatever way they like, or enforce it through their license. You have no right to speak for all open source projects.
  - ksk 11y ago
    >Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not. When you bid $1 and work for free, you're saying I don't want the money you're willing to pay. To fail to understand this basic difference is silly.
bm1362 11y ago
On a side note, there are a lot of hoops to actually work with 18F. I don't blame the guy for just wanting to do a project and move on with his life.
- TimHordern 11y ago
  Brendan would have had to jump through the hoops to work with 18F, including the SAM validation. Unless you are talking about working directly for 18F as a federal employee, which would have different levels of requirements.
Kiro 11y ago
This happens all the time with public procurements in Sweden. It's not uncommon to see negative bids as well. After you've got the contract you can bill them for service hours etc so it's a win anyway.
- sailfast 11y ago
  Do you think bids would come in negatively for Firm Fixed-Price work. In this case (micro-purchase), you are not allowed to bill again for the same service so the $1 is pretty much where you stop, unless further contract work is pursued which can take months. Genuinely curious.
  - Kiro 11y ago
    Sure, that could be a solution. The problem I see is that any future work is more or less guaranteed to go to the winning company (because of system lock-in, knowledge etc). So if you're a big company who can afford the upfront loss you can still cash in in the future. Having the government as a permanent customer is more or less the dream. I'm no expert though.
patsplat 11y ago
Lower project bids reduce the level of commitment on the part of both the client and contractor. With only $1 at risk, the amount of leverage the client can exert over the work product is minimal. Volunteering is not the same relationship as contracting, and carries different kinds of project risk for the client. Judging bids using price as the sole basis is easy, and poor procurement.
orless 11y ago
I think 18F should definitely allow negative bids as well.
femto113 11y ago
I think if there's any lesson to be taken from this it's that presenting bounded, well-described (and thus easily undertaken) sub-projects is probably more effective than simply inviting developers to "help out" in some non-specific manner on a larger open-source efforts.
OJFord 11y ago
This is a great outcome for that story. I must admit, I did too assume it was trolling behaviour when I saw the bidding on HN. He wanted to do the work, he got what he wanted, and the US Government got the job done for just $1! Not sure how anyone can see this but a victory for the US public. 18F is, I think, a fantastic initiative; I hope HM Government takes note - could be fantastic here in the UK too.
- mintplant 11y ago
  I hope it's not dismantled by the next administration to come into power.
  - arglebarnacle 11y ago
    I think it's going to be safe. It demonstrably saves much much more than it costs, so conservatives will likely support it from a cost cutting/reducing government "waste" perspective. Liberals will support it because it's smart and makes government run better. I think only an extremely cynical view would suggest this program isn't safe, a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.
    - SolarNet 11y ago
      > a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name. Pretty sure giving government a bad name is the goal for many of the elected conservatives (perhaps not the people who voted for them).
    - mtanski 11y ago
      Has our legislative branch behaved rationally in the last few years? Recently they threatened forcing a default for unrelated (to budget) issues. And in the not to distant past they voted a law that prohibits Medicare from to using it's bargaining power to negotiate for lower drug prices. You know something that would save every tax payer quite a bit of money since Medicare is one of the larger budget line items. Based on past behavior you don't have to be overly cynical to think a useful program like this could be eliminated.
bicknergseng 11y ago
18F/USDS peeps... would you consider bounty or reward style programs that reward all open source contributors? Eg instead of bidding for a contract, keep an open list of tasks/bugs/full projects and reward contributors whose PR's are merged in some way? Yes, I know this monetizes what used to be free in a way and maybe goes against the "spirit" of open source, but practically speaking it feels like it'd be a huge win win for the open source community and small to medium sized government projects in general.
- noahkunin 11y ago
  @bicknergseng - 18Fer here. The main issue here is how the Gov actually gets $ to that entity. There are lots of laws and rules that we need to obey about who we pay $ to - Gov doesn't have a ton of flexibility here. There was a reason why bidders had to be pre-registered. That said, many of us want to continue to expand our engagement with the community. When it comes to bounty/reward style programs, the one I'm personally focused on figuring out first is a bug bounty program. Once we've figured out solutions for a bounty type program, you'll absolutely hear from us. edited: small typo
  - neltnerb 11y ago
    I'm sure you've thought of this, but is it impossible to subcontract this out to a non-profit to increase flexibility in the details of how the work is done? I.e. same requirements, same constraints, but the non-profit is formally registered with GSA and handles payments to subcontractors rather than the sub getting it straight from the government?
    - wslack 11y ago
      18Fer here. Is this in regards to a bounty program or putting out specific microtasks?
      - neltnerb 11y ago
        The bounty program as a whole. Like when I worked at NREL they were government funded but on paper I think it looked like a subcontract to run the lab which was fully managed by another entity. NREL I'm sure can hire contractors, although I suppose they might have to be in GSA as well?
codingdave 11y ago
If this were a legal project, and a lawyer bid to do it pro bono, nobody would bat an eye. Why are we getting all riled up about it?

233 points by brensudol 11y ago

ac2u 11y ago

>It didn’t seem controversial to me. Writing some code to help out the government and the general public—what a unique opportunity! Y'know, if the author explained it along the lines of "I wanted to have a record of government work as a foot in the door", I think it would be an easier pill to swallow for the folks bidding at reasonable prices. However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. But at the end of the day, it's the way that system was set up. Hopefully 18F sees this as an opportunity to improve the auction system (secret minimum and other suggestions in the other thread), rather than a way to get cheap labour.

luma 11y ago
Why would anybody be against competent coders wanting to donate time to public use? I get that other people were hoping to be paid for this, but would you end all volunteer programs on account of them interfering with paid labor?
- ac2u 11y ago
  No I wouldn't. But volunteer work is usually commissioned without a price incentive in mind rather than an auction style format.
- anm89 11y ago
  No one is. If you want to donate your time there are a million non profits that will gladfully take the donation. There is no reason this process has to devalue everyone else's work on a paid job.
  - fineman 11y ago
    Then get another job. We don't owe you your line of work. If you literally can't compete with volunteers maybe you should see what they says about your niche and then find a new one. Once when replacing a server (and fixing the wiring, etc, etc) I also replaced a router and dual-homed the company's site as a freebie because it made my job easier (the new router had diagnostics, managed-switch features, etc). It was a line-item I could have billed for separately, or it was a new level of service. By the "save the work for the guy feeding the starving children" philosophy we should nickel-and-dime our clients instead of providing our true value. I don't like that.
    - fineman 11y ago
      btw, I'm a supporter of unlimited (ie, not limited - I would try to encourage you to not need it though) welfare to let society say "tough" things such as "Oh well, I guess we don't need many buggy whips." And as to why I didn't charge anyways - the change actually made my other work faster.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    There are lots of non-profits that will gladly take the donation. Very, very few have made it as easy to donate as 18F has. Perhaps the lesson here is that non-profits need to make it as easy and clearly-defined as 18F has in order to receive more donations.
- username223 11y ago
  > Why would anybody be against competent coders wanting to donate time to public use? Ayn frowns upon altruism, and lots of coders (heart) Ayn.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Volunteer programs? No, not at all. But this is NOT a volunteer program. It is supposed to be a way to better bid out government work, which I will point out is very much not charity.
moron4hire 11y ago
So I take it you believe government should in general be an "employer of last resort", aka using public works projects as mediums of social services.
- ac2u 11y ago
  Nope. Made the assumption that because the price was going down rapidly that there were perhaps a few one-man/woman shops that wanted to do work for a price which was more reasonable than $1. Edit: Also you took a massive leap of extrapolation on what my views were on a short paragraph. Beyond guessing a possible motivation (foot in door as government contractor), there's nothing pinning my views here on the auctioneer being a government contractor rather than private sector.
afarrell 11y ago
> if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. This line of argument would hold water if the federal government had any kinda of monopsony power on software consulting services. They do not.
- ac2u 11y ago
  My thoughts weren't really centred around arguing that to be honest. It was more to do with the author's tone, which took a rather tone-deaf attitude as to why certain folks were disappointed with the outcome. The outcome of the auction happened in a way which was allowed by the parameters which defined it.
tomcam 11y ago
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent. Didn't seem the slightest patronizing to me. Brendan just seemed delighted that he could help out. I love that. More important, any bidder in any circumstance can be outbid by someone else and lose rent money in the process, right? To dictate any other outcome would require a depth of knowledge about the market and its bidders that no one party could possibly acquire reliably.

zeckalpha 11y ago

Given the tendency of HN toward libertarian and free market approaches, I've been consistently surprised at the suggestions being made around this. This is free markets gone right: A buyer and seller finding the most efficient price for each.

x5n1 11y ago
The seller wasn't going for the profit motive however. The seller simply wanted to work on the project as a volunteer. This is how he facilitated that. There is no profit motive here, and so really it's not even a business transaction, it's a volunteering oppurtunity.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  There are more value systems than just monetary. This is basic, relative, marginal utility.
- Navarr 11y ago
  It's still 100% free market.
  - iaw 11y ago
    There's a lot of crappy things that are 100% free market. Oligopolies come to mind. Just because it's a free market solution doesn't mitigate the negative experiences this person created for the other bidders.
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Well the problem is self correcting. People will stop giving quality bids if they don't think that there is any profit to be made because a bunch of volunteers have destroyed the market. There is no problem here. Only that anyone bidding should be aware that they won't get properly compensated for their work and time.
      - 11y ago

USNetizen 11y ago

The problem with this isn't that the bidder wanted to do something noble, it's that it set a precedent that the government is going to expect on future bids moving forward. "Buying a contract" is nothing new - companies do it all the time (i.e. deliberately dramatically underbidding just to get the past performance). However, reverse auctions are a lose-lose for the government and commercial sector. This approach assumes that the only thing that separates vendors is price alone, which is incorrect. For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Just ask the other numerous agencies backing away from the reverse auction model due to disastrous lowest-bidder contractor performance. I do, however, wholeheartedly embrace the pilot-model approach to IT procurement (i.e. MVP for government). It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing innovators to shine in practice, not through proposals.

JumpCrisscross 11y ago
> For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Is the government bound to accept the lowest bid? When bidding closes, it would make sense to review the lowest bids for noticeable differences in expected quality. If it isn't worth doing that, because expected quality is always high, and prices keep coming low one must consider that the task has become commoditised.
- Bedon292 11y ago
  It would depend on the situation. This one, I believe, they were bound to accept the lowest bid. However if the lowest bidder failed to complete the work they could move up the ladder. Most major contracts are, I think, 'Lowest bidder technically acceptable'. Which requires the bidder to meet minimum guidelines in their quality of work. So price is not the only factor, though it is a major one.
  - tssva 11y ago
    Most large federal contracts state the criteria for judgement in the RFP. It is usually some combination of technical solution, cost and past performance with the weight of each varying between RFPs. Also for large contracts the government will have done some due diligence to determine a range which the contract should cost. If your bid is significantly below this range and your solution doesn't show some innovation to support the lower cost the government is likely to reject it as unrealistic.

davideous 11y ago

This appears to be working so far. One sample doesn't really establish a "market rate" yet, so I don't worry about the seller not being motivated by financial profit motive. Sometimes the value provided to the seller goes beyond the financial payment. 18F gets a good deal here because of the intangibles they have to offer. If they put out more projects than the amount of work people are willing to do at the "$1 volunteer" or "$1 build my portfolio" rate, then the price should go up. How deep is this pool? I guess they will find out. The big challenge, I think, will be if bad actors start coming in and making crazy bids and then doing sloppy work. Time will tell. I'm excited to see how this develops.

kbenson 11y ago
Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not directly from 18F. 18F has heavily promoted recently, and that along with them being a part of the government and the project being open source all contributed to the volunteer feeling it was a worthwhile endeavor at that price. It's an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at purely monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is extremely liquid.

ksk 11y ago

Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet. "Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist. Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone. >I use open source technologies on a daily basis, and this seemed like a great opportunity to give back a little. If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.

ac2u 11y ago
Put more succinctly that I did in my comment, where a lot of folks extrapolated my comments on the tone of the article to a full blown commentary on the free market.
kbenson 11y ago
> and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist Saying that about someone who wants to help out so essentially volunteers their time to help a government project, which in essence means it helps everyone, seems a bit entitled and ill-informed. I'm sure many people want to get paid to work on open source, but it's a free market, and people will bid what they think a project is worth, and worth isn't always about monetary compensation. Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free. > If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project. The people that start/work on a specific open source project have the right to ask for compensation in whatever way they like, or enforce it through their license. You have no right to speak for all open source projects.
- ksk 11y ago
  >Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not. When you bid $1 and work for free, you're saying I don't want the money you're willing to pay. To fail to understand this basic difference is silly.

bm1362 11y ago

On a side note, there are a lot of hoops to actually work with 18F. I don't blame the guy for just wanting to do a project and move on with his life.

TimHordern 11y ago
Brendan would have had to jump through the hoops to work with 18F, including the SAM validation. Unless you are talking about working directly for 18F as a federal employee, which would have different levels of requirements.

Kiro 11y ago

This happens all the time with public procurements in Sweden. It's not uncommon to see negative bids as well. After you've got the contract you can bill them for service hours etc so it's a win anyway.

sailfast 11y ago
Do you think bids would come in negatively for Firm Fixed-Price work. In this case (micro-purchase), you are not allowed to bill again for the same service so the $1 is pretty much where you stop, unless further contract work is pursued which can take months. Genuinely curious.
- Kiro 11y ago
  Sure, that could be a solution. The problem I see is that any future work is more or less guaranteed to go to the winning company (because of system lock-in, knowledge etc). So if you're a big company who can afford the upfront loss you can still cash in in the future. Having the government as a permanent customer is more or less the dream. I'm no expert though.

patsplat 11y ago

Lower project bids reduce the level of commitment on the part of both the client and contractor. With only $1 at risk, the amount of leverage the client can exert over the work product is minimal. Volunteering is not the same relationship as contracting, and carries different kinds of project risk for the client. Judging bids using price as the sole basis is easy, and poor procurement.

orless 11y ago

I think 18F should definitely allow negative bids as well.

femto113 11y ago

I think if there's any lesson to be taken from this it's that presenting bounded, well-described (and thus easily undertaken) sub-projects is probably more effective than simply inviting developers to "help out" in some non-specific manner on a larger open-source efforts.

OJFord 11y ago

This is a great outcome for that story. I must admit, I did too assume it was trolling behaviour when I saw the bidding on HN. He wanted to do the work, he got what he wanted, and the US Government got the job done for just $1! Not sure how anyone can see this but a victory for the US public. 18F is, I think, a fantastic initiative; I hope HM Government takes note - could be fantastic here in the UK too.

mintplant 11y ago
I hope it's not dismantled by the next administration to come into power.
- arglebarnacle 11y ago
  I think it's going to be safe. It demonstrably saves much much more than it costs, so conservatives will likely support it from a cost cutting/reducing government "waste" perspective. Liberals will support it because it's smart and makes government run better. I think only an extremely cynical view would suggest this program isn't safe, a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.
  - SolarNet 11y ago
    > a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name. Pretty sure giving government a bad name is the goal for many of the elected conservatives (perhaps not the people who voted for them).
  - mtanski 11y ago
    Has our legislative branch behaved rationally in the last few years? Recently they threatened forcing a default for unrelated (to budget) issues. And in the not to distant past they voted a law that prohibits Medicare from to using it's bargaining power to negotiate for lower drug prices. You know something that would save every tax payer quite a bit of money since Medicare is one of the larger budget line items. Based on past behavior you don't have to be overly cynical to think a useful program like this could be eliminated.

bicknergseng 11y ago

18F/USDS peeps... would you consider bounty or reward style programs that reward all open source contributors? Eg instead of bidding for a contract, keep an open list of tasks/bugs/full projects and reward contributors whose PR's are merged in some way? Yes, I know this monetizes what used to be free in a way and maybe goes against the "spirit" of open source, but practically speaking it feels like it'd be a huge win win for the open source community and small to medium sized government projects in general.

noahkunin 11y ago
@bicknergseng - 18Fer here. The main issue here is how the Gov actually gets $ to that entity. There are lots of laws and rules that we need to obey about who we pay $ to - Gov doesn't have a ton of flexibility here. There was a reason why bidders had to be pre-registered. That said, many of us want to continue to expand our engagement with the community. When it comes to bounty/reward style programs, the one I'm personally focused on figuring out first is a bug bounty program. Once we've figured out solutions for a bounty type program, you'll absolutely hear from us. edited: small typo
- neltnerb 11y ago
  I'm sure you've thought of this, but is it impossible to subcontract this out to a non-profit to increase flexibility in the details of how the work is done? I.e. same requirements, same constraints, but the non-profit is formally registered with GSA and handles payments to subcontractors rather than the sub getting it straight from the government?
  - wslack 11y ago
    18Fer here. Is this in regards to a bounty program or putting out specific microtasks?
    - neltnerb 11y ago
      The bounty program as a whole. Like when I worked at NREL they were government funded but on paper I think it looked like a subcontract to run the lab which was fully managed by another entity. NREL I'm sure can hire contractors, although I suppose they might have to be in GSA as well?

codingdave 11y ago

If this were a legal project, and a lawyer bid to do it pro bono, nobody would bat an eye. Why are we getting all riled up about it?