

The Agile Delivery Blanket Purchase Agreement is almost here - rburhum
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/15/agile-bpa-is-here/

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joedavison
This seems interesting, but I am having a hard time parsing all of the
government contractor-specific terminology in order to understand what the
actual opportunity is here.

Can someone explain this in layman's terms? Let's say I am a regular
programmer / consultant, and I can even hire / manage / scale teams of
programmers.

I would be happy to submit a working prototype as part of an RFQ process, in
exchange for landing a lucrative and stable government contract.

What exactly is being offered here for someone like me?

~~~
Kaizyn
You can get a government contract. Normally this would not be available to you
even if you could handle the work because of how contracting for the
government works. What I will find interesting is if they solve the contract
vehicle/payments problem. That is, the U.S. government isn't great about
prompt payment. For a large contractor, they can afford to wait 3-6 months
between payments. However for the small vendors being targeted with this, that
kind of pay delay may kill their business.

------
Animats
From the requirements for the demo:

 _" used at least three modern and open source frontend or client side web
technologies" ... “Modern” is to be understood as any technology or standard
released, created, initiated or finalized in the 5 years preceding the release
of this RFQ._"

That's an amusing requirement. Do they really want vast amounts of browser-
side crap? From the list of Javascript client-side libraries in Wikipedia,
almost all of them are more than 5 years old.[1] JQuery is over 10 now.

There's also _" used at least three “human-centered design” techniques or
tools"_. Whatever that's supposed to mean. Here's IDEO's presentation on
"human centered design."[2] You can take a seven-week course on it.

This document is classic Government procurement in hipster terminology.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_libraries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_libraries)
[2] [http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-
design](http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design)

~~~
enraged_camel
>>That's an amusing requirement. Do they really want vast amounts of browser-
side crap? From the list of Javascript client-side libraries in Wikipedia,
almost all of them are more than 5 years old.[1] JQuery is over 10 now.

I don't understand your criticism. At all. It comes across as intentionally
obtuse.

Yes, JQuery is over 10 years old. But there have been many _releases_ since
then. Going by its release history [1], using version 1.5+ as of this writing
would fulfill the requirement you quoted. Any earlier version would not
qualify as "modern" (which is a definition I agree with considering how
quickly this particular landscape moves).

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Release_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Release_history)

~~~
miander
And you are making exactly the same assumption he did. It is not clear whether
they meant libraries first released in the past 5 years or libraries that have
seen new releases in the past 5 years. He assumed the former, you're assuming
the latter. He has a valid concern.

------
rburhum
Since the title was edited somehow, this is the interesting part: "We’re
requiring vendors to submit a working prototype based on a public dataset and
show their work in a publicly available git repository. "

~~~
dang
We edited the title in accordance with the HN guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you want to highlight the interesting part, the place to do it is by adding
a comment to the thread, as you just did.

~~~
rburhum
ok. sounds good to me.

------
Zikes
Make a working prototype AND make it public?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797482)

~~~
rburhum
I am not going to say that I agree or disagree with this methodology, but let
me give you some context. Traditionally, getting into the GSA schedule is _a
lot_ of work and it takes _a lot_ of time. So much indeed, that it doesn't
make sense for most startups to do this.

For some startups in the Govtech space this makes more sense. It is a way to
hack the procurement process. I would happily get one of our devs to put
something together that uses our Open Source codebase and solves this
"challenge" than to spend months navigating all the bureaucracy to get in the
schedule.

Somewhere around $50b/year go through the GSA schedule
([http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/198473](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/198473))
so, IMHO, anything that makes this process easier is a step in the right
direction against traditional vendor lock-in.

~~~
cjoh
Unfortunately the schedule 70 provision in this RFQ requires that you _both_
get your devs to put something together using your open source codebase, AND
spend months navigating all the bureaucracy to get on GSA schedule 70.

------
lifeisstillgood
I spent some considerable time and effort trying to hack my way into the UK
equivalent, and so far have mortally failed. The most frustrating was a
failure to use the correct phrasing in the 42 box of the RFQ for getting onto
the digital framework for LOcal authorities.

I say go for it - the field is being tilted in your favour a bit - but I am
not convinced it's an easy win for a one or two person biz.

