Place to "unbox" and better understand this thing we call government procurement
The spark that ignited this project out of our collective frustrations was a series of regional conversations in Fall of 2019 with academic, state, and local government folks. Highlighted in those conversations was an appetite for more information on government IT purchasing. Who bought what? For how much? and did it work? Often asked by town, city, and state employees, but rarely answered. While the information was considered public, it was often not available to satisfy those questions. We also heard how much of administrative burden RFPs and purchasing was to towns. But that is a story for another day, more about that over at MAPC digital municipal collaboration project (add link).
Even the most basic list of what vendors were used didn't exist. Many of the common services and products government purchases like Permitting, Licensing, GIS or Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) didn't have profile pages on G2 or Capterra. You couldn't find the government sharing their software stacks on stackshare and there was certainly no YouTube unboxing video with towns sharing their experiences. When there was information about purchases it was often available as repackaged open data that had been previously FIOA being resold at a price. Or a subscription cost would allow a town into a gated conversation with a narrow focus. This didn’t scratch the itch; it didn’t answer enough of our question as we or our partners faced when buying tech in government.
With shared connections through the Code for America network the conversation naturally flowed over into weekly discussion at the Code for Boston meetups. Code for America was familiar with this lament about government procurement. Check out this selection of summit video for more background:1, 2, 3.
We decided to take a turn at shedding some on the gov-marketplace here in Massachusetts. In trying to learn and share more about the purchases being made here we hope to recreate that cathartic experience of the conference lunch table swapping stories about what’s working. Expand on the powerful listers that help connect you with to that answer you were searching for. We believe there is an opportunity to leverage volunteers to pull the data out of the pdf depth from which it lives and work with governments to find out new ways to consume this information. Be it a “Yelp for Government” or “Angie's List for Government” we want to start by unearthing some answers and sharing what we find. It’s our believe that this information can help reshape what governments have come to accept as good IT. Help create new definitions of good or acceptable and shift the market to meet the needs municipalities have. Opening the door for more efficient and equitable government.
Goal: Collect and disseminate information about what products/services Governments buy and if they are working.
We envision initial work for this project falling into two groups.
Data Collection: Will be looking for volunteers to help us identify and catalog the expenditures and budgets of the towns in Massachusetts. After cataloging we hope to create a snapshot of aggregated openly available information. Data with less of a 5 star rating will then be tackled one town at a time. The output we will be working towards is vendors lists, products lists, pricing, and any assessment of value that happened to have been captured. While often not written down, will also be looking to help categorize types and trends we see in products as we go along. Built for user needs? Agile development process? Have a data standard?
Data Dissemination: we are looking for volunteers who want to work with towns and cities in designing how the information gathered can be disseminated, but also new insight can be generated and shared. Leveraging tools, channels, and designing new features we would like to explore ways of sharing that help the town officials who have to make procurement decisions. Often they are not a procurement specialist and its almost never their only job. If this tool or the info we can share is helpful to them, than we have succeeded.
- When it’s an official project come on by (virtually) to a Code for Boston event. Pick a town, fill out a survey about it’s budget and add any field you find to the repo folder for that town.
- Have a question reach out by email rkelly or wpfeffer at codeforamerica.org or feel free to submit a GitHub issue
- We are currently looking for thought partners to ground truth these ideas please reach out. Especially looking for those with government procurement experience.
- Before going official with Code for Boston we want to make sure we identify a long term organizational partners for this potential data and tool.
- Clear alignment with helping to solve the needs of municipal staff responsible for procurement.
- Commitment to using this data and tool to bring about a more efficient and equitable government.
- Ability to commit to weekly meetings during development.
- Ability to support hosting and technical maintenance cost as they arise. This will be the AWS server cost. - Maintenance will involve staying on top of updating any software packers that go out of date and responding or prioritizing and future feature requests as they arise.
- Willingness to stand on a metaphorical soap box and share experience with software services and vendors.
- Ability to build trust with users (primarily municipal staff)
- List of Mass municipalities (cities/towns) https://datacommon.mapc.org/browser/datasets/415
- List of permit vendors identified through surveying websites: https://airtable.com/shr6r4MHQL2po8wUX
- List of IT Community Compact Grant recipients:https://airtable.com/shrqdEsQc9apcH3RS
- List of request for H.4733 (eventually turned into 202 IT bond bill)https://airtable.com/shrLG0HEIp3eZyrsu
- List where cataloging and categorizing town budget sites https://airtable.com/shrGrW8bTDj3djobY
- List of software review sites https://airtable.com/shrokdQ9HKbYWewk1
- List of government procurement vehicles https://airtable.com/shrGtmWBq93dfWcYR
- List of vendors notified for government IT RFPs https://airtable.com/shrtgPpwqcpg8punS
- List of vendors from Somerville open data portal https://airtable.com/shrpPO2LS33G97vHl