36 votes
Use twitter to update procurement status
For acquisition of over $10M in value, update the procurement status on a weekly basis - even with 'no new updates' status.
About the Better Buy Project/Frequently Asked Questions
- Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
- What Topics Are At Issue?
- What Kind Of Feedback Are You Looking For?
- What Is Your Moderation Policy?
- What Are The Terms Of Service And Privacy Policy?
Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
On his first day in office, President Obama challenged leaders in government to "use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector." The acquisition process represents one of the most important areas of collaboration between government and the private sector.
Unfortunately, it is also among the most complex and least transparent. The Better Buy Project is an experiment dedicated to the belief that there's a lot of room for improvement in the way government buys products and services. We're testing this hypothesis by asking for your ideas on how to make acquisition process more open, transparent and collaborative.
The best part of this project is that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) GSA would really like to adopt some of your best ideas. Promising ideas will be selected by GSA to be piloted on an upcoming acquisition, where lessons learned will be captured for future implementation. But that really depends on us, and the ideas we're able to produce.
What Topics Are At Issue?
This project is concerned primarily with the pre-contract-award stages of the acquisition process—the activities that take place before the government "signs on the dotted line" to buy a product or service. Those areas are:
- Market Research and Requirements Definition Phase—Includes publicizing agency needs and requirements, and refining them based on further input and research about current capabilities.
- Pre-Solicitation Phase—Includes web-based research, discussions with other federal agencies, meetings and open discussion forums with the private sector to discuss potential solutions, and requests for information soliciting input and ideas. The requirements are also further refined at this stage in the process.
- Solicitation Phase—Includes the government notifying the private sector of the requirement through various channels such as E-Buy and FedBizOpps, holding open forums to discuss the requirement and answer questions (e.g., Industry Days), a review of the solicitation by interested companies, the written exchange between government and the private sector of questions, answers and clarifications on government requirements, and proposal submissions.
The ultimate goal is to improve how government learns about and chooses what it buys—in other words, to make government a more informed, more effective consumer.
What Kind of Feedback Are You Looking For?
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
- Open—Raise awareness of upcoming needs government is trying to fulfill, in order to assemble a pool of qualified providers who can compete on specific requirements.
- Transparent—Give the public and interested parties timely data on upcoming and ongoing buying activities, with the goal of promoting fair and high-quality competitions.
- Collaborative—Find ways for the government to engage in more ‘open’ conversations with the private sector on topics such as best practices, emerging technologies and innovations, and market conditions.
We believe that making the process more open, transparent and collaborative will make government more likely to end up with the right item at the right price.
What Is Your Moderation Policy?
This online forum allows you the opportunity to post comments and other information that will remain publicly viewable on this website. The site therefore operates a moderation policy to ensure that comments are appropriate and not harmful to others. Comments which include any of the following may be deleted by site administrators:
- Threats or incitements to violence
- Use of obscenity
- Disclosure of your or others' personally-identifiable information, such as social security number or credit card number
- Duplicative or substantially duplicative postings by the same person or entity
- Postings seeking employment or containing advertisements for a commercial product or service
- Information posted in violation of law, including libel, condoning or encouraging illegal activity, revealing classified information, or infringing on a copyright or trademark
Additionally, while we invite open participation and diverse viewpoints to be shared, moderators reserve the right to remove posts which do not address some aspect of the stated purpose of this forum: To collect ideas about using collaboration and social media to improve the acquisition process. We deeply value your time and input, and our desire is to remove as few posts as possible while ensuring that a focused, constructive discussion takes place.
Finally, in addition to this policy, this site allows individual users to flag ideas as being spam, duplicate, or otherwise inappropriate. When an idea is flagged a sufficient number of times, it is automatically placed into a queue for review by moderators. We reserve the right to remove any posting that receives a sufficient number of "flags" to be placed in this queue, though will not automatically do so.
What Are The Terms Of Service And Privacy Policy?
This site is hosted using a service called UserVoice. You can read the UserVoice Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Close Window
William
I think this would be just a helpful for any acquisition, not just those over $10mil. Instead of creating a new GPE, I think it would be much easier to modify FBO with a twitter-like function. Contractors who flag themselves as "interested parties" would automatically be signed up as followers for future tweets. It may be too much of a hurdle to implement two GPEs when so many people already have FBO hard-wired in their mind for new government requirements.
Sterling Whitehead
Also, using a service like Yammer may be more appropriate for government since it's use is designed for organizations and teams. However, Twitter updates can be synced with Yammer, so there shouldn't be a problem.
Sterling Whitehead
Love it. I love this idea. There would have to be an easy to be a simple-to-use way to organize the information through. Having tracking,, graphs, charts, and analytics for this would also be nice.
Chris Hamm
As the highest ranked idea (as of 12/22/09), we are definitely looking at how to implement it on the first BetterBuy pilot project. I have been trading emails with the team that will actually be responsible for posting updates, and we all agree that asking the CO and CS to perform an additional step may not be the best use of their time. Instead, we may ask someone to be the central manager of status for all acquisitions as one of their many hats.
BIsbrandt
We're doing a form of this for GSA's Public Buildings Service. We highlight 'new' opps daily. It does take some effort to summarize and post opps in a comprehendable way, but we've made sure that the workload is manageable.
It's great for agencies to create awareness around opps as part of their outreach, but especially coming from Industry myself, after that I think it's up to Industry to use FedBizOpps to track their opps of interest for mods/updates themselves.
Twitter - gsapbsIRD, LinkedIn Groups - GSA PBS Industry Relations
Esther Burgess
Good discussion here. Industry do spend a lot of time trying to track down the status of the solicitation, especially during the pre-solicitation phase. Resources are allocated based on any known schedule/time-frame of the RFQ release. Possibly weekly might be too much, but some frequency is definitlely helpful. It also would reduce the number of calls just checking on the schedule of upcoming requirements.
I agree that we don't want to add unecessary workload and that it should complement the existing tools e.g. fedbizopps. Perhaps something simple that can connect the two services might be something to also consider.
Carolyn
For who's information? There will be months of technical evaluation. Is this so industry can know what's going on every week? Disclosure is a good thing, but every step along the way? This appears to simply create more work for the government, which is already understaffed.
DSMITH
Don't we have enough twitter and blog stuff in the social community? We need one site for updated status, and a lot more time just to get procurements done. One of the big complaints you see on this website is lack of time. Let's not make more work for contract personnel.
CSmith, contract specialist
Procurement personnel have enough to do without this kind of nonsense.
Chris Hamm
Definitely low hanging fruit here. Very easy to implement, as long as it served as a complement to official practices (e.g., posting on fedbizopps).
I am not sure if this would be done at an aggregate level from each agency? From each procurement shop? From each CO?
My worry is that industry would have to sign up to follow thousands of Twitter feeds.
Peter G. Tuttle, CPCM
Quick thought - would or should the blog have the same "legal" effect as more traditional contracting officer correspondence currently has?
emma.antunes
Disagree here - a blog would be better. The basic concept is fine - keep up the communication, and post regularly (biweekly at a minimum).