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Lowering the risk of experimentation with open source code
on December 13, 2016
In September, Singapore launched the govBuy Marketplace, adapted from the Technology Transformation Service’s (TTS) Micro-Purchase Marketplace. Both sites are an auction platform designed to connect government teams to small businesses ready to solve small technical problems using open source code. The code that powers both platforms is also open source.
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Vendors and government strengthen partnership at Technology Industry Day
on September 19, 2016
The Technology Transformation Service (TTS) is already absorbing the first-mover risk of introducing modern tools and techniques, but we know that only with the help of industry will this transformation be able to spread across the federal government. As we all bring agile methodologies, human-centered design, and modular design to the government, the opportunity to improve federal digital services is immense.
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Micro-purchase’s design philosophy: Do one thing well
on August 25, 2016
Rather than wait for knowledge to naturally diffuse through team changes, we try to kick-start the process through shared interest groups, tech talks, and documents highlighting some of the more interesting design decisions our developers make. Today, we'll focus on some of the core architectural philosophiesbehind the Micro-purchase project.
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The role of bot-bidding in Micro-purchase auctions
on August 9, 2016
The 18F Micro-purchase team recently introduced the ability to bid on an auction via API. This feature is part of our long-standing commitment to experiment and iterate towards the easiest bidding process for vendors. Like everything in the platform, we treated this feature as an experiment to learn how it would affect bidding behavior and the final price of auctions. Here’s what we learned.
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Jacob Harris: From big data journalism to micro-purchase platforms
on August 2, 2016
Jacob Harris joined 18F in May of 2015 after nine years working as a developer at The New York Times. He currently works on the Micro-purchase Platform, which enables vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less.
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When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it
on July 7, 2016
Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.
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How and why we built the micro-purchase bidding platform
on February 19, 2016
This past December, 18F launched a micro-purchase platform to enable vendors to place bids on opportunities to deliver open source code that costs $3,500 or less. This is a look at how and why we built this platform.
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Micro-purchase auctions round 2: What we learned
on January 15, 2016
The auctions have closed, the bids are in, the winners are off coding, and some already have been paid. Let’s look at some early lessons from our latest round of micro-purchase auctions.
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Announcing the 18F Micro-purchase Platform
on January 7, 2016
In October 2015, 18F launched an experiment in micro-purchasing. Given both vendor and government interest in continuing this task, 18F is happy to announce the launch of a new platform for posting and bidding on micro-purchase tasks.
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Early lessons from the micro-purchase experiment
on November 6, 2015
Well, we sure didn’t expect this. But the winning bid for the first iteration of the 18F micro-purchase experiment was $1. And on Wednesday, the winner delivered a solution that passed our acceptance criteria.
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Announcing the criteria for 18F's first micro-purchase contract
on October 26, 2015
Today, we're beginning our micro-purchase experiment. Here are the details of what we are looking for and our acceptance criteria for the final submission.
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Open Source Micro-purchasing: An experiment in federal acquisition
on October 13, 2015
In the next few weeks, we're going to use our micro-purchase authority to run an experiment to contract for open source contributions to our active projects.
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