GSA's quest for free contest app may be fruitless, some say

GSA's David McClure says the agency might later ask for a fee-based product. James Kegley

The government is asking industry and other interested groups for a free application that will let agencies launch online competitions, but developers who run such contests and some contracting specialists say the government may not get what it is looking for.

The General Services Administration on Thursday issued a request for information for a free tool that agencies could use to coordinate online competitions, prizes and other incentive-based efforts. The White House sent agencies a memo in March describing various legal options for conducting competitions to spur innovation and encourage public participation. The guidance said the administration would provide agencies with a Web-based template for running contests within 120 days.

The RFI asks interested bidders to respond with information about software that fits the description by April 15. The contest platform must be live by July 6.

Software providers must describe an application they can offer GSA -- for free - to use across government. "GSA seeks a no-cost contract or unconditional gift. The no-cost solution must not be tied to required, ancillary fee-based products or services," the agency said. "That is, GSA and other agencies must be able to use the product at a maximum level of technical functionality without being required to purchase" supporting services or products. "GSA cannot accept a no-cost solution if the provider's intent is to provide the solution for no-cost now, and then begin charging GSA at a later date for what is being offered."

Sunlight Labs, a programming division within government transparency group Sunlight Foundation, runs online challenges similar to what the government is envisioning, but developers there are doubtful the software GSA wants exists.

After running two online contests, with another underway called Design for America, "we still haven't developed any software, really, to specifically run our contests," said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. "We just use the SunlightLabs.com Web site to have people fill out a form to submit their entries, and then build a front-end to show those entries. That's not a significant amount of work for a developer, and it'd be relatively useless as a software package."

Design for America challenges programmers nationwide to turn downloadable government data into graphics that the public can understand easily. Sunlight's previous contests invited developers to feed congressional and federal data sets into Web applications that would hold the legislative and executive branches more accountable.

Clay called GSA's request fairly complex and questioned why the government wants the service to be a gift. He said the only concept that would work is open source software, in which a program's underlying code is free to the public for reuse and modification. But open source software, in this case, would likely require paid work, he added.

"Government spends too much money on software as it is, and we want to see government using open source to drive that number down," Johnson said. "Just because its open source doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost, and GSA will have a hard time finding someone to develop custom software for them for free."

Sunlight offers a generic voting application , but it does not meet all the requirements of the RFI. The tool the government wants must allow agencies to easily and quickly create and administer contests using unique, customized Web site addresses. The application must be flexible enough to handle a range of types and sizes of contests, for different audiences, in accordance with each agency's needs. It has to support multiple, simultaneous contests within one agency or multiple agencies and it must permit numerous agencies to collaborate on joint contests. In addition, the software and hardware must comply with security regulations and ensure the application is accessible to people with disabilities.

In 2009, Sunlight tried to bid on a contract to overhaul the stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov. The award was only open to a preselected group of companies that are part of GSA's giant information technology services contract called Alliant. Later, the foundation served as an unpaid adviser to the winning vendor, Smartronix.

Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president at the Professional Services Counsel, a contractor association, said he is skeptical that a for-profit or nonprofit organization will be able to sustain a free platform. Part of the difficulty is that the scale of the project is potentially unlimited, he noted.

A company likely would need to leverage an existing platform that has paying customers to offset the cost of providing the service to the government for free, Chvotkin added. "It's certainly an unusual request," he said. "It's an interesting concept. If they can do it, God bless them."

GSA officials acknowledged they might have to revisit this request in the future but for now they must meet a tight deadline.

Over the long term, "we might sit down and use a [request for proposals] process for fee-based products," said David McClure, GSA's associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. The immediate need "is to meet the deadline and provide some initial capability to get into this space. It will be for the simpler challenges."

The agency conducted market research to identify free and paid services, and now wants to expand its search. GSA could publish the RFI in the Federal Register to target interested groups who do not visit FedBizOpps.gov, a regularly-updated listing of government contracting opportunities where the RFI is posted.

"We recognize this is going to evolve as agencies experiment and learn more about it, and the market is going to evolve," McClure said.