COA – The New RFP to Release This Summer – That’s The Latest News
The City of Austin is hard at work rewriting the RFP to build the Open Government website. The presentation to the public on June 17th provided some insight into the plans, but not much in the way of concrete dates and deliverables. Here are the two slides that capture the salient points for all who are interested in participating in the process.
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The entire presentation can be downloaded as a PDF here.
And here is the City’s Project Information page that includes additional links and data.
And on the AustinGO blog this update was posted on July 9th.
Austin GO updates community, City Council
Last week saw many developments in the Austin GO project with the announcement that a new RFP (“request for proposals”) will be prepared to help identify a vendor for the City of Austin Web redesign project.
On June 17, 2009, members of Austin’s technology community and others gathered at a town hall meeting and heard an update on the new RFP from Matt Esquibel, the Web project’s Technical Lead.
And heck, there’s even an RSS feed link on that page. It’s not working right now “no data available” is what my reader shows when I attempt to preview a link, but hey at least Matt and Co. are working on it.
So, while the city does appear to be moving forward and there was some mention of a July release for the new RFP, the details are still sketchy.
There is one interesting detail that appeared on one slide #3.
The “pay by deliverables approach” sounds novel. What I think they are getting at has something to do with the Open Austin movement to drive some of this project with Open Source tools and teams. And I guess that could also be covered by “Explore creative project models.”
No one can argue with the define objectives and manage expectations bullet, but that is easier written than done. So far the city has shown very little leadership in this process. From a failed series of RFPs, the entire process of building the RFP should be made a bit more transparent.
Whatever Matt Esquibel is working on, I hope it’s good and I hope it meets the expectations of the large community of developers, designers, project managers, businesses, and visionaries who are waiting to put their bids into the ring. Let’s hope they get a better than 3 : 400 ratio of returns on this one.
Mostly, I’d really like Matt, Doug Matthews and Gail Roper to ramp up the AustinGO site they already have. Post updates on the blog! Fix the RSS feed! Use the tool! As it stands what’s happening is still happening behind closed doors with a new team and the community is forced to wait for the release of the new RFP.
Slide 11 kicks off the “discussion” section of the presentation with this slide:
So there you have it. Register as a Vendor and wait. We have to suppose they will update the AustinGO site when this event has taken place. I’ll go register now, how about you?
Wait, this just in: Matt also gave a PPT presentation the next day to the City Council. Here is the Timeline slide:
This presentation is also available here.
So the first week in July was the target. I guess I could be late to the party if it has been released via the Vendor bidding process. My guess is there has been a delay of some sort since there is no mention of the update or RFP release on the AustinGO website. Nor is there any information concerning the “group from UT” vetting. Now I’m more curious than ever.
@jmacofearth
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