The General Services Administration’s tech consultancy team is experimenting with a new way for federal agencies to buy code.
The team is building an online system that could help federal agencies make “micro-purchases” — transactions for less than $3,500 made directly with the vendor — for open source software code.
Since its inception in 2014, 18F has been uploading the code for its products on GitHub, a public, online repository, so citizens can examine the code and occasionally contribute to it.
“But we want to show that opening our source code improves our ability to contract for digital services,” 18F staffer V. David Zvenyach wrote in a blog post. “We also want to see whether this is a sustainable way to engage small businesses and non-traditional contractors in the government space.”
Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2015/10/18fs-takes-micropurchasing-experiment/122800