crowdsourcing | The Contracting Education Academy

May 11, 2016 By AMK

USAID uses new contracting technique to try to lower barriers to entry

The United States Agency for International Development has started accepting applications for a $30 million grand challenge calling on innovators to submit ideas to combat Zika and “the disease threats of tomorrow.”

“To get ahead of infectious diseases like Zika, we need to move quickly to find and scale new tools and transformative solutions,” USAID Administrator Gayle Smith said in a statement.

The grand challenge is an addendum to the to the USAID Development Innovation Accelerator Broad Agency Announcement for Global Health, and is an example of how the agency is increasingly turning to a contracting technique used elsewhere in the U.S. government to see if the model might work to involve new actors in addressing development challenges.

As USAID looks to partner with a more diverse group of actors, the agency is contending with regulatory restrictions that can be cumbersome or limiting. The Broad Agency Announcement, or BAA, may be a way to address that challenge. The BAA is a new way for the agency to communicate with partners to design solutions before determining what procurement tool may be the best fit.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.devex.com/news/usaid-uses-new-contracting-technique-to-try-to-lower-barriers-to-entry-87858

March 4, 2016 By AMK

‘Hack the Pentagon’: Will DoD’s bug bounty program attract top talent?

Challenged by hackers and staffing shortages, the Pentagon is inviting plainclothes techies to a competition where they can poke around military code for security bugs.

The idea is to find and fix vulnerabilities unknowingly inserted in software before the bad guys do.

The contest draws inspiration from “bug bounty” programs in the private sector open to hobbyists and professional penetration testers. Microsoft, for instance, offers a reward of up to $100,000 for attacking its software. General Motors earlier this year launched a car-hacking program that seeks glitch reports but doesn’t yet pay for them.

The military’s new “Hack the Pentagon” program, unveiled Wednesday, potentially could offer cash prizes, according to a Defense Department announcement. Perhaps some of those bucks could come from the nearly $7 billion Pentagon Secretary Ash Carter expects to spend on cybersecurity in 2017.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2016/03/pentagon-launches-open-contest-hack-military-websites/126383/

November 6, 2014 By AMK

Top administration official says FAR can be made to work

A senior Obama administration official acknowledged that federal purchasing rules are difficult to navigate, especially for information technology projects and services, but they’re getting the job done – for now.

“We may want to think, at some point, about changing authorities. But we have authorities now that can be made to work,” said Beth Cobert, Office of Management and Budget deputy director, referring to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR.

Cobert delivered the keynote address Oct. 27, 2014 at the Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Va., an annual conference sponsored by the industry group ACT-IAC.

A common complaint among federal technology officials is that the FAR is better suited for buying filing cabinets rather than complex IT systems and services. In response to the need for more IT acquisition guidance, OMB created something it calls the “Tech FAR.”

In May, then-federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said in testimony before a Senate committee that the Tech FAR was being developed to help agencies solicit services in new, more agile ways “such as using challenges and crowdsourcing approaches to involve citizens, writing requirements that allow for more flexible execution, or a pay-for-service model.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/top-obama-administration-official-says-federal-purchasing-rules-can-be-made/2014-10-29

September 10, 2014 By AMK

White House to agencies: Embrace offbeat methods for buying tech

With no plans to return to the moon anytime soon in NASA’s future, the space agency decided to challenge private sector teams, including small startups and academia, to come up with ways to safely land commercial lunar landers on the moon’s surface and transmit data back to Earth.

None of the six teams selected by NASA to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE — which carries total prize winnings of $30 million and a Dec. 31, 2015, deadline — is a “traditional” government contractor.

And the method NASA used for the process — a milestone-based competition combining the best attributes of a firm, fixed-price contract with the flexibility of an indefinite-delivery deal — wasn’t exactly the typical FedBizOpps posting, either.

But the point is — it worked.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2014/08/white-house-agencies-embrace-offbeat-methods-buying-tech/92051

August 4, 2014 By AMK

What needs to be fixed in the FAR?

A recent Federal Computer Week story by Mark Rockwell, “Teaching feds not to fear the FAR,” has gotten a fair amount of attention in the Twittersphere and is definitely worth reading.

It discusses a number of efforts underway — including a “Buyer’s Club” led by Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak and a TechFAR document being prepared at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy under the leadership of the indefatigable Mathew Blum — to lower the fear factor in the government IT community around the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and to emphasize flexibilities available in the regs.

These are very good efforts that deserve support. Many new and exciting procurement techniques, such as contests and crowdsourcing, are — as those quoted in Rockwell’s article note — already permitted by the FAR. The government can access some crowdsourcing websites for less than $3,000, which means services there can be purchased without further ado using a government credit card.

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2014/07/fixing-the-far.aspx

See article entitled “Teaching feds not to fear the FAR” at: http://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/2014/07/teaching-feds-not-to-fear-the-far/

The United States Agency for International Development has started accepting applications for a $30 million grand challenge calling on innovators to submit ideas to combat Zika and “the disease threats of tomorrow.”

Challenged by hackers and staffing shortages, the Pentagon is inviting plainclothes techies to a competition where they can poke around military code for security bugs.

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