The General Services Administration’s 18F unit says it has found in an experiment that the “micro-purchase” approach could be used to buy open-source codes for federal digital projects.V. David Zvenyach, acquisition management director at 18F, writes in a post published Friday that 18F picked the winning bid of $1 for the experiment’s initial iteration through the “reverse auction” approach.
In less than a week, the winning bidder submitted a code that satisfied the agency’s acceptance criteria, Zvenyach reports.
Brendan Sudol, the winning bidder and software engineer at Simon Data, submitted a source code to load data from the Schedule 70 contract vehicle into Contract-Awarded Labor Category website.
Zvenyach noted that small businesses comprised almost half of the bidders for the experiment and that $50 was the common bid increment.
He also mentioned some of the lessons learned from 18F’s micro-purchase experiment, including the development of the Google Form and an online application that works to manage and facilitate bids for the experiment.
