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October 23, 2015 06:00 am

Government Team Experiments With Paying For Small Open Source Tasks

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. General Services Administration has a team within it called 18F. They describe themselves as an open source, digital services delivery team. In other words, they create software for use by citizens and other government agencies, and the software they produce is open source. Starting next Monday, October 26, they're trying out an interesting new experiment for procuring open source code. Like any other agency, they have a budget, and they're allowed to contract out work when it makes sense to do so. But there's a difference between big projects and small ones. If their purchase doesn't exceed $3,500, they have the authority to just do it. Higher than $3,500, and they (not to mention the contractors) have to deal with a bunch of extra red tape. This brings us to their experiment. They're developing a system that will let developers bid on small software projects the GSA needs. It starts at the cap for "micro-purchases," $3,499, and developers can bid it down if they feel it's easier. Once a bid is selected, the developer(s) have 10 working days to send back functioning code with a specific set of acceptance criteria. 18F isn't sure how well it'll work, but it's a cool way to try and make it easier for the open source community to build things for the government.

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