SUMMARY

Waldo Jaquith talks about the challenges of promoting and implementing best practices for federal and state government procurement of custom software, including open source.

GUEST

Waldo Jaquith, an open government technologist

HIGHLIGHTS

• Waldo and his team created a playbook to help legislatures fund and provide oversight for software projects.
• Government RFPs used to be 300-500+ pages; Waldo’s team set a cap at 20 pages, requiring them to be minimally prescriptive.
• Simplified RFPs got released more often, made smaller companies more likely to be considered, and made the contracts get awarded more quickly.
• Vendor arrangements were changed to time and materials agreements. The government retains copyrights to software developed for it.

LINKS

• U.S. Open Data
• Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation
• 18F
• Agilebudgeting.org