Bidding to tweak Recovery.gov

The Federal Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has officially issued its request for proposal (RFP) seeking a company to redesign its website, Recovery.gov. The board is facing a mid-October deadline to complete work on version 2.0 of the site.

And that deadline is the main reason why the RFP for Recovery.gov has gone out the way it has, with the very short deadline of this Friday for bids, according to Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery board.

The proposal is being handled for us by the General Services Administration (GSA), the management operation for the Federal government. They sent out a proposal several days ago to redesign the website, and this will include building a database with the capacity to hold large amounts of recipient data. We want this website to be user-friendly for the public, and time is of the essence here. We have to get this contract awarded, because we have other contracts in the pipeline, too, and we have to have this ready by October when we will begin to receive many, many reports from recipients of the recovery act funds.

In a telephone interview, Pound explains that the request has gone out on a government-wide acquisition contract under the GSA's Alliant program.

"Which means," he says, "59 companies bid on that contract sometime back. These are IT companies. GSA is limiting this procurement to these 59 companies because of the speed with which we have to handle this particular procurement. These 59 companies have the right to bid for this work."

Pound goes on to say that had they not gone this route to use Alliant to expedite the procurement process, and gone instead to a more traditional "full and open competition", he has been told by GSA that "the average time is 268 days, which most Americans, especially those interested in this website, would say is far too long."

Last week on FederalNewsRadio's Daily Debrief, the Sunlight Foundation's Clay Johnson said that they were planning on bidding on the work to redesign Recovery.gov. Ed Pound with the Recovery Board says he'd welcome their input on the redesign, but suggests that the foundation might have more success partnering with one of the 59 Alliant firms as a sub-contractor.

Spokesman Pound adds that several more technical projects related to Recovery.gov are also awaiting their final RFPs. He says that one involves the use of the Environmental Protection Agency's Central Data Exchange, which Pound describes as a "central data portal." EPA uses the portal for entry of various environmental data. Pound says Recovery.gov will use a version of the portal to give states and localities a portal through which stimulus spending data can be uploaded to the website for public display, and to the database for analysis.

Pound also says the Recovery board and the GSA also hope to put out a bid for geospacial mapping software, to give citizens a clickable map to show how stimulus dollars are being spent at the state and local level. On Monday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it was partnering with the Agriculture Department to use USDA's geospacial mapping program to also display HUD's stimulus spending.

Pound says he was unaware of HUD's plans, but says the Recovery board expects to have its own map in time for the mid-October deadline.

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On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - HUD using USDA's tool to track stimulus spending
FederalNewsRadio - Sunlight Foundation plans to bid on Recovery.gov
FederalNewsRadio - Recovery websites: related in name only
White House - Recovery.gov

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