Re: City ditched plan to run open-data competition for new traffic app Paid tens of thousands in sole-sourced deal to Toronto company instead
Posted by Stéphane Guidoin on Nov 27, 2013; 4:26am
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/City-ditched-plan-to-run-open-data-competition-for-new-traffic-app-Paid-tens-of-thousands-in-sole-sod-tp6345p6348.html
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URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/City-ditched-plan-to-run-open-data-competition-for-new-traffic-app-Paid-tens-of-thousands-in-sole-sod-tp6345p6348.html
Flybits is a spin-off of Ryerson U with
backing from MarsDD. Although it's a young company, they have
solid foundations (which does not mean they won't fail, but they
have interesting credentials.)
One example of app founded by a public body is smart-muni who received a $100,000 grant to run a pilot for an ipad app to improve management of the Muni fleet in SF (http://smartmuni.org/our-story/). Unfortunately, there is no news about it since 2012, so it is unclear what happened after the 4-month pilot.
As of support: working with an open competition could have made things easier to ask for open source software. That's the kind of thing that could help municipalities to prevent vendor lock-in and maintenance issue, even if the provider runs out of business. It is by no mean the silver bullet to solve the maintenance issue, but it could certainly help.
Steph
Le 2013-11-26 23:05, Herb Lainchbury a écrit :
One example of app founded by a public body is smart-muni who received a $100,000 grant to run a pilot for an ipad app to improve management of the Muni fleet in SF (http://smartmuni.org/our-story/). Unfortunately, there is no news about it since 2012, so it is unclear what happened after the 4-month pilot.
As of support: working with an open competition could have made things easier to ask for open source software. That's the kind of thing that could help municipalities to prevent vendor lock-in and maintenance issue, even if the provider runs out of business. It is by no mean the silver bullet to solve the maintenance issue, but it could certainly help.
Steph
Le 2013-11-26 23:05, Herb Lainchbury a écrit :
"a contract with a company that has some permanence guarantees ongoing support"
Hmm... it seems like he's expecting a lot of a new small company.
Interesting strategy, but I think the city would have been much better off with a contest followed by a potential support contract if they liked any of the apps.
If it is supported apps they want (which is understandable) I would also encourage cities to state in the contest rules that they are looking for firms that can potentially provide ongoing support. I think this would help set expectations and would actually bring more vendors out to the contest as it would increase the potential reward. Even if the original developer couldn't support it, this could be provided by another firm if need be.
H
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:
"And second, a contract with a company that has some permanence guarantees ongoing support. An amateur programmer who’s really good at programming could land a time-consuming job or move away or just lose interest. “And then what do we have? We have nothing,” Tierney said."
And what was wrong with 511.ca?
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