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"gewg_" writes:

from the 600-of-those-could-get-you-a-toilet-seat dept.

TechDirt reports [techdirt.com]

A neat little technical division of the GSA, known as 18F [gsa.gov], which is modeled on startup culture and bringing a much more innovative take on technology to the government (it's the same group that's going around making the rest of the federal government encrypt their websites...), recently ran an experiment which (somewhat unexpectedly to all involved) resulted in the GSA awarding a $1 contract for a bit of open source software [gsa.gov]. And, yes, that's ONE DOLLAR.

A few weeks back, 18F announced this experiment in "micro-purchase" contracts [gsa.gov], with the idea being to see if they could create a quick and simple process to both (1) do small focused contracts and (2) make it easy for smaller tech firms to actually provide their products and services to the government. So 18F posted the details [github.com] of a specific problem it was trying to solve to Github, and then created a Google form, to serve as a sort of blind reverse auction. Here's how 18F described things:

If you're interested in bidding, the closing time for the bid is 12 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, 2015. The opening bid starts at $3,499, and the lowest bid at the closing time will have 10 working days to ship the code necessary to satisfy the criteria. If the criteria are met, the vendor gets paid. If the criteria aren't met the vendor shall not receive payment, the next lowest bidder will have the opportunity.

[...]No one expected someone to (a) bid $1 and (b) then deliver working code that not only met the requirements, but exceeded them. But that's what happened.

In some respects, this result was the best possible outcome for the experiment. It proved that some of our core assumptions about how it would work were wrong. But the experiment also validated the core concept that open-source micro-purchasing can work, and it's a thing we should try to do again. A few weeks ago, micro-purchasing for code was just an idea, but now that we've done our first experiment, the data demonstrate that the idea has potential and can be improved upon.

You can see the "winning" $1 pull request by Brendan Sudol [github.com] over at Github, which went above and beyond the requirements:

Not only did Brendan Sudol meet the requirements of loading the data, the new code had 100 percent test coverage, an A grade from Code Climate, and included some new functionality to boot.

Original Submission