[foundation-board] Fwd: Greek data registry + deliberation RFP analysis

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

We've been invited to be part of an RFP for the official Greek
government open data catalogue. Some details (translated from the
Greek documents) are below. The time window for this is not very big -
call went out last Monday and is open for around 2 weeks.

We're talking to a group who are submitting - mainly to provide them
with technical details about CKAN. Our role in the RFP (if any) is yet
to be determined. If the board has any questions please let me know
ASAP and I'll pass them on. Otherwise I'll keep you posted when there
are developments.

All the best,

Jonathan


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: George Anadiotis <ganadiotis at imc.com.gr>
Date: Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 10:42 AM
Subject: Greek data registry + deliberation RFP analysis
To: Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>, Jonathan Gray
<jonathan.gray at okfn.org>


Dear Rufus, Jonathan,

as promised, this is the analysis of the RFP for the Greek data
registry and legislation deliberation. The executive summary is that
this is a 2-phase RFP, at this phase all applicants are judged on the
basis of project team experience and adherence to required skills and
contractor financial and technical viability, while a full technical
solution is not to be submitted. This will be done in phase 2, to
which the 10 highest ranked applicants will be invited. So, at this
point the bottomline (since we score very well on the financial and
technical viability criterion) is presenting a team that covers the
technical requirements expertise required, which are mostly php-based
as per the existing implementation.

Then at phase 2 a full technical solution is to be presented, which
can be different from what is now in place, as long as the contractor
has the skills to figure out the existing system and support its
operation during the transition period. There is also the requirement
that the solutions developed for this be released as open source and
we have submitted some questions to clarify the exact definition and
extent of this.

We have not yet decided 100% what would be the best technical strategy
for us on this when it comes to that - i.e. stick with their existing
application development environment or switch to ours, but in any case
there are 2 things for certain: 1) we do need some people with
technical expertise in their environment in the team and 2) your
overall expertise is most definitely relevant and there will be things
for you to do in the development phase - it's the extent that is
unknown at this point.

So, practically this means we're teaming up with some other Greek
contractor and we think it would be a good idea to have you in the
team as well. At this stage, i think the best thing to do would be for
you to read the description of what this is about and how we're
thinking of approaching it and decide if it makes sense for you to
join. One of the things we need to know for this is your person-month
rate, since at phase 2 the decision will be heavily influenced by the
financial aspect of the bid. If it does make sense and we decide to go
through with this, we will probably need a couple of resumes for
people from your team.


Administrative context:
This is a 2-phase RFP, in which bids for the 1st phase can be placed
until the 28th of March. At this stage, no technical solution is to be
proposed and submissions will be judged on the basis of project team
experience and adherence to required skills and contractor financial
and technical viability. Submitters of the top 10 bids will proceed to
the 2nd phase, where they be given the full technical details and
requirements of the project and will be asked to submit their full
technical and financial proposal at a later date (unknown at this
point). The full bids will be evaluated according to a formula that
combines financial and technical criteria, albeit favoring the former.
The duration of the project is set to 18 months and the budget is up
to ~1.5M euro. Actual implementation will probably kick off in
September. This RFP resembles a framework contract, in the sense that
there is an existing system with some functionality in place and the
contractor is asked to a) provide support to the operation of the
existing system for the duration of the contract (18 months) and b)
add functionality to the existing system. The timeline is set as
follows: 3 months for requirements analysis and design, 7 months
implementation and 8 months beta mode operation.

Technical context:
The project is divided in 2 major parts:
1) The transparency part that has to do with making
(central/local/regional) governmental resolutions available online.
Currently, this is basically about formatting official documents in
PDF and making them available online, along with some metadata
referring to the content of the documents manually filled in at the
time of uploading and consequently used to categorize and search the
documents. For this part, some custom applications have been developed
and an operational environment has been set up using php - MySQL -
Apache - Varnish - Ngnix - Linux - KVM - PUPPET.

Applications developed include an info-site, handling
registrations/user management, document uploading, metadata definition
and storage, digital signature, feedback, helpdesk, micro-sites for
administrative entities. For the metadata part there is a Web Service
API (read-only).

Besides improvements in existing applications, new functionality
required includes workflows, MIS, advanced/faceted search and
vocabulary management.

The people who implemented the existing infrastructure and wrote the
RFP have unfortunately never heard of Linked Data, as it seems. So we
would have to educate them on that and show how things they are
thinking of doing in the traditional WS/REST-API approach can be done
in the Linked Data approach.

2) the deliberation-open gov part that has to do with collecting
feedback on legislation and regulations before they procceed to the
parliament. I won't expand on this at this time, since we think this
is of much less interest to you. I can give you more details if needed
of course, but let's suffice to say that the current implementation is
based on wordpress, hence not really appropriate for what it's
supposed to be doing. The deliberation part is one of our core
expertises, so we have been waiting for this for a long time and have
clear ideas about what needs to be done here as well as the means to
implement them, with a big part of the implementation being already in
place.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there is more information you need to
know, and looking forward to your reply.
George



-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg