I think if there's any lesson to be taken from this it's that presenting bounded, well-described (and thus easily undertaken) sub-projects is probably more effective than simply inviting developers to "help out" in some non-specific manner on a larger open-source efforts.
I think it's going to be safe. It demonstrably saves much much more than it costs, so conservatives will likely support it from a cost cutting/reducing government "waste" perspective. Liberals will support it because it's smart and makes government run better.
I think only an extremely cynical view would suggest this program isn't safe, a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.
Has our legislative branch behaved rationally in the last few years? Recently they threatened forcing a default for unrelated (to budget) issues. And in the not to distant past they voted a law that prohibits Medicare from to using it's bargaining power to negotiate for lower drug prices. You know something that would save every tax payer quite a bit of money since Medicare is one of the larger budget line items.
Based on past behavior you don't have to be overly cynical to think a useful program like this could be eliminated.
More to the point, 18F is supposed to be a self-funded organization that shouldn't draw much from the overall GSA budget. (Not sure if that applies to standing up the organization / hiring and other investments). It would be a hard argument to kill it. That said, The US Digital Service is out of the White House Office of Science Technology Policy (a distinctly political / appointed office) and USDS / 18F interact quite a bit so momentum could be a challenge if there was executive-level antipathy.
> a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.
Pretty sure giving government a bad name is the goal for many of the elected conservatives (perhaps not the people who voted for them).
- $1 IT contracts get in the way of crony overcharging, said cronies then provide campaign financing to the right people (never forget Accuweather paying Rick Santorum $50,000 to lobby to stop making National Weather Service data public);
- overcharging is how some intelligence services finance black ops (the modern Air America might be a press or marketing company) as France is alleged to be doing already (e.g. [1] for the full description)
In both cases, there would be powerful incentives to shut down "more efficient government IT" projects.
One sample doesn't really establish a "market rate" yet, so I don't worry about the seller not being motivated by financial profit motive. Sometimes the value provided to the seller goes beyond the financial payment. 18F gets a good deal here because of the intangibles they have to offer.
If they put out more projects than the amount of work people are willing to do at the "$1 volunteer" or "$1 build my portfolio" rate, then the price should go up. How deep is this pool? I guess they will find out.
The big challenge, I think, will be if bad actors start coming in and making crazy bids and then doing sloppy work. Time will tell.
Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not directly from 18F. 18F has heavily promoted recently, and that along with them being a part of the government and the project being open source all contributed to the volunteer feeling it was a worthwhile endeavor at that price. It's an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at purely monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is extremely liquid.
The problem with this isn't that the bidder wanted to do something noble, it's that it set a precedent that the government is going to expect on future bids moving forward. "Buying a contract" is nothing new - companies do it all the time (i.e. deliberately dramatically underbidding just to get the past performance). However, reverse auctions are a lose-lose for the government and commercial sector. This approach assumes that the only thing that separates vendors is price alone, which is incorrect. For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Just ask the other numerous agencies backing away from the reverse auction model due to disastrous lowest-bidder contractor performance.
I do, however, wholeheartedly embrace the pilot-model approach to IT procurement (i.e. MVP for government). It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing innovators to shine in practice, not through proposals.
"For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for"
Well, you don't, sometimes you just pay for overhead you don't need.
My wife works at a small 15 person non-profit - I was shocked when I heard how much they pay for IT support from a small support organization.
She asked what other choice they had, because they don't have anyone on-staff that can do it, and their old hardware needed a lot of support.
So I put together a proposal - for less than they were paying for a year of support services, they could replace all of their hardware with new hardware (including desktops, network and printer), plus move from hosted Exchange to Gmail (for another big cost savings).
I spent a weekend setting up the hardware, including automatic backups to a local fileserver plus crashplan for remote cloud backups (they had no backups at all before, just a bunch of flash drives with various bits of information).
They saved money after the first year, plus they had all new and reliable hardware. They bought a block of 40 hours of support from their IT support organization and haven't even used half of that over 2 years.
I have to agree, with digital technology, "you get what you pay for" breaks down completely. Sometimes the very best choice for one component is cost free, or very low cost, because reproducing that component 100% perfectly is pretty much free.
The big problem is identifying what is a good choice. If you don't know, you can't easily contract out the choice either, how do you know the contractor can or will make a good choice for you?
So the best outcome for non-technical organizations is to get lucky and know someone personally who knows what they're doing and has no ulterior motive - someone just like you. They don't really know if they know such a person. But if they get lucky and pick just the right helpful competent person to make IT decisions for them, modern technology can give them quite a lot for very little.
Hence why they call it "best value" which was my point. What this person did is called "LPTA" or, essentially, lowest bidder. Not sure if you want every lowest bidder making your mission critical applications.
> For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for.
Is the government bound to accept the lowest bid? When bidding closes, it would make sense to review the lowest bids for noticeable differences in expected quality. If it isn't worth doing that, because expected quality is always high, and prices keep coming low one must consider that the task has become commoditised.
It would depend on the situation. This one, I believe, they were bound to accept the lowest bid. However if the lowest bidder failed to complete the work they could move up the ladder.
Most major contracts are, I think, 'Lowest bidder technically acceptable'. Which requires the bidder to meet minimum guidelines in their quality of work. So price is not the only factor, though it is a major one.
Most large federal contracts state the criteria for judgement in the RFP. It is usually some combination of technical solution, cost and past performance with the weight of each varying between RFPs.
Also for large contracts the government will have done some due diligence to determine a range which the contract should cost. If your bid is significantly below this range and your solution doesn't show some innovation to support the lower cost the government is likely to reject it as unrealistic.
But sometimes you pay a lot and still get crap. I don't know any reliable mechanism that can predict project outcome. Past success is not a good indicator for future success in software projects, sadly.
18F/USDS peeps... would you consider bounty or reward style programs that reward all open source contributors? Eg instead of bidding for a contract, keep an open list of tasks/bugs/full projects and reward contributors whose PR's are merged in some way?
Yes, I know this monetizes what used to be free in a way and maybe goes against the "spirit" of open source, but practically speaking it feels like it'd be a huge win win for the open source community and small to medium sized government projects in general.
18Fer here. The main issue here is how the Gov actually gets $ to that entity. There are lots of laws and rules that we need to obey about who we pay $ to - Gov doesn't have a ton of flexibility here. There was a reason why bidders had to be pre-registered.
That said, many of us want to continue to expand our engagement with the community. When it comes to bounty/reward style programs, the one I'm personally focused on figuring out first is a bug bounty program. Once we've figured out solutions for a bounty type program, you'll absolutely hear from us.
I'm sure you've thought of this, but is it impossible to subcontract this out to a non-profit to increase flexibility in the details of how the work is done? I.e. same requirements, same constraints, but the non-profit is formally registered with GSA and handles payments to subcontractors rather than the sub getting it straight from the government?
The bounty program as a whole. Like when I worked at NREL they were government funded but on paper I think it looked like a subcontract to run the lab which was fully managed by another entity. NREL I'm sure can hire contractors, although I suppose they might have to be in GSA as well?
>It didn’t seem controversial to me. Writing some code to help out the government and the general public—what a unique opportunity!
Y'know, if the author explained it along the lines of "I wanted to have a record of government work as a foot in the door", I think it would be an easier pill to swallow for the folks bidding at reasonable prices.
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent.
But at the end of the day, it's the way that system was set up. Hopefully 18F sees this as an opportunity to improve the auction system (secret minimum and other suggestions in the other thread), rather than a way to get cheap labour.
Why would anybody be against competent coders wanting to donate time to public use? I get that other people were hoping to be paid for this, but would you end all volunteer programs on account of them interfering with paid labor?
Then get another job. We don't owe you your line of work.
If you literally can't compete with volunteers maybe you should see what they says about your niche and then find a new one.
Once when replacing a server (and fixing the wiring, etc, etc) I also replaced a router and dual-homed the company's site as a freebie because it made my job easier (the new router had diagnostics, managed-switch features, etc). It was a line-item I could have billed for separately, or it was a new level of service.
By the "save the work for the guy feeding the starving children" philosophy we should nickel-and-dime our clients instead of providing our true value. I don't like that.
btw, I'm a supporter of unlimited (ie, not limited - I would try to encourage you to not need it though) welfare to let society say "tough" things such as "Oh well, I guess we don't need many buggy whips."
And as to why I didn't charge anyways - the change actually made my other work faster.
Volunteer programs? No, not at all. But this is NOT a volunteer program. It is supposed to be a way to better bid out government work, which I will point out is very much not charity.
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent.
Didn't seem the slightest patronizing to me. Brendan just seemed delighted that he could help out. I love that.
More important, any bidder in any circumstance can be outbid by someone else and lose rent money in the process, right? To dictate any other outcome would require a depth of knowledge about the market and its bidders that no one party could possibly acquire reliably.
My thoughts weren't really centred around arguing that to be honest. It was more to do with the author's tone, which took a rather tone-deaf attitude as to why certain folks were disappointed with the outcome.
The outcome of the auction happened in a way which was allowed by the parameters which defined it.
Nope. Made the assumption that because the price was going down rapidly that there were perhaps a few one-man/woman shops that wanted to do work for a price which was more reasonable than $1.
Edit: Also you took a massive leap of extrapolation on what my views were on a short paragraph. Beyond guessing a possible motivation (foot in door as government contractor), there's nothing pinning my views here on the auctioneer being a government contractor rather than private sector.
Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet.
"Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist.
Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone.
>I use open source technologies on a daily basis, and this seemed like a great opportunity to give back a little.
If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.
Saying that about someone who wants to help out so essentially volunteers their time to help a government project, which in essence means it helps everyone, seems a bit entitled and ill-informed.
I'm sure many people want to get paid to work on open source, but it's a free market, and people will bid what they think a project is worth, and worth isn't always about monetary compensation.
Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free.
> If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.
The people that start/work on a specific open source project have the right to ask for compensation in whatever way they like, or enforce it through their license. You have no right to speak for all open source projects.
Any form of volunteering replaces some amount of paid work. The pros and cons need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
If volunteers do just enough free programming to drive professionals out of the market, it's possible the result will be that less work gets done. I don't think soup kitchens have the same risk.
> The pros and cons need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Utilitarianism? Watch it quickly spiral into a shit show.
These same concerns and arguments are nothing new. People have been bemoaning the evils of open-source and it's socialist ways as unethical and selfish for years. And look how the software market still flourished. In many cases, directly off the backs of unpaid developers.
There's a good chance we're beyond a tipping point of ever again having enough work for the masses anyway. Look how many able-bodied folks the Feds hide under disability to keep the unemployment numbers low. And computing jobs will continue to vanish as software advances. You gonna tell a software company they can't launch their accounting AI because of CPA job losses? You going to stop IBM from improving Watson because it might cost us some Javascriptkiddie jobs (don't need as many web pages if Watson can do my work just by talking to it, or just having a brain-wave interface)?
Humanity will shrug and do what they did when cars replaced horse and buggy: Carry on.
So I think most people completely miss this when they see it, but I love it when people call "socialist" things selfish. It's the very definition of irony that something done "for the benefit of others" is deemed to be done solely for the person's ego. Personally, I don't see open source as inherently socialist anyways, but that's another topic entirely.
Soup kitchens have the exact same risk. If those soup kitchens cook too much, they will drive restaurants out of business. Luckily, for both soup kitchens and programmers, this will never happen. There is more programming work to be done than programmers, and the markets aren't the same.
This was the common argument 10 years ago as open source CMSes - primarily WordPress and Drupal - started becoming more common. That eventually web developers would be entirely replaced by people who just configure plugins/modules.
As we've seen, software development has stagnated and almost gone away in the ten years since.
Open source CMSes increase efficiency - by reducing the amount of work required to set up a website, they mean that the time and money saved can potentially be used for more productive purposes. Working for free doesn't do that; it involves the same amount of work and time, just for free.
>Any form of volunteering replaces some amount of paid work.
This makes very little sense. They still have $3,498 left from what they had budgeted, money that can (and will) be spent elsewhere. The money doesn't just disappear into thin air.
>Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers.
No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not.
When you bid $1 and work for free, you're saying I don't want the money you're willing to pay. To fail to understand this basic difference is silly.
You could run this same critique against any bid after the first bid, because it's lower than the amount they were willing to pay. The consequence of your argument is that all auctions are immoral.
In reality, prices are negotiated between a field of willing suppliers and purchasers. There will almost always be some "producer surplus," some amount producers get beyond their bedrock price, and some "consumer surplus," some amount consumers save over what they would have paid. It's just typical to find some middle ground in any transaction.
Here there was a middle ground, because $1 was not the only compensation, there were other personal benefits from taking on the work. It seems at the core you're saying he should have only valued money, that he should not have been allowed to "enjoy the work for other reasons" unless cash was involved, because some people prefer cash.
That doesn't seem like a sound ethical principle either.
> To fail to understand this basic difference is silly.
Also, maybe avoid dismissing other commenters as "silly." It's how these threads tend to slide off the rails.
EDIT: Warning - Sorry for some ninja edits, tried to expand my position. I didn't delete anything controversial, just added additional thoughts.
> I can do it cheaper is distinct from I can do it for free.
Why? I don't understand why these aren't just other prices.
I'm not trolling, I'm asking for clarification. It's like you just said to me "3 is a number but 0 is not a number." I literally don't understand your position.
Also is $1 free in this context?
Note I'm responding to your critique of the low bid, you said the reason it was bad was because you're taking less than they're "willing" to pay. If that's really your justification, it would apply to non-free bids as well. Maybe that's not your actual justification though...
Sorry if we're talking past each other. My perspectives on this are highly shaped by my experiences with economics courses, especially micro. Really recommend working through some of that material, which can be found free online. It might change the way you look at the world: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-121-microeconomic-th...
> No, you could not. I can do it cheaper is distinct from I can do it for free.
No, its not. "I can do it for free" is an instance of "I can do it cheaper". Its quite possible for someone to have a non-negative (zero or positive) net utility from an act which gives someone else a net positive utility, so that the "price" they are willing to charge for that task is zero or even negative (that is, they are willing to pay for the opportunity.) That's no different than the variation in utilities between suppliers with a net negative utility who are willing to do the task for a variety of positive payments.
> No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not.
The organization does have enough money to pay some of them, but the savings from people volunteering goes to other resources, and since people align with the goal of the organization, they are fine with that.
This is the exact same. He liked the goal of the organization, he liked what they were doing, and he wanted to work with them, and he wanted to help out. Any money saved here isn't going to some CEO, this is the government, it's budgeted and if it doesn't go to another project here, it goes to some other service for the American people.
When you comp some or all of any expected monetary compensation, which is what this and all volunteer work is, you are helping to set the market rate for that job. The only reason volunteers in an industry can be unpaid is because the supply of people willing to work for no money outstrips the demand. If there were not enough people to volunteer in an area, the organization could and would pay some amount out of their operating fund to pay the work, if it was important to them. This would likely result in fewer workers, but it's obvious how this would work out. It's all supply and demand, even for volunteer work.
>The organization does have enough money to pay some of them, but the savings from people volunteering goes to other resources, and since people align with the goal of the organization, they are fine with that.
You are comparing two very different things. The material costs of feeding 100 people would probably equal the labor costs of one worker for one day. Nobody is going to make the labor compromise when the question is "Do I feed 10 people or 100 people".
>Any money saved here isn't going to some CEO, this is the government, it's budgeted and if it doesn't go to another project here, it goes to some other service for the American people.
Um, do you have any idea about federal funds just languishing in bank accounts? Just google "unspent government money".
Sorry, your argument does not hold any water. In any case, we're entering into the minutia of a topic that I have little interest in, so I am not inclined to continue.
> The material costs of feeding 100 people would probably equal the labor costs of one worker for one day. Nobody is going to make the labor compromise when the question is "Do I feed 10 people or 100 people".
But that's not the actual decision that needs to be made. It's more like do I feed no people because there's nobody to distribute the food that will work for free, or do I pay some people some small amount and feed some people. I guarantee decisions like that get made at all levels of nonprofits all the time, from entry level positions to directors. It is a market, and just because much of the time supply far outstrips demand, to the point that there is no monetary compensation (but there is theoretically other compensation), doesn't mean that always hold true at all times and in all locations.
> Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free.
This comparison is inaccurate – soup kitchen volunteers are not performing a complete job which is being bid for. This underbid is more analogous to if a local government center asking for bids to serve a meeting of 500 people, and a local soup kitchen bidding $1 for the contract because they are essentially giving away free food. They then end up supplying the meeting with 500 bowls of great chili, and everyone is happy.
If the soup kitchen started doing this every time the government center issued a bid, the local restaurants would never make any money from the government center. This is not to say that they would never make money. But it is legitimate for an average restaurant in the area to be worried by the soup kitchen's actions, and view it as a potential devaluer of their product.
Sure, but the government is under no obligation to support restaurants through soup kitchen contracts. Their mandate is to feed the poor. They should choose the option that lets them achieve this goal as efficiently as possible. Social, technological and economic changes that make it harder for restaurants to compete can and will happen, and it's the job of the restaurants to respond in a competitive way if they want those contracts, or shift their focus to a more lucrative sector, or go out of business. That's not smug and elitist (as the top level comment implied), that's the system we have and it's responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than anything we've tried before.
You can safely ignore the rest of my comment if you like, it's sort of me just rambling because there's a place to do it.
An important concept that I think some people miss with free markets and "fairness" is that it's all relative to the time frame you are looking at. Yes, it's possibly more fair (depending on how you determine fairness) to right now to completely redistribute all wealth equally between all world inhabitants, but will that result in overall better outcomes for people 50 years from now? If we had done that 50 years ago, would we be better off right now? 100 years ago? To my view, free markets are the best way we've found so far to increase wealth overall over time, so it helps prevent local maxima effects and eventually leads to better outcomes. Unfortunately that means some people get the short end of the stick, but it's important to remember that the short end is short relative to the other end, and the stick is getting longer overall as time goes on. That's not to say I believe in a completely hand-off approach to markets. They can and are manipulated at times, and there are runaway effects that should be mitigated.
Switching contexts, you could say the same thing about garage bands.
"Why are these amateurs playing all these shows basically for free? They're stealing money from hardworking musicians!"
Some disciplines spark addicted, passionate individuals who get other benefits beyond the price. (In contrast, there aren't a lot of enthusiast janitors.) If you want to make a living and you opt to compete with abundance, you shouldn't be shocked when someone is willing to underbid.
> (In contrast, there aren't a lot of enthusiast janitors.)
Totally unrelated, but this is the second time recently I've seen a remark like this. And I agree entirely, but I actually know one. Guy retired, wanted to help out an underfunded school, became their janitor. Retired military so he's essentially got a (much better than) living wage for the rest of his life, the income was irrelevant. He just wanted to see the conditions for the students improved.
Ha, fun to see the counterexample, totally makes sense.
Definitely more accurate to say that, while volunteerism is pervasive in some fields, it's far less common in others.
I think the fields where it's more common have huge social or moral benefits to go along with the job. Or sometimes they function like a foot in the door in a lucrative field. I can easily see helping out an underfunded school fitting the former categories.
Coal mining will probably be my go to example from now on... ;)
>Switching contexts, you could say the same thing about garage bands
I don't know much about the music business, but as a layman, I don't think the two situations are comparable. I think that when a band releases free music they're thinking "I just need to put htis out for free and if my song goes viral THEN I'm going to get picked up by this huge record label, etc ,etc"
Its more of a "let me win the lottery" prayer, than any kind of volunteer type sentiment.
I don't think GP was talking about releasing music for free. I think they were talking about bands that'll do a gig in a bar for $200 (or whatever's considered cheap) versus one that costs several times that, but is actually trying to make a living playing music.
This is a good analogy, actually. You want a chance to do the work, and have people see your good work. You want that badly enough that you're willing to do the initial work for free.
>"Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist.
Not seeing a big difference between that and "Oh, I already make enough at my day job, now let me produce FOSS that competes with commercial software which are some people's primary job."
> Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet.
Not necessarily, this may be also a valid profit-oriented strategy. My wife worked for ca. 8 month almost for free (for lowest rate allowed by the law) to get an entry in her CV which landed her on her next real money job.
Whether it's a good strategy is besides the point; it's still a luxury in that your wife had the means to live for 8 months without a substantial income. Some people don't have the safety net to be able to do that, even if they knew it would put them in a better position in the long run.
> Working for free is a luxury for the people not struggling to ends meet.
This is true for markets where there really is no other alternative than working for free. You are certainly referring to children of wealthy parents who can afford to do unpaid or low-paid internships and entry level jobs in industries like media, the arts, or sports.
When you are talking about contract development work, which exists a robust market for paid work, even if all similar gov't contracts gets done at the $1 it would not much affect someones ability to sell their skills in the private markets.
So donating anything is elitist? Most things that are donated are things that someone else provides for a price, so you will always be "taking a job" from someone else.
> So donating anything is elitist? Most things that are donated are things that someone else provides for a price, so you will always be "taking a job" from someone else.
If you donate things then you're still buying it from someone, but giving it to someone that cannot afford them. So really, you're a surrogate purchaser.
The problem comes in when you're donating time (via work) to a group that can afford to pay for it, and there are people looking for work that are willing to work for the normal wages/rates that would've been paid.
If the people receiving the benefits of the work can't afford to pay, you aren't taking the work from anyone. When there's no one willing to work for the rates being offered, you aren't taking the work from anyone. But when people are willing to work for the rates offered, and you give your time for free, you are taking the work from other people.
The ethics and morality of giving is kind of complicated.
> The ethics and morality of giving is kind of complicated.
No, it's really quite simple. It's the ethics and morality (and circuitous justification) of being upset by others giving that's complicated.
I built a friend of a friend a billing system for his fledgling business. Didn't charge a dime. I even got sucked in to support for much longer than I really wanted, since no good deed goes unpunished. Was it unethical of me to undercut the other people who might have wanted to provide those services for money?
I did some free consulting last week. A friend is starting a company and hasn't hired devs yet, so I met him for a half day and we worked on system architecture. I told him ahead of time that I was happy to do it for free. He had the money to pay a consultant, but every bit he saves now extends his runway. He bought me a beer. Unethical?
Last year my water heater failed catastrophically and dumped its water all over the floor. I went to my next door neighbor and said, "hey, is there a plumber you recommend around here?" and his response was "don't waste your money on a plumber. That's an easy job, and I can help. Let's go to Home Depot." He spent the whole day helping me. Literally took a paying job that I was planning to pay a plumber to do. Should plumbers be upset about their work being devalued?
> Should plumbers be upset about their work being devalued?
The problem stems from contributions that have a big impact. Big impact can be achieved by one person contributing a large amount, or many people contributing small amounts.
Was it bad just by giving away t-shirts? I don't think so.
Was it bad just by giving away that many t-shirts? I don't think so either.
It was bad because his actions created a dependency on an unreliable source while removing the main income source that sustains reliable ones. If he subsidized the income loss of the textile industry, the consequences would not have been as devastating.
That's really the crux of the argument; giving away things for free generally takes income from dependable sources of labour. It's only when it has a big impact that people pay attention.
Going back to the topic, the same can be said about volunteering. I think it's okay if volunteering dislodges an entire industry as long as the volunteering is sustainable and reliable.
I think the big mistake people make when criticizing this $1 contract is imagining the logical conclusion if everyone worked for $1 instead of realizing that this is a one-off giveaway and it has zero impact on actual rates for this type of work. This guy is not going to continue doing $1 contracts, and nobody is going to respond by reducing their prices to below what they deserve. People can give things away. The reason plumbers aren't concerned about neighbors helping each other with their water heaters is that nobody is going to make a career out of competing with them by doing full-time gratis plumbing jobs.
Complaining about this is like saying the apocryphal jilted wife who sold her husband's prized Porsche for $1 has affected the price of Porsches.
I think this is the most apropos objection: 18F is trying to trial a reliable source of contracting for small-scale IT work.
If it turns out that volunteerism is reliable, then awesome! 18F just discovered that by spending time to nail down detailed reqs the govt can let patriotic citizens contribute to their society by helping on projects! Everyone wins and things are awesome!
If on the other hand your intuition is that volunteerism is unreliable, then this just short-circuited an early experiment by 18F to figure out a reliable piecework system for doing IT development.
My intuition matches the second case, but there's an existence proof that the first might actually be correct. It'd be a totally awesome story if it was, so I have a hard time being sad. And even if it isn't, it may give 18F folks a think, as in "hmm, perhaps some of these projects are appropriate for volunteerism; is there a context where we can develop tools for that use case? universities? job training?"
> Another comment referred to this article where a Florida business man donated a million t-shirts to Africa that resulted in the textile industry bankruptcy
I didn't result in any such thing, nor does the linked article suggest it does. A million t-shirts dumped in Africa would have less effect than the same number dumped in the USA.
1) Maybe? Did they have the resources to pay someone? And, as you pointed out, you got sucked into support for a role you didn't get paid. This increased their dependency on you and pulls you out of your normal economic/professional role. Probably not unethical, but certainly led to undesirable results (for you, great for them).
2) Your free consultancy extends his runway, which means he has a greater chance of success and puts him in a better position to contribute by hiring and spending in the future.
3) You also keep the retail chain in existence, and have spent your money more wisely rather than overpaying (by labor rates at least) for someone else to do what was actually a quick and easy job.
Honestly, though. You seem to be thinking that I'm opposed to giving. All I said is that it's complicated when you start giving to (and sometimes, in essence, taking from) others. Look at that Africa t-shirt versus textile manufacture example in another thread. Millions of people clothed, thousands of people out of (otherwise sustainable) work. The calculus is non-trivial. Clothing people is a good thing. Putting thousands of people out of work is probably a bad thing (depends on what the work is, and what they can do after it). Which one outweighs the other. In the long term, eliminating an industry from a region is probably going to turn out to be a worse thing as it eliminates the ability of those individuals participating in it to feed and clothe themselves and contribute financially to their local economy. Compared to other forms of giving (versus free t-shirts) that would have enabled people to build up more businesses and industries where they would then be able to afford and/or manufacture more clothing (or whatever other needed goods) locally/regionally. Or purchase them from abroad by producing some goods/services they could sell globally.
Ok, so I took away some work that they were going to pay someone for. What, though, are they going to do with that money they saved? They are probably going to spend it on something else, which will employ somebody. It just shifts where that money is spent.
Right. If we provide teachers to an area, we might be eliminating the teachers already present. More likely we're supplementing them. This is filling a need that a local economy may not be able to sustain on its own.
If we provide volunteer laborer a to a farmer who can afford hired hands, we're reducing the income to those in the local unskilled labor market.
Those are two extremes and most labor-giving and goods-giving fall in between. But we need to determine where it falls to determine whether is a positive or a negative.
Put more succinctly that I did in my comment, where a lot of folks extrapolated my comments on the tone of the article to a full blown commentary on the free market.
Perhaps but I imagine people would not willingly produce something for free if it was the private sector. The fact it is government and taxes pay for it, therefore you and me pay for it, there should be no problem in getting it done for free(essentially).
Would it be better to pay a company $500, of which $150 goes to the dev and $350 to company coffers?
When Microsoft let volunteers supply photos for new default Windows backgrounds, there was incredible outrage among professional photographers. People who are not professional photographers can usually see that better images at lower cost is a good thing and not a bad one.
You're basically name-calling, which is unproductive. While I'm not in agreement with OP, some levels and methods of altruism/volunteerism can end up being counterproductive. A certain level of free <insert good> to a region is useful. Above that, or for too long, and you end up harming local farming and manufacturing, to the point where they may also depend on the free goods.
I'm lacking specific articles and lines of research, but charity seems to be better when it's establishing people on their own (teaching them a trade, providing them a global market for the goods they already produce, education, medical, etc.) than giving them a thing. We have to be careful when giving to others that we don't simultaneously diminish them. All of this is a balance, and the correct balance very much depends on the extent of the need and the existing capabilities and limitations of the people involved so no universal line can be drawn.
TLDR; sending a surplus of tshirts to Africa did nothing but crash local textile industries by introducing a surplus of existing, cheap product. Guy wanted to do good, didn't think about the consequences, and screwed up.
Except you clearly haven't read the article - he didn't send the shirts, he listened to the aid workers and criticism over his plan and decided against it.
The local textile crashes referred to in the economy were from cheap second hand imports, not aid.
Calling other people "smug" and "elitist". Justify it by believing you are some sort of protector of the rest of us. Opening our eyes to our unethical behavior, and how we're demeaning and stealing bread from the mouths of others.
Maybe our economics are unethical. I mean we have right here evidence that people can be motivated by things other than money. But yeah we have to bow our heads at the pulpit of "sound economics".
Let's start excluding those who want to contribute in a different way because it undermines the religion. Maybe we should burn them at the stake?
This happens all the time with public procurements in Sweden. It's not uncommon to see negative bids as well. After you've got the contract you can bill them for service hours etc so it's a win anyway.
Do you think bids would come in negatively for Firm Fixed-Price work. In this case (micro-purchase), you are not allowed to bill again for the same service so the $1 is pretty much where you stop, unless further contract work is pursued which can take months. Genuinely curious.
Sure, that could be a solution. The problem I see is that any future work is more or less guaranteed to go to the winning company (because of system lock-in, knowledge etc). So if you're a big company who can afford the upfront loss you can still cash in in the future. Having the government as a permanent customer is more or less the dream. I'm no expert though.
Brendan would have had to jump through the hoops to work with 18F, including the SAM validation. Unless you are talking about working directly for 18F as a federal employee, which would have different levels of requirements.
Lower project bids reduce the level of commitment on the part of both the client and contractor. With only $1 at risk, the amount of leverage the client can exert over the work product is minimal.
Volunteering is not the same relationship as contracting, and carries different kinds of project risk for the client.
Judging bids using price as the sole basis is easy, and poor procurement.
Given the tendency of HN toward libertarian and free market approaches, I've been consistently surprised at the suggestions being made around this. This is free markets gone right: A buyer and seller finding the most efficient price for each.
I upvoted you for the "this is free markets gone right" part, but I have no idea where you're seeing "a tendency of HM toward libertarian and free market approaches". Every time the issue comes up, I'm seeing about 90% comments against it. Maybe I'm reading the wrong threads :)
I host a general-interest VBulletin forum, which at one point had something like a hundred people posting. One day, we discovered that via the "groups" functionality, there was a whole parasitic forum co-existing with ours - we didn't know it existed, we didn't know any of the people there, and they didn't know us, and the two groups didn't interact at all.
I wonder if it's possible for something similar to happen on specific-interest a messaging board, but just as a function of time zones. (e.g., somehow, most of the population of the board is from Spain and New Zealand, 12 hours apart.)
It sounds like a group of people abused the Social Group feature of vBulletin[1] to piggyback off of his forum to have their own little area without having to host their own forum/server. Depending on how vBulletin is configured, you can basically create a wholly independent forum within the Social Group that can't be accessed/seen outside of the group.
The seller wasn't going for the profit motive however. The seller simply wanted to work on the project as a volunteer. This is how he facilitated that. There is no profit motive here, and so really it's not even a business transaction, it's a volunteering oppurtunity.
There's a lot of crappy things that are 100% free market. Oligopolies come to mind. Just because it's a free market solution doesn't mitigate the negative experiences this person created for the other bidders.
Just because someone said "free market" doesn't mean you are obligated to recite the generic Litany Against Free Markets. The specific point here is that in a free market you are welcome to decide to volunteer to do something. Nothing about "free markets" prevents it. If you judge yourself to receive more utility from volunteering, then go ahead and do it. No central organization will stop you.
The idea that free markets "obligates greed", in a particular cartoon-villain sense of greed, is propaganda, not what the theory actually says. (Now, we can have a very profitable discussion about whether and where it enables greed, or perhaps structurally encourages it, and some interesting conversations on whether "encourages greed" is even necessarily always bad. But there is no way in which one is obligated to greed, such that you are somehow betraying some sort of ideal if you decide for your own reasons to act altruistically.)
I'm sort of amused at the number of people getting peeved about this. This person is volunteering to work for nearly-free for government civil service... if you are anti-capitalism or anti-free market and think people should be doing more for and with government... isn't that exactly what this is?
Are we really going to try to spin "someone volunteered to help the government with something" into "free markets are evil"? It seems to get rather into the "doth protest too much, methinks" domain.
This individual didn't volunteer to help the government. He undercut all competition in a competitive bidding process because his costs are $0 for the project.
This is one of the known failures of free markets, regardless of the actors intent the effect of his behavior is negative for those trying to participate in the market as a means of sustenance.
I'm not mad at the guy, he can do whatever he wants. It's just kind of a crappy thing to do knowingly to other people and, if widespread, could have some strange externalities.
Even if the winning bid had been $3000, it wouldn't have changed the situation for everyone who lost the bid. By bidding $1, he only caused one person to lose the bid, which is whomever bid second lowest.
I understand where you're coming from but I disagree. Ignoring the emotional impact on the losing bidders I think that reducing the net payout of the market has a negative effect on all market participants.
If he won at a bid based on cost it would have kept the market at a price level comparable for all participants. He won the bid by ignoring all cost which has the effect of lowering the entire marketplace by pushing prices down.
Well the problem is self correcting. People will stop giving quality bids if they don't think that there is any profit to be made because a bunch of volunteers have destroyed the market. There is no problem here. Only that anyone bidding should be aware that they won't get properly compensated for their work and time.
Too bad we're all supposed to benefit from what this market produces.
Having worked in a government agency before, I guess I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a needed project would be delayed indefinitely while we waited for market dynamics to correct themselves.
Yep. Fully agreed. I think it sucks for the other participants because it wasn't the "intent" of the market. At the end of the day the market is going to yield a solution, intent doesn't matter.