[gbhn]

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?"