Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 03

“Canadian companies have long asked the federal government to improve its relationship with suppliers – to make opportunities easier to find, simpler to navigate and faster to award, with less administrative burden.” procurement May/June 2018 // Canadian Government Executive / 29 To see if it was possible to make the above vision a reality, PCO joined forces with Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) and Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC). Together, we launched the Government of Canada Developers’ Ex- change (GC DevEx) in December 2017. The GC DevEx is a website that connects GC teams with freelance developers and small businesses that are eligible to work in Canada. To foster experimentation and promote continuous learning through fast failures, developer services procured via GC DevEx are for short periods (aka technical sprints). The maximum contract value that can be offered via GC DevEx is $9,999 CAD, including GST. The launch was able to happen in a mat- ter of months, thanks primarily to the BC Developers’ Exchange (BCDevExchange) who made their code available for anyone to re-use. After copying their code, all that was needed to get GC DevEx up and run- ning were some minor adjustments such as adding French screens, updating the user guide, and finding a server to host the site. All work procured via GC DevEx is li- censed as open source and made available to anyone via an online repository. In this way, the work is open by default, is never discarded, and can be repurposed. Suc- cesses and failures alike are shared. The lessons learned from failures can be used by others to prevent mistakes from being repeated. GitHub, which the BC Govern- ment had integrated into BCDevExchange, serves as the online repository for GC De- vEx. It not only provides a place to store code or documents for free, but is also a collaboration space, similar to a wiki, where developers around the world can co-create. GitHub houses a Canada-ca or- ganization—a playground of sorts in which GC teams can work together in the open. Anyone can discover code and join forces with others to co-create tools for open pol- icy making and in support of GC programs and services. Only a few weeks after launch, over 100 developers had signed up to be notified of opportunities, and many GC teams had ex- pressed interest in posting opportunities. This suggested that GC DevEx had met a need. These feelings were further validat- ed with the release of Budget 2018, which stated that: Canadian companies have long asked the federal government to improve its re- lationship with suppliers – to make oppor- tunities easier to find, simpler to navigate and faster to award, with less administra- tive burden. GC DevEx works to achieve these im- provements for procurement of open source code – a small corner of govern- ment procurement. However, we still face challenges. Because GC DevEx follows a decentral- ized model, departments manage the code that they procure. Each team is account- able for the quality assurance of the prod- uct they receive. This could be challenging for teams of non-IT public servants who procure an open source app but do not have the expertise required to verify the quality and security of the code. Secondly, the GC DevEx website is not in and of itself a procurement vehicle, but simply a layer on top of existing procure- ment policies and processes. All contracts awarded via opportunities on GC DevEx must therefore follow an existing procure- ment process. GC DevEx contracts are of- ficially awarded via the sole source process due to the low maximum contract value. However, GC DevEx involves open bidding on opportunities and evaluation of propos- als, which does not seem to be compatible with providing a sole source justification. Finally, we recently learned that amongst the many existing GC procurement vehi- cles, there are some that are mandatory for IT procurement. At this time it is unclear if any of these are a perfect fit for the type of opportunities offered via GC DevEx. To make the vision of working in new ways a reality, we will need to co-design with procurement specialists to adjust for the challenges that have surfaced. In the meantime, the GC DevEx experiment con- tinues. Since the launch in December, two opportunities have been posted. Through- out this process, the team has been docu- menting progress openly on GitHub, learn- ing and adjusting. For example, we learned that problem definition was not clear in the first opportunity and so we adjusted by cre- ating a space for GC employees to get help with problem definition before they post opportunities. We also continue to work closely with our colleagues in British Co- lumbia to learn with them as the BC Devel- opers’ Exchange evolves. As we learn, the vision for GC DevEx grows. Developers tell us that the time it takes to pay suppliers prevents freelancers and small businesses from bidding on pub- lic sector contracts. Could a tool such as GC DevEx fix this? Would it be possible to pay developers automatically when their code is “pulled” on GitHub? Other jurisdictions are using “pay on pull” as a tool to remove barriers to working with government. Fi- nally, would it be possible to shorten pro- curement time by automatically issuing a contract to winning proposals? We have yet to answer these questions. But we hope you’ll join us as we continue to learn and experiment! If you are a developer, we invite you to visit the GC DevEx website (https://gcde- vexchange-carrefourproggc.org ), sign up for notifications of opportunities or follow the @gcdevex Twitter account. If you are part of a GC team, participate in this experiment by posting your oppor- tunities. R achel M uston , Analyst, posted to Consultations and Public Engagement, Privy Council Office