2013 Knight News Challenge

[Matt Richardson]

While I have it on authority that we won't get funded because we don't know anyone at the Knight Foundation, that doesn't mean we shouldn't submit.

THE CHALLENGE

https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/brief.html

OUR SUBMISSION

https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/a-tool-to-allow-greater-transparency-and-public-awareness-about-municipal-requests-for-bids/?at=1363587832

THE SUMMARY

Request for bids from the City or County of Milwaukee are published via an email system. While anyone can sign up for these notices, the process of submitting and how the bids are judged can be difficult to understand. Additionally, the public is not made immediately available the information about the bids without going through an open records request. In an effort to promote a more transparent bidding process (which will help businesses owner by local residents and minority business owners), our team will build an open source bid management tool. 

This tool will allow municipal officials or volunteers to post official bids for easy public access and review. It will help categorize certain qualification criteria and help guide business owners through the process with helpful description and a "submission checklist". Bids submitted can either be managed through this tool or can be retrieved by open records request and posted by volunteers. The winning bid will also be displayed. This tool will also allow moderated public commentary on the closed bid, and encourage more public discussion around the selection of vendors.  

Doing this not only help level the business playing field, it also helps encourage greater transparency and civic engagement around spending decisions by government at local levels. The interface will make it easy for the public to understand the process visually. This system would be made available to other cities via a Creative Commons license, and be built on an open source CRM and be easily deployable on any web service with a SQL database. For use in Milwaukee, scraping from published PDFs will help provide the data. Attached is a screen shot of the current listing of bids used in Milwaukee.

[Matt Richardson]

Hey everyone! Go to the submission link and comment. If you like it, applaud it! The more activity we get, the more likely we are to get funded.

-Matt