Pretty awesome experiment, but I feel like this just falls into the same ol' "lowest bidder to meet the absolute minimum" trap. Is there any thoughts on introducing some notion of quality? It seems to me like "lowest price" is not really what you want, but rather "best quality while staying within budget."

I'm trying to make the math on this make sense. The scale of the projects being assigned, if they actually take two full-time weeks for one developer, means a company would receive $43.75/hour in compensation. That's a lot less than most companies bill for developer/tester time, though it is comparable to the salary of a corporate developer/tester.

Are you expecting most companies applying to this to actually be small shops?

Are the scale of projects going to generally be designed/selected to take much less than the allotted 10 business days?

In line with what Jtsummers said, it looks like this is priced for freelancers/contractors working as individuals [i.e. corporate developers who freelance for extra money] but seems to be locked in to a limited pool of companies:

> For the first iteration of this experiment, we’ve made a decision to limit eligibility to companies that are registered on SAM.gov at the time of bid.

I think for this experiment to work in the long run it needs to be handled in a way that makes it clear:

A) You don't need to be a registered LLC/Corp/etc.

B) You don't need to invest in any kind of liability insurance for your contribution.

C) It can be staged in a way that it could be ~60 hours/month with multiple "purchases" for longer projects.

This seems interesting, but how are you judging success or failure of the project as a whole?

The post seems to indicate that you will be using micro-payments to address individual issues on a single code base (CALC). This would appear to be bid splitting to avoid acquisition requirements.