18F's Micro-Purchase Experiment: Why I Bid $1
brendansudol.com
brendansudol.com
He wanted to do the work, he got what he wanted, and the US Government got the job done for just $1!
Not sure how anyone can see this but a victory for the US public.
18F is, I think, a fantastic initiative; I hope HM Government takes note - could be fantastic here in the UK too.
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.
Pretty sure giving government a bad name is the goal for many of the elected conservatives (perhaps not the people who voted for them).
Based on past behavior you don't have to be overly cynical to think a useful program like this could be eliminated.
- $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.
[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-...
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.
I'm excited to see how this develops.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start
Clearly, you don't always get what you pay for. The price is not always the value.
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.
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.
It's a perplexing situation.
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.
edited: small typo
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.
There is no reason this process has to devalue everyone else's work on a paid job.
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.
And as to why I didn't charge anyways - the change actually made my other work faster.
Perhaps the lesson here is that non-profits need to make it as easy and clearly-defined as 18F has in order to receive more donations.
Ayn frowns upon altruism, and lots of coders (heart) Ayn.
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.
This line of argument would hold water if the federal government had any kinda of monopsony power on software consulting services. They do not.
The outcome of the auction happened in a way which was allowed by the parameters which defined it.
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Zero or negative net costs are lower than positive net costs. So "I'll do it for free" (or even, "I'll pay you for the opportunity to do it") are instances of "I can do it cheaper."
> "I can do it for free" means that I'm ignoring any of my costs.
No, it doesn't; assuming rationality it means that the net costs are nonpositive, not that they are ignored (which would be irrational.)
Of course, it could be the result of ignoring some or all costs, but so could "I can do it cheaper" when there is still some charge for the work. There's nothing special about the zero charge case.
Minimum wage might be a useful data point, but tied to not predictable work time.
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.
As we've seen, software development has stagnated and almost gone away in the ten years since.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
He got a lot of attention from just doing that aswell, so a success for him
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.
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... ;)
It IS an open source project: https://github.com/18F/calc/blob/master/LICENSE.md
Go back to your gulch, John Galt. Just because someone chooses to be altruistic does not mean you have to crap all over their altruism.
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.
The local textile crashes referred to in the economy were from cheap second hand imports, not aid.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00...
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.
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 the spirit of the complaining is more of a warning to keep an eye out for the trend rather than stop these one-offs altogether, but that's a lot harder to say and act on than "stop these one-offs".
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?"
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.
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.
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?
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.
It is my point that this may be a good strategy.
> it's still a luxury in that your wife had the means to live for 8 months without a substantial income
Spending 10k Euro on an audio system is a luxury, spending 10k Euro to get a better job is an investment with a pretty good ROI.
> 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.
Since for almost anything there will be people who can't afford it, so this argument makes everything a luxury.
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.
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."
Would it be better to pay a company $500, of which $150 goes to the dev and $350 to company coffers?
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.
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.
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 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.
There's no shortage of work, and no realistic chance that the government is going to be able to get all of its software tasks done via donations, so worrying about what happens if everybody or even a lot of people do this is really looking the gift horse in the mouth.
I'm confused by this. According to this logic, it's a crappy thing to do to undercut anyone, ever, in any circumstance. Is that what you think?
This individual could have volunteered on any project but instead chose to participate in a bid based market for contractors at an effective $0 rate. Presuming those contractors will only contribute to Open Source projects if paid then, on net, the world would have been better served if the guy had volunteered on a project not open for bid.
I hope that makes a bit more sense. It's a nuanced issue to dance around via text without a long issue, the guy has every right to do whatever he wants but I think it's kind of rude and inconsiderate towards the contract market participants.
First, I think that because the goal here is a public good. As a result, civic engagement in the form of volunteerism is something to be welcomed and encouraged. Volunteerism in public good production is a net win, as it frees up resources for other uses where volunteer labor is not available. This could easily include paying contractors to write Open Source software, leading to a net increase in the production of Open Source software. The goal is a maximum of production of public goods, not a maximum of employment of people to produce public goods.
Second, I do not think you like where this logic leads if applied with your caveats. By your logic, you should object to any non-profit performing service that are also performed by for-profit entities in the event that the former undercuts the latter for service recipients. Your logic requires you to object to free clinics, MSF, and food pantries. All participate in markets as volunteers where others are attempting to participate as for-profit actors. Do you think MSF is rude and inconsiderate?
Third, I do not think you have considered the practical implications of your proposal. How do you propose 18F determine which projects should be market-rate-only and which should be volunteer-only? Do you think there's reasonable any way of doing this that produces ideal or near-ideal outputs? I do not. Such a distinction is at best arbitrary.
To review, I understand your position. You hold that volunteers should not undercut for-profit contractors in market bidding scenarios. I disagree. The product here is a public good, and we wish to maximize production of public goods for a given cost. Further, any logic that requires you to object to MSF should be reconsidered. Finally, I hold your proposed alternative to be unworkable.
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.
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.)
[1]http://www.myth-weavers.com/wiki/index.php/Help:VBulletin:So...
There wasn't any harm to it, but it's definitely something that can slip by an insufficiently wary admin.
The market connected the man with free-time and an ideal vision, with a project that needed to get done.