Open Source Micro-Purchasing Forked in Singapore | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Micro-Purchasing Forked in Singapore

gbuy.gds-gov.tech

84 pointsfieryeagle13 comments

Interesting! This kind of forking and hopefully inter-government OSS co-operation is exactly what I've been hoping to see.

FYI: "Bidders must have a bank account in Singapore to receive payment for work done."

I looked for that on the site and didn't find it. Would you mind linking the page with this statement? Thanks.

Hit Sign up, then Authorize with GitHub.

And btw it would be very interesting if anybody from the US would like to write a little bit about the role of 18F - I am not sure that I understand things right, but it seems to be a very interesting concept of governmental IT services.

How is this agency perceived? How does it work out in practice? How are things coordinated? Anything would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Hello! Happy to answer any questions you have about 18F. The basics: we're an office of federal employees inside the General Services Administration that helps other federal agencies improve how they build, buy, and share technology. Other agencies have to pay us for our work, so we operate in a similar way to a private business. You can see a summary of the types of things we ship (with examples) here https://18f.gsa.gov/what-we-deliver/. More info about the micro-purchase platform here https://18f.gsa.gov/tags/micro-purchase-platforms/

*I'm an 18F employee.

Thanks for your answer!

I am just looking at this from the viewpoint of an interested citizen (in Europe) and try to compare with how things work here. Currently I suspect we are heavily missing something like 18F.

Do you know what brought 18F into existence? Was this an administrative initiative? Was there big resistence to start that? I am interested in some of the "meta" behind how all that happened.

Also: are there some laws involved?

I guess I could contact your press office, however, maybe you would like to post some interesting links to stories that certainly went unnoticed on the other side of the ocean.

Things like 18F show a very interesting aspect of USA that does not fit into the usual "ultra-capitalist" stereotypes that are painted in the european media much too often. Especially the commitment to OS is extraordinary interesting!

Thanks for your attention!

18F came out of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship (pif.gov) when some fellows wanted to stick around and continue their public service. So they created 18F as a more permanent home that could house larger projects and hire people for longer tours of duty. It's a sister office to the U.S. Digital Service (which is in the White House) but it's primarily a GSA initiative.

There aren't specific laws involved. We aren't funded by Congress, but instead by an investment from GSA and fees from our partner agencies.

Here's one of the larger stories about the digital services movement in the U.S., including the U.S. Digital Service and 18F. https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

We've taken heavy influence from the GDS team in the UK, and Estonia is also a leader in digital government. https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/17/what-estonia-can-teach-us-abo...

Gbuy is an ... awkward name for a Singaporean service.

It's pretty common. We have G-Cloud Cloudstore [1] and GeBIZ [2] among other things.

[1] https://www.ida.gov.sg/programmes-partnership/sectors/G-Clou... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeBIZ

They're alluding to the fact that Gbuy sounds similar to a Hokkien profanity :)

Probably the reason why they label it as "GovBuy" instead ;)

Does anybody have a list of similar gov services around the world?

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