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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think about creating an organization that's sole purpose would be to enter bids in on government tech contracts with upper and lower cost estimates. It wouldn't actually do any of the work (to maintain neutrality), but at least put in a reasonable set of figures for how much a project should cost. Or maybe just a company that reviews proposals for local/state/federal government agencies to ensure they aren't being ripped off.

Frankly, tech contracts aren't the only thing that goes wrong. Civil engineering contracts are just as awful with people underbidding and then having massive cost overruns because there was no expert there to say, hey... this isn't reasonable.

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>Sometimes I think about creating an organization that's sole purpose would be to enter bids in on government tech contracts with upper and lower cost estimates. It wouldn't actually do any of the work (to maintain neutrality), but at least put in a reasonable set of figures for how much a project should cost. Or maybe just a company that reviews proposals for local/state/federal government agencies to ensure they aren't being ripped off.

so one more consulting participant and review layer to dig teeth into government money without actually delivering on the project? And with the best intentions like everybody else :)

I don't know if you have these in the US but there are social enterprise programmes in the UK.

One example would be training for people who have been out of work for more than 6 months. The training os how to dress and wrote a resume and apply for jobs.

These are put out to tender.

There are companies that are very good at making a bid and giving the presentation and winning the contract. But then their expertise drops away and they are hopeless and actually providing the scheme they just got awarded.

You comment made me think that a decent spreadsheet could optimise a companies ability to make the perfect bid. You then either sell that software or win lots of bids.

I think it's the job of the buyer (the gov in this case to find out what is reasonable). Companies, just like individuals, should be able to bid whatever they like. If you are looking to have software built and one person quotes $200/hr and someone else quotes $75/hr, you can't go saying $200/hr is unreasonable. The developers can quote whatever they think their time is worth, it doesn't mean you use that particular developer/provider.

I wonder if right way of doing this would be to crowdsource it like robotics/technology challenges with very large bounty? On another note, Obama administration should have assembled team of developers from challenge.gov with track record/history etc.

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