Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > March > 25
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
UPDATED: City of Austin Web site redesign: do people need to chill?
Edited to add this update, 7:27 p.m.: the Austin City Council has deferred voting on this item from tomorrow’s meeting. Yay, Austin?
Is Austin boosterism getting out of hand?
Late last night on Twitter, I started seeing many people posting messages urging Austinites to do something about a large City of Austin contract being awarded to a California company. The job is to redesign the City of Austin Web site, which I think everyone can agree is in need of an overhaul.
The city is poised to award a contract to a California company, Cignex Technologies, Inc. for $704,088 to overhaul the site. In a vote to be held tomorrow, this bid is expected to be picked over the only two other companies that submitted bids — Austin-based FG Squared and EOP Media of Cedar Park. Each of their bids was for more than $1.3 million. (You can see the bid summary here. Click on Matrix to see the scoring for the three firms.)
Please do not misunderstand: I love Austin. Heck, I even work here. Someday, I hope to get my kid tattooed in Austin and have her play Frisbee Golf at Zilker Park, probably against her will. But there is something that happens when people here feel that this lovely city is being slighted that tends to shut off brains and engage mouths and angry typing fingers. (This goes for the Austin film industry, too, but maybe we’ll get to that at a later date.)
The outrage over sending business (for the City of Austin Web site, no less!) to a California company is making people start up Facebook groups and post nonsensical Twitter-fueled petitions in support of keeping Austin business in Austin (and, it goes without saying, keeping that business weird).
The “Keep the City of Austin in Austin!!!!!” Facebook group contains no less than five exclamation points in its title alone. That’s a lot of ire.
I spoke to Steve Golab, a co-founder at FG Squared about what happened. I asked him if I’m crazy or if I’m completely misunderstanding what’s going on. He was the first to post on the Facebook group and urged people to make some noise: “I don’t think we stand to be heard unless we can rally thousands of community members in 24 hours or so,” he wrote.
In a short phone conversation, Golab told me he’s not “Whining” over a lost contract. His firm, he said, jumped through many hoops to put in a bid in a limited time frame. 10 people worked on it for two weeks to create a compliant bid. He says he’s disappointed that the bidding companies were not given face-to-face time to present their proposals.
“I don’t think the City of Austin is a bad guy and I don’t think FG Squared is the victim,” he said. Nevertheless, he thinks that the bids were so wildly different that perhaps some fault lies in what the city is asking for.
“If FG Squared was selected, one of the first things we would do is say, ‘let’s take a look at the request for proposal and let’s validate that it’s actually the most cost-effective solution,’ ” he said.
What’s being lost, I think, in the whole “Let’s keep business in Austin!” response is that very few companies would have the capabilities to take on such a large government project. This isn’t a matter of getting a few Web designers together and knocking it out over a weekend of Shiner Bocks and BarCamping.
As Chip Rosenthal said in an e-mail to me this morning, “The other thing the angry crowd should realize is that the Web design component is a small component of the project. There is significant information and system architecture required, application development and porting (python/zope/plone), and content migration.”
In other words, you and your Web design buddies are not going to get together and put the site together for a cool $50k and save the City a million dollars. At least not given the (perhaps overly aggressive) guidelines the city put out.
So who’s to blame here? Did Austin firms (besides FG and EOP) drop the ball by not submitting realistic bids? Golab seemed to acknowledge that when he told me, “Our interactive community needs to be more cohesive so that everyone becomes aware of these opportunities.”
Did Austin not query the right companies or streamline the request enough to make it a realistic project?
Would it be heresy for me to suggest that if an Austin company wasn’t able to put in a competitive bid and that the city only had three bids to work with and is choosing the one that’s most cost-effective for them, that maybe Austin deserves to lose that business?
Here are the facts as I understand them:
- Only three bids were received.
- One bid, from California, is significantly less costly than the other two bids. (Let us for the moment put aside long-term costs that may be in addition to what’s presented in the bids themselves.)
- One of the three bids was non-compliant. So, really, there were only two bids to choose from.
Am I missing something or do those facts make the decision pretty easy to make?
We’re in a global economy. If a company puts in a cheaper bid and fulfills the requirements (take a look at the scores on the evaluation), don’t they deserve the business, regardless of geography? Of course the city should try to keep the business in Austin. But if the three bids are all they had to work with, their options are limited. Why rail about it after the fact? Somebody dropped the ball. And it’s not clear that it was the city.
It reminds me, if I may post this aside, of the recent Statesman Texas Social Media Awards. I got a few messages from people outraged that this person or that wasn’t given an award.
“Did you nominate them?” I would ask. We held a public nomination period where any Texan could be nominated by everyone and included in the nominee pool.
“No,” would be the usual response.
If you don’t step up to the plate, you don’t get to complain that you didn’t hit a home run.
Rally if you like. Storm tomorrow’s City Council. Get all up in that Facebook group and decry the continued Californication of Austin. Sign a vague Twitter petition.
But unless you are willing to look at the factors at work and see what the city has to work with, you might want to run to the drugstore and quickly dose yourself with a heaping tablespoon of Shut Up and Calm Down (available without a prescription).
If the city has handled this badly by not making enough of an effort to reach out to local companies or not doing a face-to-face meeting with the bidding firms, that’s one thing. But let’s not forget: three bids. One of them was non-compliant. If you’re going to get mad, get mad at the companies who could have handled a project of this scale, but didn’t submit bids. Where were they? Maybe they didn’t want to work on what seems like a problematic project like this. What then?
Your comments (and I am bracing for them) are welcome. There’ll be more Statesman coverage later today from people smarter about city council matters than me. I’ll add those links when they are live.
Edited to add: Here is the Request for Proposal (RFP) document in MS Word format. You can judge for yourself.
Permalink | Comments (75) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet
