Agile Procurement Alter procurement methodologies to favour agile approaches over “spec and deliver”. Specifically, current methodologies follow a “spec and deliver” model in which government attempts to define a full spec up front and then seeks solutions that deliver against this. The spec and deliver approach greatly diminishes the value of open source - which allows for rapid iteration in the open, and more rapid switching of provider - and implicitly builds lock-in to the selected provider whose solution is a black-box to the buyer. In addition, whilst theoretically shifting risk to the supplier of the software, given the difficulty of specifying software up front, it really just inflates upfront costs (since the supplier has to price in risk) and sets the scene for complex and cumbersome later negotiations about under-specified elements. Instead, create an agile procurement stream in which, rather than detailed requirements being set up front, you secure estimated budget for an initial phase and seeks bids on X number of sprints (with ability to end after any sprint). This model requires acceptance of some budget uncertainty: the total cost of delivery of software may not be fully known in advance. However, one can, alternatively, fix a budget and accept some uncertainty over features delivered. We emphasize that this limitation is not a limitation of open source but of software in general. As the maxim goes: in software development you can have any two of features, time and budget – but not all three. Traditional tendering with its fixed requirements, fixed timeframes – and implicitly fixed costs – exists in an illusory world where one can have all three and implicitly imagines that buying software is like buying traditional goods like chairs whose features, usage and cost are all well-known up front.

Fourth, even when government negotiates and writes a good contract it often does not secure the outcomes it should as a result of weak contract management. Contract managers must have the capabilities and information they need to ensure good performance.3

First, government did not always engage with the market early in running procurements or establish a sufficient understanding on both sides about the service that were being outsourced. This often led to problems over the lifetime of a contract, such as disputes and cost overruns.Second, an excessive focus on the lowest price and an insufficient assessment of quality in selecting bids undermined many contracts. While outsourcing can reduce costs, government must balance this against the minimum level of quality it needs in a service. Too often, it has outsourced services in pursuit of unrealistic savings and without a realistic expectation that companies would deliver efficiencies.Third, large contracts have failed when government has transferred risks that suppliers have no control over and cannot manage, rather than those which suppliers can price and manage better than government. Government should also not think that it has outsourced risks that will revert to it if a supplier fails – as the provision of public services will always do.

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More recently, Brad and University of Michigan's Dean of Libraries James Hilton codified what they consider to be the contrasts between open source and Community Source in their essay "The Marketecture of Community," and which Brad elaborates on in his piece "Speeding Up On Curves." They represent different models of procuring software in a two-by-two matrix, where the dimensions are "authority" and "influence":

Data Re-Use. Contractor agrees that any and all Institutional Data exchanged shall be used expressly and solely for the purposes enumerated in the Agreement. UH Institutional Data shall not be distributed, repurposed or shared across other applications, environments, or business units of the Contractor. The Contractor further agrees that no Institutional Data of any kind shall be revealed, transmitted, exchanged or otherwise passed to other vendors or interested parties except on a case-by-case basis as specifically agreed to in writing by a University officer with designated data, security, or signature authority.

ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution

mandate the use of "learning management systems."

The manager then starts writing a request for proposals. This process often starts with an email asking other campus-technology officers to share their own versions. After getting three or four of them, sometimes from wildly different types of colleges with wildly different needs, the manager may start cutting and pasting together bits from the various documents. There is a lot of pasting, but not so much cutting. Lists of requirements are added together, and then added to based on whatever the selection committee comes up with.

If we’re going to fix things, we need to design a better system

ost promising in this regard are ideas for introducing a National Software Foundation, perhaps within the National Science Foundation, that will fund soft- ware development projects on condition that the fruits be licensed as free software, and the adoption of a government procurement policy that would require that software written under government contract be released as free software