Porting the micropurchase marketplace to code California

[patwater]

UPDATED

Following up on this conversation on the twitter (treeverse map), a couple questions and ideas about how to port this over to California. Big things afoot out West...

Questions

1. Is it possible to get data on the transactions performed on the marketplace? Are you aware of any analysis comparing the market dynamics on this 18f site and others (Singapore for example)? UPDATE see here for insights
2. How much time and effort did it take to A) build the marketplace and B) maintain it? UPDATE approx 4-5 devs / product manager
3. What would be an appropriate annual budget for maintaining the project?
4. What would be involved in migrating the marketplace? Is it as simple as a fork and spinning up the website? Any potential gotchas or things to note?
5. Any key features that you wish you had implemented that would be good to implement now with a migration?

Ideas

The most natural home as mentioned on twitter is probably https://code.ca.gov/

Brainstorming sustainable funding models, I wonder if the marketplace could operate similar to many other online marketplaces and take a simple percentage of the fees.

The one challenge to that is that this micropurchase marketplace has historically been one side (correct me if I'm wrong) where 18F is the sole purchaser of micropurchase marketplace code so that's a bit of an ouroboros.

That model would make sense where other governments and public sector organizations are utilizing the marketplace and could set the fees just to recover costs of running the micropurchase site.

That could make sense to have a quasigovernmental NGO as a neutral third party to manage the marketplace. Curious to your alls thoughts.

[randyhart]

cc'ing the folks that helped build out the platform: @stvnrlly @vzvenyach @adelevie

[patwater]

Thanks @randyhart . By the way did you all ever come across a YC startup that was attempting to do a micropurchase marketplace? Hear via Mariel Reed that the company was called "Lace Labs"

There was also an interesting civic tech project somewhat in this vein looking to catalogue procurement thresholds via open data (now defunct it seems)

Anyway one interesting tidbit and curious to your alls thoughts about how we can build on this great work on the 18F marketplace out in CA

[afomi]

@patwater - https://www.coprocure.us/

[patwater]

Yup Mariel is great!