Uncle Sam’s List
How two weeks saved the government 300 Million dollars
Think smaller.
The Problem
- Government agencies contracting multiple times for the same service
- For nearly identical plans* agencies were paying $21 - $98 per month per phone
- Get more agencies to use existing services instead of buying new ones
- Traditional solution: build a multi-million dollar bespoke contract-management system
*Less than 400 monthly minutes with unlimited texts and data
What Is Uncle Sam's List?
- Open source classifieds system
- Accessible only to government employees
- Commodity IT, Mission Services, Support Services
- Think Craigslist.gov
- No-cost transactions
An Example
- FBI has a field office in Toledo
- Field office is under staffed, conference room rarely used
- IRS needs a conference room for two weeks to conduct an audit
- Old busted: Rent hotel conference room, etc.
- New Hotness: Search Uncle Sam’s List
The Ask
“Ben, do you know of any open source versions of Craigslist?”
The Hardest Part Of Open Source?
Remembering to Google before you build
Prior Art
- OSClass - “Open Source Classifieds”
- Classified Ads - Drupal Module
- Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin
*Don’t mean to hate, I looked at them almost two years ago now, they may be better now
What Did We Actually Need?
- Users
- Requests and offer CRUD
- Taxonomies (e.g. agency, category, location)
- Category counts on the front page
- Recently added stream
- RSS, XML, etc.
An hour and a half later…
A Fully Functional Prototype
- 288 Lines of code
- Single plugin
- Handful of community plugins
- Ran off a thumb drive
Two Weeks Later
Working Alpha
- Feedback, iteration, planning
- Basic styling
- Polish
Two Months After That
Private beta with 20 federal agencies
Under The Hood
Vanilla WordPress
- Posts and Pages (no custom post types)
- Custom taxonomies (wizard to generate)
- Admin dashboard
- Search
Community Plugins
Custom Plugins
- Taxonomy Ordering
- RSS Authentication
- Auto-post expiration
- Identity management integration
The Result
The Numbers
- Identified more than 100 opportunities to eliminate redundant investments
- Over the 2013 to 2015 fiscal years, could save the government $2.5 billion.
- To date, netted $300 million in actual savings
- 40,000 lines of code
- Less than 1/2 of one percent coded in house
Source: fedscoop.com/uncle-sams-list-ombs-next-generation-for-shared-services