ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

Show

An entry

Get it down. Make it good. Share it.

Title

Text

Yes — there are both **legal constraints** and **significant room for improvement**.

Public agencies absolutely *can* evaluate vendors, developers, consultants, contractors, and integrators. In fact, they are supposed to. But many procurement systems are structurally weak at:

* preserving institutional memory,
* sharing performance information,
* and enforcing accountability across jurisdictions.

That creates a recurring pattern:

```text
bad implementation
→ cost overruns
→ change orders
→ political embarrassment
→ staff turnover
→ weak postmortem
→ same vendor wins elsewhere
```

Especially in ERP, EHR, civic tech, infrastructure IT, and consulting.

---

# Legally: yes, vendors can be rated

Most public entities already maintain some combination of:

* contractor performance evaluations,
* debarment/suspension lists,
* responsibility determinations,
* references,
* litigation history,
* liquidated damages,
* corrective action notices,
* and audit findings.

Federal contracting has systems like:

* CPARS (Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System),
* SAM exclusions,
* past performance scoring.

States and cities often have weaker/localized variants.

So legally, performance assessment is normal.

---

# Why it often fails

## 1. Fear of litigation

Agencies fear:

* defamation claims,
* bid protests,
* retaliation,
* procurement challenges.

So evaluations become sanitized:

```text
"Vendor generally met expectations."
```

instead of:

```text
"Project failed due to repeated staffing instability,
missed milestones, and poor requirements discipline."
```

---

# 2. Staff turnover destroys memory

A city may:

* suffer through a failed implementation,
* lose the project manager,
* lose the CIO,
* lose the procurement lead,

and five years later:

* nobody remembers.

Institutional amnesia is enormous in government.

---

# 3. Procurement focuses on compliance, not outcomes

Many procurement systems optimize for:

* fairness,
* process legality,
* documentation,
* anti-corruption controls,

rather than:

* actual delivery quality,
* maintainability,
* operational outcomes.

This is understandable historically — procurement law evolved heavily around preventing favoritism and corruption.

But the side effect is:

* lowest bidder dynamics,
* checkbox compliance,
* and weak operational accountability.

---

# 4. Vendors specialize in procurement gaming

Some firms become extremely skilled at:

* proposal writing,
* certifications,
* incumbent relationships,
* staffing optics,
* change-order economics.

Meanwhile agencies often:

* under-scope projects,
* lack technical evaluators,
* or lack independent architecture review.

This creates asymmetric sophistication.

---

# Existing formal recourse

There *are* mechanisms.

## Formal mechanisms include:

| Mechanism                        | Purpose                         |
| -------------------------------- | ------------------------------- |
| Cure notices                     | Formal warning                  |
| Termination for cause/default    | Remove contractor               |
| Liquidated damages               | Financial penalties             |
| Withholding payment              | Enforcement                     |
| Performance bonds                | Financial protection            |
| Debarment/suspension             | Ban future contracting          |
| Litigation                       | Recover damages                 |
| Audit findings                   | Oversight/public record         |
| Inspector General investigations | Fraud/waste review              |
| Grand jury reports               | Local government investigations |

But many are:

* politically painful,
* slow,
* expensive,
* risky,
* or avoided.

---

# The deeper issue: no shared public reputation layer

Private markets have:

* Yelp,
* GitHub reputation,
* AWS reviews,
* Gartner,
* references,
* open-source credibility,
* developer communities.

Public procurement often lacks:

* interoperable operational reputation systems.

That means:
a vendor can fail in one city and quietly reappear elsewhere.

---

# What could improve this constructively?

This is where your thinking around:

* civic registries,
* operational transparency,
* machine-readable governance,
* and public accountability systems

becomes extremely relevant.

A modern approach could include:

---

# 1. Structured implementation postmortems

Every major project should publish:

```text
budgeted cost
actual cost
timeline variance
staff turnover
scope changes
uptime
adoption metrics
maintenance burden
security findings
technical debt
lessons learned
```

Not blame theater.
Operational learning.

Like aviation incident reporting.

---

# 2. Public vendor performance registries

Imagine a machine-readable cross-jurisdiction database:

```text
vendor
project type
agency
budget variance
schedule variance
resident impact
security incidents
maintenance quality
references
audit findings
```

Not simplistic star ratings.
Operational history.

This would radically improve procurement intelligence.

---

# 3. Independent technical review boards

Especially for:

* ERP,
* EHR,
* cybersecurity,
* cloud migrations,
* AI systems.

Many public failures happen because:
decision-makers cannot independently validate vendor claims.

An external architecture review layer helps enormously.

---

# 4. Open-source reference implementations

One huge structural problem:
cities repeatedly buy custom implementations of commodity systems.

Open-source civic infrastructure changes leverage:

* procurement becomes integration/support,
* not reinvention.

This can dramatically reduce:

* lock-in,
* opaque change orders,
* and vendor dependency.

---

# 5. Procurement memory systems

One underexplored idea:

Treat procurement history as a longitudinal civic memory problem.

Cities need:

* durable institutional memory,
* reproducible histories,
* searchable implementation outcomes,
* public lessons learned.

This aligns closely with your repeated themes:

* Git-like histories,
* append-only operational records,
* civic registries,
* structured accountability.

---

# Important caution

There are real risks.

Poorly designed rating systems can become:

* politicized,
* retaliatory,
* captured,
* defamatory,
* biased toward incumbents,
* or hostile to smaller vendors.

So a healthy system needs:

* evidence-based reporting,
* standardized metrics,
* due process,
* response rights,
* auditability,
* and contextual nuance.

---

# The most important shift

The biggest improvement is probably not:
“rate vendors harder.”

It is:

> move procurement from document-centric compliance toward observable operational outcomes.

Meaning:

Instead of asking:

```text
Did they submit the right paperwork?
```

Ask:

```text
Did the system improve service delivery sustainably?
```

That is a fundamentally different governance philosophy.

Status

Series