Hello Eyal,
some further thoughts. All are my personal thoughts, not the board’s.
- A software tendering organizational support specialist
In the past, the majority of tenders came from the ESC. I don’t know if user-proposed tenders were routed through the ESC, but in any case, the process was not really massively communicated to the public. On the other hand, we sometimes had “wish for a pony”, quite unspecified, without a rough budget estimate. Fair enough, it is not trivial (and might cost money actually) to make such an estimate, and it depends in which country we are contracting, but for budgeting, we need at least a ballpark number. Whether a tender costs 20.000 € or 50.000 € does make a difference obviously.
The development of the tender texts was much more public in the end than in the beginning, which is a tradition we should continue.
Having bidders out of the community is a challenge. For nearly all LibreOffice-related tenders we had two bidders, and one of them won if the tender was awarded. We published tenders externally, but the bidder base seems small. While it was already problematic in the past, having only one potential bidder makes tendering actually pointless currently, so growing the bidder base is a key element to restart tendering.
The idea with the “hand-holding” is something we have added to the last tenders in 2021/2022. I am not aware this offer was used a lot. We have some resources for it, but obviously not if the plan is (as it was in the 2023 budget) to have a tender every one and a half weeks. That doesn’t scale at all. Also, of course the team needs to have some experience in the specific tender field to help out.
or is being kept secret from the trustees like so many other things
If you find it, please share it with me, because I would like to have it as well.
Seriously: No, there was not much documented from what I recall, for a variety of reasons. I am not aware of anything (beyond contractual details for obvious reasons) that exists and has not been shared with the trustees. Given I really would have needed more supporters and volunteers back then, I would have published what I have, to enable more people to support.
Florian