GSA Administrator Martha Johnson announced yesterday that her agency will experiment with using wikis to help develop the requests for proposals (RFPs) on two new acquisitions.

The idea for this actually emerged from the dialogue on procurement innovations GSA has conducted (in cooperation with the National Academy of Public Administration) on the Web at a site called BetterBuy. At the BetterBuy website, there is now a link presenting information on two acquisitions that are in the development stage -- one for hosting the Data.gov website and the other (unexplained and as yet not up at the site) for an acquisition called Clearpath. GSA is asking members of the public to provide advice for features and performance requirements for these applications, as well as other elements of the RFPs. Specifically, GSA is asking for members of the public to point out mistakes and engage in "meaningful technical debate."

Given the endemic problems government has developing good requirements for IT acquisitions, the idea of drawing on the public for suggestions is in principle a great one. Reference Article.