Terence Lee · · 1 min readSingapore government experiments with online auctions for micro coding work
Photo credit: IDA Hive.
The Singapore government has an agency devoted to creating online government services. It’s called – what else – Government Digital Services (GDS).
GDS started a new experiment lately. GovBuy is a website where programmers can bid on microassignments issued by GDS. Each assignment is valued at a few hundred dollars, though it can go up to a few thousand.
The experiment seeks to streamline the cumbersome tender process that government agencies face when engaging vendors to build systems. Deciding on a vendor could take up to two months.
What GovBuy seeks to do is to break down programming tasks into smaller components, and then let contractors bid on them through an automated bidding process. This saves time and money.
The site uses reverse auction, in which the lowest bidder gets to do the task. Payment is only given up if the code is of good quality.
Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee
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