The City of Toronto PayIt Procurement: Freedom of Information Requests, Fairness, and Transparency IV
A post in a series to understand and assess the procurement process followed for PayIt. This post is a straight copy/paste of a thread of tweets — this is an archival post to cover tweets from Mar24-Mar 31, 2022
“Once an Unsolicited Proposal has been submitted, proponents do not have to register with the Lobbyist Registrar. However, proponents may not contact anyone other than the Strategic Partnerships or persons designated by that Office.” links to unsolicited proposal policy
starting on the timeline work this weekend. also holding this process up against the new digital infrastructure plan to understand if/how it would have impacted the PayIt tendering process.
no word yet on access to the unsolicited proposal from PayIt. after emailing and asking for it a second time, City said on Tuesday they’d reply Wednesday. no reply Wednesday, no reply today. (Mar 24)
“However, proponents may not contact anyone other than the Strategic Partnerships or persons designated by that Office.” — wonder who is in charge of managing that rule and how it is documented? will ask.
white-label govtech is problematic in this moment of low internal public sector tech investment. hides the vendor/intermediary from the public. politicians celebrate tech functionality as though it was the govt. hides privatization of infrastructure + govt/resident relationship.
smart marketing strategy from vendors based on knowledge of and shame about public legacy IT rot.
fondant icing on a structurally unsound layer cake
ps: if white-label tech is backed by govt intent, capacity, + legal position to fire a vendor/avoid vendor lock-in, it can be useful. still v hard to do in practice, and sometimes more because of culture than law. h/t David Eaves for nudge to be expansive on nuance, thank you :)
does anyone know about precedents/other examples where: a city govt (in this case Toronto) has written into their contract with a software vendor that the govt has a financial incentive to get other cities to adopt the product?
would seem that if you are negotiating using the value of the City’s brand as a component of the deal value, due diligence would need to be significant.
FOI #5 is shaping up to be in this realm — due diligence, city legal review and inputs, contract negotiations
from City re: FOI #1 and 2 upon me asking for an update: “The expected due dates were March 25, 2022 and March 14, 2022. We have unprecedented delays in processing requests due to the ongoing volume of backlogs. A decision will be sent to you as soon as it becomes available.”
received FOI #3 today, first one back. the Gartner “report”. cannot understand why it required a FOI request to get it. will now move this thread to a post and include it there.
Gartner report is below in screenshots. This is a bad approach for accessibility. Should anyone need the transcript more urgently please contact me/comment below and I’ll send you the PDF.
