Squeak big project tender
Well, Squeak news keeps coming: Spanish Technology ministry the has published a tender for Squeak-based museum displays.
I haven’t been able to find the tender itself on-line, but the Regional Government of the Extremadura is an avid Open Source supporter, so this would be a great opportunity.
Any Spanish-speaking Squeakers up for setting up a consortium to bid on this project? This should go to well-known Squeakers instead of some large IT company 
Update: José L. Redrejo RodrÃguez provided me with links to the documents:
- General legal conditions for all the regional government projects
- Particular legal conditions for this project
- The most important one, technical conditions for this project
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January 27th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Update: I ran the technical requirements document through Adobe’s pdf-to-text converter and the resulting webpage through Babelfish. From the resulting gibberish - a mix of untranslated Spanish and badly translated English - I think I can deduce that this amounts to almost a mission impossible (correct me if I’m wrong): 1 month left to complete a proposal including all the science displays; 2 months after contract signing for full specs of the science displays; 4 months to delivery. And everything must be done in waterfall fashion.
I don’t think the Junta de Extremadura is doing itself a service by specifying a project like this. Here is how I would have dealt with it:
- One tender for the software environment plus, say, 2 or 3 working science displays - the environment should impose a common look and feel on all the other displays, have patterns for interaction design, etcetera;
- An open market for all the remaining science displays.
That will probably be cheaper because more it is accessible to smaller (local) companies (and that’s where innovation comes from), and you’ll get an open system where you can simply swap the science displays. With the current closed system tender, there’s a good chance that you get a black box, and when the displays need updating (there’s still progress being made in the various areas they mention), no-one will know how it has to be done, or worse, you’ll need to go back to the original supplier. And yes, that is a possibility even when it is all open sourced.
Anyway, it looks way too risky to me for a small company to start bidding on it (I’m still available to help, though
). But I do sincerely hope the project becomes a success - the list of science items is wide-ranging and well-chosen, and I’m looking forward to see this stuff in operation.
January 27th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
My experience is that the tenders, specially in that region, tend to favour local bidders and that most of the time they have already been “pre-assigned” so they either ask for sort of unreasonable or very specific things, that probably are just an extension for someone who already has most of the work done. In that way, they exactly know what they want if this is actually a way to pay a specified party.
January 29th, 2006 at 12:08 am
[…] This book joins the uprising of Squeak’s popularity in Spain, driven by its being used by the local government of Extremadura as the platform for some of its projects. The last one consists of an interactive educational and reference tool that will let users of the Extremadura’s Regional Net to know more about a bunch of topics on physics, chemistry, biology, ecology or society, to name a few. Actually, the tender is still open, in case you feel like trying. Cees’ Blog provides the necessary info (this time in English), including some reasons to not really wasting the time applying. […]
December 8th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Yeah, you are right.
Don Lapre Fan
webmaster@j-ams.org
www.j-ams.org
December 9th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Well yes “Spanish-speaking Squeakers” have a good chance especially when Regional Government of the Extremadura greatly supports such adventures but there can be a catch!
“Spanish-speaking Squeakers” may prove good in building a virtual science museum but when they build a building or exhibit model in 3d; I seriously doubt their ability to get it into Croquet both as the entire workspace or into a window world.
To me only a big IT company having rich experience in the domain can handle the task. Anyways happy bidding Squeakers