Andy Seybold’s Public Safety Advocate, May 28, 2015

This week’s edition is a day early as I will be traveling tomorrow and next week’s will be a few days late because I will be attending the PSCR meeting in San Diego. Hopefully I will be back on schedule after that. Today was the deadline for submitting questions to FirstNet regarding the draft RFP which is out for review. I hope that a number of you filed questions.

The draft RFP, from my perspective, needs to be refined in a number of ways. The most frustrating part of this process was that after spending literally hundreds of hours reviewing the RFP and developing numerous questions which I submitted on time, I did not receive a confirmation that my questions had been received. Since we were instructed to send the questions to an email address there was no a way to make sure that it was really received by the recipient and when I reached out verify that it was received, I received an email which stated in part “It is not customary practice for the Government to confirm receipt of items submitted during the acquisition process unless formally requested. Moreover, in order to preserve procurement integrity and to ensure fair opportunity, during the acquisition process it is imperative requests be submitted to me, the Contracting Officer, or in accordance with any instructions as posted in notifications within the Federal Business Opportunity (FBO) (www.fbo.gov).”

Nowhere in the documentation did it say that I had to ask for a confirmation. I guess the Feds have their rules but at this point FirstNet needs to be encouraging anyone and everyone who might be a potential partner for them, and not providing any type of feed-back that was submitted was received, in my mind, a great way to encourage this type of participation. Have a great week-end and if you are going to be at the FirstNet/PSCR meeting in San Diego let’s say hello to each other. Andy
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