How Tradewinds is Shaping the Future of Defense Contracting with Bonnie Evangelista

Bonnie Evangelista: [00:00:00] My name is Bonnie Evangelista. I work in the Acquisition Directorate for CDAO, and I think we had a little bit of a primer on day one on who we are, why we're here. What I really want to impart on you today is maybe open up the thinking, our thinking boxes inside our minds. To something new, something different, and maybe inspire you to try something new or different that might make your lives better in your office.

Cause that is how Tradewinds started. All we were trying to do when it originated at the JAIC, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. So our predecessor organization before CDAO was the JAIC. I was for, I was part of that organization and our acquisition authority. Was given to the Jake and that's why the CDAO now has acquisition authority so that we can do the things we're doing today, not just for AI as was our first mission, but also with data, digital, and, uh, analytics as well, data analytics.

So our mission has significantly grown. However, I would say the tenants of why we started Tradewinds still remain to be true. How do we buy faster? How do we buy better? And how do we buy? Um, and so we need to be smarter because the world is changing and we need to do something different to change with the world or else we will get left behind.

And when I say we will get left behind, I'm not even talking about the operational imperative. I'm just talking about as contracting and acquisition professionals, we will get left behind. Um, you've already heard a lot of commentary from different perspectives and you're going to hear a little bit more from industry in the afternoon.

In terms of people who do not embrace what is happening in the tech world today are likely going to be Um, I was going to say obsolete, but I don't want that to be a negative thing. But like, they, they will not be moving in the same direction as the world is moving in. That's just the reality that we're in.

[00:02:00] That's not, I'm not trying to trigger you emotionally. I'm trying to talk about facts, um, because not everybody is, sits in the world that I sit in. Everyone's mission domains are very different. And sometimes your mission does not dictate you do something different. It, I'm here to tell you, I, I live and breathe this stuff for Almost two years now, it will touch you.

It may not be today, but it will be at some point. So, again, this is why we started Tradewinds. There was some savvy, um, people. I was not involved in that. Like, my predecessors who, who kind of originated in starting the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center saw this trend and said, we need to act now. And They started this idea called Tradewinds.

I'm not going to get into everything we offer in Tradewinds. It, we, we call it a suite of services. Uh, it's a place where you can come if you're not familiar, or you want to be familiar with what we do, or if you want to try something different. We like to think that we're a pathfinder, and we're a place where you can come and find those resources, find those tools, or find those strategies, or even just find like, like minded people that you, you know, you need help with, Some some kind of extension where we're modeling or pathfinding again for A. Technologies in particular. So I want to start with talking about our I would say I call it our premier offering called the trade wind solutions marketplace. Uh, this is It probably took us a year of getting things wrong before we found something that, where we really, really got it right. So like, even the market, like, because everything we're doing under Tradewinds is a big experiment.

Sometimes we're pushing boundaries, like with the marketplace, and then sometimes we're taking some of the plays that we already have in our playbook, and we're just maybe reframing it and approaching it a little bit differently. So, I want to share with you about the Marketplace.

[00:04:00] Not only is it something you can use today, but maybe it will inspire you to think a little bit differently about, how does this apply to me?

Maybe the Marketplace isn't a good fit for me today, but I could, maybe if I tweaked it and implemented it in a slightly different way, um, this would really, again, make my life a lot better in my day to day job and help support my mission. So, before we get started, um, and I talk about what is Um, I want to address the elephant in the room because, um, what I'm going to talk to you about is you may or may not have implemented an approach like this, or you may or may not be familiar with some, I'm going to talk in a lot of, I'm going to call it little a technical terms, you know, where I'm going to talk about contracting authorities and, um, Um, other technical terms of art in the contracting community, and you may or may not be familiar with that, and that's fine.

Um, you might be very, very familiar or have been trained to do things a very, very specific way, and I'm going to ask you to put that aside for just an hour, and let me tell you what we're doing and how we're thinking about it, because we believe we've found some goodness, um, and we're trying to extend this goodness to the rest of the department.

So, I'm going to talk about five things that I hear about a lot whenever I talk about the marketplace, the first comment that, thank you Elena, uh, the five things that we typically hear, and the first one is my favorite, is how this is illegal, um, but there's other comments that I just want to address up front, and then I want to tell you what we're doing, and then I want you to tell me if you, if you fall in any of these categories, and I want to talk about that, because that, that is the goal at being at our level.

We do have a, Slight benefit to how we, we can communicate things at the OSD level, that you, that, because the, we recognize the reality you're living in might create a barrier to implementing the approach that we're talking about today.

[00:06:00] So with that, is it illegal? I want you to know. No one in my office is doing anything illegal and I will, I want to remind you, I want to remind you for, for those who have been around for longer than five years, do you remember when kind of OTAs, other transaction authorities kind of got their renaissance at when, when, uh, in the NDA language, they added the follow on production and everybody said the same thing about OTAs.

If you do this, it's illegal, you're going to jail, and the fear mongering was just, it was massive. So, I just want to remind you, I promise you, we have done our due diligence, and I, I will walk you through every single authority and help you understand that there is actual statutory authorities that the things that we're doing are directly tied to.

So that's thing one. Uh, thing two, um, when we talk about the marketplace. It's a very different way of thinking about competition. So when people tell me, um, this isn't real competition, what they're really saying is I'm used to CICA, Competition and Contracting Act. I'm used to competing things and giving everybody that fair opportunity.

And that's great. But the authorities we're using do not, CICA does not apply. And so we like to say, uh, we have competition by statute. So one of the authorities we're going to talk about as an example is a commercial solutions opening. Anyone heard of that before? Have you actually used it? Okay, brilliant.

You would be surprised how many people I asked that question. They've never heard of it. And it's one of the more powerful tools in our toolbox that is highly underutilized. As an example, though, using a CSO is, is a merit based competition.

[00:08:00] And that means you can do business with vendor A on the basis of competition because you, a subject matter expert has found they have a technical merit to a solution or problem.

So we'll get into that. That's just a little preview, though. So when you're When I'm talking about the marketplace and I'm explaining to you and we're talking about competition standards, just remember that Sika does not apply. And so when you browse the marketplace, I'm going to do a demo, we're going to show you what the marketplace is.

Think of like browsing Amazon and when you're buying sneakers or things for your kids, you're going to see products and maybe there's 10 sneakers you want to buy. How do you pick? Sneaker A, B, or C, you just choose, right? And maybe in your mind, you say, Oh, I want this color, or I need it to be this size, or, or maybe that's too expensive, or something like that.

You can have that same logic with the marketplace and still be compliant with the competition standards that the authorities have, uh, I'm sorry, that Congress has provided the, uh, per the, the statutory authority. So that's thing two. Uh, think three. Ooh, I love this one. Who's who is battling culture? Um, and maybe risk risk averse, I don't know, uh, leaders or teammates and, uh.

Everybody? Yeah. So, uh, I, I won't foot stomp this too much, but I hear, I hear this so much. We, we just have to say it. There's, um, we're, we're not going to get a different answer if we do the same thing over and over again. So, again, I'm not saying the marketplace is your answer, but please just remember, like, if you, if somebody is pitching something to you, like me or any of the vendors yesterday, Just open your mind and ask why or is this true, like maybe, and, and just try to apply some critical thinking to your mindset, um, before you close the door and just say no, because I'm not familiar with this.

[00:10:00] Because again, the world is changing faster than, than the government can essentially keep up with. So sticking to what we know is not going to bring us to the future we want to be in. So I'll just say, I'll just leave it at that.

Um, who has kids? Everybody? Yeah, most. Um, I have two kids and, uh, you know, kids, especially younger kids are really good at just trying things. Like, they don't care. Does anybody else notice? Like, they, like, my two year old just touches everything. Everything. And, and me as the parent, I'm like, don't touch or I, I get worried and, and things like that.

He doesn't have that framing and he just wants to explore. And. I would offer you as, as I'm talking about the marketplace to have to maybe take a moment, remember how your kids love to explore and have that same mindset again, as I'm talking about things that you may not be familiar with, because I feel like if we adopted or embrace a little bit more the exploration part of our jobs, even if it's like something boring as a contracting strategy.

Contracting strategies can be fun. And I hope the marketplace becomes that for you. And just remember, we all have to start somewhere. Trade wins started somewhere. Remember I told you we did a year of doing things wrong before we got to the marketplace. Um, so I, I offer, or I submit to you that like aiming for perfection.

Not only is it for amateurs, it's boring. Um, learning by doing is definitely the state of, and when I talk to Jamie about future of work stuff, that is, um, I believe where the future is going. And then, um, for those people who might be thinking if I, if I'm the first person to take the first step, um, that's gonna put more pressure on me.

[00:12:00] It's gonna put a limelight on me. Um, and maybe you're, maybe that triggers an emotion. Maybe they're, and I'm not sure what that is. It could be fear. Uh, fear of, you know, of, uh, being challenged by superiors or fear of being wrong if it doesn't work or that fear of failure, whatever that emotion is, I would offer that the people who don't take a step again are going to be the ones left behind.

So instead of being scared of what of that uncertainty, maybe that we might be facing at whatever level or complexity, um, That your circumstances provide you look for the instead look for the opportunity because if you continue to wall yourself off or limit your potential because you're we are afraid and I'm going to say we the collective we this is not a single person's job.

This is our job. Um, we all have to collectively want to make this better. So with that, um, I'm going to quickly talk about what is the marketplace. We're going to go through those mechanics and I'm going to convince you, or I'm going to do my best to sell you. No, one's breaking the law. This is. a better way of doing business in the emerging technology space because the entire goal of the marketplace is to decrease the gap between the buyer and seller.

If you all are like me, you've maybe figured I'm a good, I'm pretty good at seeing patterns as a contracting prof I'm an 1102 by trade. I've been an 1102 for 15 years. Um, I, I would say I am fluent in acquisition. However, I relate the most to little a procurement and contracting and when you're that person you tend to be a bridge of all things all roads lead to contracts and don't let whoever you're dealing with when they're doing their strategies and whatnot they have at some point whether they want to or not they have to come to us and contracting to spend the money and to Deliver capability.

[00:14:00] So with that, you start to see patterns because they all come, you're the bridge. They all have to come to you in some way, shape, or form. And one of the patterns I see is like, if you try to break down what it is to create a business deal in the government, you need money, you need a problem to solve, and then you need a mechanism to execute the contract.

The goal of the marketplace can't solve the money problem. It can't solve the, I ha I have a. Uh, essentially the requirement. I don't like to say requirements because requirements again are, I don't believe are going to be solving any problems in the future. Uh, so we like to focus on how do we solve problems, but I can't solve that for you.

That's you as a government buyer, you do that, but I can help you give you the mechanism to get to the business deal as fast as possible. We like to call the marketplace an accelerated, um, competitive assessment process. So we have this repository of video of video pitches that present solutions to problems very similar to a shark tank like pitch.

It's a five minute video and, and they're pitching to no one, right? Like there's no, there's no back end requirement that these solutions are responding to. We'll get to that in a second, but you as a government buyer potentially can look at that and say, I have a mission need, or I have an operational gap.

And I want to buy that thing, like right now, because I have a problem right now that I need to solve. And the Marketplace provides a mechanism for you to do business directly with vendor A, B, or C, to get that solution to your problem as fast as possible. Go for it. There's products and solutions, there's no way to buy personnel and services.

[00:16:00] It's, it's, yep, it's services and solutions. However, I will tell you, the way we've designed it, it's harder to do services. There are, and I will, I'll pull up some, it's, uh, there are a few in there that do, uh, there's one for AI services, as an example. It can be done, but the vendor has to, like, really, it has to be a really good product.

That's another thing, we, so we feel like we're setting a bar, and I don't know what that bar is yet, but not everybody gets in. We do, there is an evaluation, so let's, let me just show you what that looks like and what that is. Tradewindai. com. This is our externally facing way we communicate with everybody, currently.

Um, if you forget everything I tell you today, just remember this website, and a really good reference point, not just for you and your teams, is this Tab, go to tools and services and go to solutions marketplace. This is also a good point. If, if after this pitch, you're like, man, this, this is the real deal.

I want to, you know, maybe I want to invite some, some industry vendors to the marketplace. This is a great place to point them to as well. When you come here. And by the way, like, just because you're seeing this today, we're constantly iterating. It might be changed a week from now, but hopefully for the, the change is for the better.

It's supposed to, our goal is to make things easier, better information exchanges and whatnot. But currently, as it is, there's some very introductory information. What is the marketplace? And we have a couple videos on there. The videos are mostly for industry. What I think the government is more interested in, uh, as, sorry, these videos right here as an example are more like for industry, what, what makes a good video pitch, like make sure like people can hear you, you know, little, little nuances like that, or details like that, excuse me, where, um, we're trying to communicate with industry in a format that's consumable, very easy to consume for them.

[00:18:00] That's what those videos are about. What you all are probably more interested in, if you're a nerd like me, and you want to read the black and white, be like, is this real? Is this legal? Click our SAM. gov announcement. This is what makes the marketplace real. There, we have a general solicitation. General solicitation, not an RFP.

Not, I don't even know, uh, not a synopsis or whatever. There is a general solicitation, if it pulls up, uh, that is a long term open call. Announcing to industry that we are looking for solutions to problems and very similar. If you're familiar with broad agency announcements or even the Siber process, right?

They have their, sometimes they, it's not just open topic. They have like, Hey, we're looking for things in these focus areas where we want to invest in or something like that. The marketplace is very, very similar in the open call. The first thing it addresses is. Uh, what authorities are we compliant with?

And so this general solicitation is compliant with the competition standards for four authorities. Uh, all OT authority, sorry, all other OTA authorities, uh, 4021 and 202 in particular. Who knows what 4021 and 202 are specifically? That's okay. That's why I'm here. I'm the contract nerd. Um, 4021 is for basic and applied research.

4022 is for prototyping and production. Uh, then we are also compliant with broad agency announcement procedures in FAR Part 35. And we are also compliant with the commercial solutions opening procedures given to us by the DFARS deviation. And if you know your history, your contracting history, um, The CSO was only recently implemented, like, within the last year or two, as, uh, or included or established into the FAR, and I believe it has gone through rulemaking, which means it will be in the FAR.

Like, right now, it's a deviation. There's a class deviation, uh, signed by Okay. Okay. Uh, Mr. Tanaglia at [00:20:00] DPC, and, uh, it was in a pilot program for I think two, I might be wrong on this, like at least two years before it got to this point. So we are taking full advantages of this, uh, more recent authority as well.

Does anyone know? Besides, I know we had some people who are familiar with it. Does anyone know like kind of the premise of the CSO? Because this is really the foundation, one of the foundations of the marketplace. If anyone familiar with BAAs, Broad Agency Announcements, the CS, so not that many. So BAAs are, are in the FAR, FAR Part 35.

They do a really good job because for basic and applied research, you don't know. What you want to buy, like sometimes you, you are, you want to explore and you need to, um, in the FAR, they've, they provide procedures for how to do that. And it's more based on what the technical term is, technical merit, rather than evaluating to buy a thing.

So you are trying to establish technical merit or some kind of, um, technical credence to, Exploring something versus buying a thing. So, anyone familiar with DIU? Familiar with their CSO process. So I, I would say the, uh, in my community there, there, there's someone named Victor Deal and he is considered the father of the CSO and he helped to implement or to, um, create the pilot program that congress, you know, put in statute.

But at DIU, the CSO originally was a solicitation method or a competition method to a step to award a prototype. Other transaction agreement. So the CSO, the history of it, the reason I'm giving you this context is because it started because somebody said, I like the way a BAA is modeled, but I don't want to do research.

[00:22:00] And then the FAR specifically says you can only do it for basic and applied research. They said, I want to buy products. I want to buy commercial things, but I want to use the same methodology as the BAA. That's all it is. So the CSO allows you to do more than basic and applied research, but it uses the same.

foundation of a BAA. So, now we have this kind of cool authority, um, where we can not only do FAR and non FAR based contracting, because remember, DAU, who I would say was the pathfinder for what we, the CSO now is, was doing it for non FAR based contracting. But somehow along the way, Congress decided, hey, why are we limiting it to just Non FAR based contracting, so in the statutory author, or the pilot program provided by the NDAA, um, they allowed both FAR and non FAR based contracting, and that is what made it into the DFAR's deviation.

So if you, and it's actually a really short read, if you actually look up the class deviation, it still hasn't pulled up. So if you go into our announcement, it gives you the number. Of the class deviation, you can pull it up. I think it's like a three or four page document, the deviation. So the left and right parameters of how you use the CSO is actually really broad.

You have a ton of discretion. Okay. So, uh, fortunately the website started working and this is the open call. I remember, so I want to run through a couple of mechanics and then I'm just going to show you the marketplace and then we're going to have a conversation. Um, remember I said like all the authorities that we're, this might be hard to read in the back, but just so you know where it is and you can look for it later.

I think it's in paragraph two right here. We call out, so we're telling industry very openly. Hey. There's those four authorities that we talked about, and the purpose behind multiple authorities and one general solicitation was to provide maximum flexibility to the government buyer, whether it's the acquisition professional or the contracting professional just executing a contract.

[00:24:00] And then what else do you need in a solicitation? Well, what's the requirement? So remember, we're not doing requirements, but we do have strategic focus areas. Right here. Um, by the way, we're not even a year old. It will be a year since we launched this. Uh, at the end of this month. So when we, uh, shaped what the strategic focus areas where we kind of looked at some national security strategies and stuff and just kind of put something together.

The purpose, though, is to continuously iterate. So to your point, by listening to what people are asking for, as we're doing sessions like this, or the more we engage at the service level, we Continuously, we'll, we'll add focus areas, or maybe we'll remove some focus areas. I also envision if this thing is worthy and does live on beyond, um, you know, more than a year or two, I see multiple portfolios for different mission specific, uh, demands, so to say.

But for now, this is what we have. This is what we started with just to get CDAO's mission, though. Okay, so we've got our strategic focus areas in the general solicitation, and then we've got section L, right, not section L, but for all of you who, you know, can draw, these are the submission instructions, and the cool thing about what we're doing is there's no written documentation, no white papers, no technical proposals, no slick sheets or quad charts or whatever, it's a five minute video pitch.

This is another thing that I really liked. Um, one of the, we really looked at how does, We really wanted to lower the barrier to entry for industry. And honestly, like when we were kind of researching what this should be, we're like, you know, a lot of people communicate in video right now, if you look at social media or, um, how, uh, I would say a lot of digital content right now that's being created it's video.

[00:26:00] So we said, let's try that and see if that's a. Um, a modern medium. I don't know if that's a good term or not a good way of asking industry to pitch to us. Uh, the pitch is very similar to a VC pitch. What is your solution? What problem in the department are you solving? Why should I care that you're solving that, that problem?

So what's the magnitude of solving my problem and what makes you different? Like what, how do you differentiate yourself in the market? What makes you innovative? Um, like, how do we orient ourselves to your product versus someone else's product? That's it. No pricing, nothing like that. So, we've got sectional instructions, and then there's some other information, if you want to read this later, that's, again, oriented toward industry, obviously, because it's a general solicitation, um, that talks about, Um, there's a couple notices in there, but the last key thing that makes this real, makes this legal, is how do we evaluate them.

So that's at the very end. And actually you're going to hear from, I see him in the back, Adam. Adam Rentschler is, uh. The CEO and founder of a digital tool called Valid Evaluation, I'm not going to steal his thunder, but this is his rubric where you're using his tool to, um, facilitate the assessment process.

So we have a rubric, which I love, it's a rubric, it's not Uh, it's, it's not the normal source selection, maybe type criteria. It's something that gets right, it's very succinct, and it's easy to, for evaluators to assess very quickly, you know, if you think about a, a number scale, like where are you on a scale?

And that evaluation criteria is published in the general solicitation. So this is a long term open call. There's no end. We're collecting videos all the time. Month one, we said, um, we were like, man, we're not going to get any videos because nobody knows about this thing. And we're going to have to do some marketing and stuff.

[00:28:00] Month one, we got 12 videos. And ever since then, the demand has spiked a little bit. There were a few months where we got 70 submissions. So, so the way we're organized, or trying to manage and organize the evaluations are every month we batch the submissions from a single month. And then a peer panel is assembled to asse to watch the videos and then use the rubric and they go into Adam's tool, Valid Evaluation, and they record their results.

Another interesting thing that we're doing, uh, in this, we, we don't have to debate this today, but just open your minds a little bit. It's a peer panel, and it's made up of industry, academia, and government. Industry and academia? What? Well, guess what? Most of the expertise is in industry and academia. So we've created a way to do our proper OCIs and invite the people with the actual expertise to help us and advise us on what, you know, I'm gonna use a cyber term, but we need to know what's vaporware and what's not vaporware.

Like, who is Giving us something real, and again, it's a five minute video pitch, you know, you can only do and say so much, so we're doing the best, we're trying to balance that and making sure that the right expertise is giving us good recommendations and assessments, and that, honestly, is the spirit of the CSO.

It is not limited to government expertise, it is technical expertise. Another caveat, all of the videos are non proprietary. If you read the general solicitation, we say your videos do not include proprietary information. It's meant to be a pitch, a video pitch. Like any pitch that you would give at a trade show or something like that.

It's not, we don't want the proprietary secret stuff in there. Now if a vendor does that, we can't fix it. Monitor and enforce that, but we, we told them in the, in the general solicitation, Hey, don't do that. So that also helps us in that process.

[00:30:00] So they're not watching anything proprietary. This is not doing any cybersecurity, any supplier vetting, uh, any other types of, uh, additional due, uh, due diligence that you would need for your mission set.

This is not doing that. This, think of it as a contracting mechanism. I have an, I have an opportunity or I have an ability to buy directly, but maybe before I buy, I need to have a conversation and I want to know, you know, can they get ATO like, what does that look, you know, and, or they ATO and I want to have that kind of conversation.

This gives me the ability to have the conversation though. If you noticed, if you noticed, uh, at the top right, there's a, it says account now, but if it, when you go to the website, it's going to say log in. You, everyone in this room, anyone who has a mail. gov can register and just be part of the Tradewind platform, whether you use it or not.

So if you want to just like, be like, oh man, uh, Bonnie's You know, I want to see if she's telling the truth or if this is real, this is vaporware, right? You can do this right now, if you want, no pressure. And then when you, when you get here, though, to get to the marketplace, there's going to be a little drop down.

Uh, John's going to talk about Acbot in the afternoon. Um, I want to show you the marketplace. So this has to be some kind of government, anything government, mail, gov, whatever. This is the marketplace. So all that, we just spent like, I don't even, uh, 45 minutes talking about like, like, how did we get here?

Why is this real? Why is this compliant with the law? Why is this different? So this is the opportunity. Every video here, I'm just gonna pull up the first one, has gone through, oops, has gone through the process that we were Just talking about. So the, the key here is the awardable status. Um, so everything in here should be awardable, but just to, to check and verify, make sure they have that status because that means they have gone through the peer panel process and they have determined based on that rubric that there is merit.

[00:32:00] There is merit that this solution should be in a DOD marketplace for, Um, AI, data, and digital services and solutions. By the way, there's a blue sky category. So even though we say data, digital, and, um, AI, we, we kind of took inspiration from AffWorks and we're like, that's a really good idea. So we have a blue sky category just like Sivers and Open Topics, um, just in case there's something we're not thinking about because, again, we're in this world that's constantly changing.

So there's even things, like, we'll even go to that for a second so I can show you a couple examples. So Hermes. Hermes is actually Donovan. They rebranded Hermes, and it's technically Donovan. So me, as, and I will tell you, because I've done three contracts with scale for, for Hermes slash Donovan, am I going to be the person that says, they need it, the video says Hermes, but I'm dying Donovan?

Or can I just Make it, uh, uh, a discretion, make, use my discretion and say, Hey, the only thing that's changing is the name, the product is still exactly the same. I think, like, there's still validity here. I think that you're going to have to exercise some good business judgment, like that, with what we're dealing with.

I'd, so, um, that's a very squishy way of saying, like, We're going to have to figure this out. Don't know, but I'm also like, John's in the back. We take all of this feedback and then we roadmap, like, how do we make this better for the future that we're living in? We've assessed, uh, I might be like off by 10 or so here.

We've assessed over 400 videos in almost a year. And there's, I think 150. In the marketplace, just to give you some context that we, not everybody gets in and there, there is a bar. Um, so even if you see multiple solutions, I, we're not at the scale yet where there, there's thousands of videos. It could get to that scale to your point.

[00:34:00] Um, but hopefully there's still a bar there to make it, uh. easier. And then, and then John, you're going to meet John this afternoon. He's going to talk about Ackbot, but he, Ackbot is the back end tech site or backbone of the platform. And so we are constantly finding ways to make the searchability, uh, even easier, even better.

I even have ideas where you're going to see how Ackbot works later, but like, as I'm writing a problem statement in Ackbot, can there be some kind of, uh, capability, I don't know if this is AI or not, that is recommending videos. So, before I even get to publishing a problem statement, maybe I don't need to publish a problem statement.

Maybe there's a video in, in the marketplace that I could just go watch a video pitch and see if that's a good mechanism. So there's things like that, that we're constantly trying to find ways to make that connective tissue and make it easier. Uh, for the government buyer to not have to deal with that, this voluminous data problem that we're all dealing with.

What this is not doing, and this is actually, uh, if you have any feedback on this, I'd love it, uh, there is no way for us to track who's awarding. Um, unless, so we, we, we do have a handbook now, uh, that provides a little more guidance to government buyers because this, this is very, this is a very different model.

Um, it's very akin to CBR phase three contracting, if you're familiar with that. And most of, I would say the contracting community is not familiar with that. Like they don't know how to scope and negotiate a contractor with one vendor without being in a quote unquote sole source environment with certified cost and pricing data or something like that.

Um, But, so with that in mind, I do know my office has done at least 12 or 13 awards, and this was just an FY23 alone. So remember, we started collecting videos in November. We made our fir my office made our first award in February. So that's, what, four ish months after that, I think. And, um, uh, this actually helped us support CDAO kind of at, in, during the end of fiscal year crunch.

[00:36:00] And, uh, we did, so we did, I would say a handful, it was, uh, 12 or 13 or so. And then I, I'm aware of, um, five awards in the Air Force. There was one from the Rapid Capabilities Office and there was four from the Digital Transformation Office. But again, that's all I'm aware of, and, and we've talked to so many people since then, so I don't even know who else, if, you know, took a step and said, hey, you know, we're gonna try this too.