1. Introduction

What is Code With Us?

Code With Us is a procurement mechanism for public sector organizations in British Columbia to pay developers for code.

How does it work?

Here in British Columbia, we've got an increasing number of software products being developed in the open, here in GitHub. 🚀

Product owners can use a single Code With Us opportunity to pay for up to $70,000 worth of software development work.

When publishing a Code With Us opportunity on bcdevexchange.org/opportunities, a product owner:

• Defines the acceptance criteria for the enhancements they want
• Sets a fixed price reward for those enhancements
• States what they want to be included in proposals to do the work, and how they'll score proposals

Any interested developer (or team of developers) can then:

• Ask questions about the opportunity and get clarity on requirements through open discussion on GitHub
• Sign in on bcdevexchange.org and submit a brief proposal to do the work. In the process of submitting, they agree to a set of terms which includes a fixed price contract.

The product owner scores the proposals and assigns the work to the developer/team with the highest score.

The assigned developer/team works with the product owner and delivers code in the open in the GitHub repo. Once the acceptance criteria has been met, the fixed price is paid!

Where did Code With Us come from?

We started the BC Developers' Exchange with a desire to find better ways for the public and tech sectors to work together, for the benefit of British Columbians and the tech sector here in our province.

Procurement was one area we saw great opportunity for improvement. We asked questions like:

How might we get quicker and more direct access to a larger pool of developers?

How might we more efficiently communicate enhancements we need made to our applications?

How might we make the contract process more efficient, to minimize wait times and effort spent on legal formalities and maximize time spent on making the code better?

How might we make paid work more widely and directly accessible to developers who've never worked for government before?

As pockets of the BC Government began to embrace open source development, we started experimenting by publishing small opportunities directly on Issues in GitHub. Our first Code With Us opportunities offered a fixed price reward to the first developer who could submit code that met the acceptance criteria. We quickly learned that this would lead to "spec work" (not our intention at all). So we worked with developers in our community to design a lightweight assignment process, then worked with our lawyers to create the set of legal terms that would enable the process we envisioned.

Since then, we stood up a web app to notify developers when new opportunities are posted, and standardize the experience for product owners and developers.