PRE-TENDER MARKET ENGAGEMENT - Open Regulation Platform Alpha

Tender description

Summary of the work This is an early market engagement for the Open Regulation Platform - a project around building an enriched, machine readable dataset of regulations as well as an open API to release this data to the public. Please contact us at openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk for the full specification and proposal templates. Expected Contract Length We are looking for responses to this early engagement by 3rd May Latest start date Monday 3 May 2021 Budget Range This is an early market engagement and thus has a budget of £0. We are looking for market guidance on the potential budget required for this procurement. Why the Work is Being Done The Open Regulation Platform (ORP) seeks to enable regulatory innovation by openly publishing UK business regulations as an enriched, machine-readable dataset. The Better Regulation Executive are engaging with the market in preparation for an invitation to tender to deliver an Alpha prototype of the Open Regulation Platform. We have developed a detailed specification outlining our plans for the project and are interested in comments and proposals on how these plans might be delivered. Please contact us at <openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk> to be sent the specification and proposal template. Comments and proposals for early market engagement are not commercially binding and will only be used to help develop the invitation to tender. Any information we provide as part of this engagement will also be made available as part of the final invitation to tender to ensure no suppliers have a competitive advantage in that procurement. Problem to Be Solved The purpose of the ORP is to develop an open augmented regulation to help develop a market of regulation tech tools. Discovery research has indicated three capability workstreams needed to successfully deliver the Open Regulation platform: Workstream 1: ORP as a republishing platform for regulatory information, in particular primary and secondary legislation and official guidance from regulators. Workstream 2: ORP sets a data standard for regulatory information and enriches documents with document-level metadata and links. Workstream 3: ORP starts enhanced tagging of regulatory data, and a Trusted Research Environment for third-party machine-learning experimentation. This early market engagement is specifically interested in the delivery of an Alpha for capability workstreams 1 and 2, in particular the feasibility, timelines, and cost, for this work. Please contact us for our detailed specification of the project. We can also provide a proposal template for any responses, and are hosting an engagement meeting over Microsoft Teams on Thursday 22 April. Who Are the Users This is an early market engagement, please contact us for the project specification and proposal template. Early Market Engagement The requirements outlined are our form of early market engagement. Findings from this early market engagement will help inform our formal invitation to tender to be released next month. Work Already Done We have already undertaken a Discovery Phase for the Open Regulation Platform: https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/13595 The Discovery report is available by request to openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk Existing Team Our existing team is outlined in our early market engagement specification. Please contact us if you are interested in providing comments around this specification. Current Phase Alpha Skills & Experience • N/A • N/A Nice to Haves • N/A • N/A Work Location This an early market engagement and will thus be done entirely remotely. Working Arrangments This is an early market engagement. Please contact us if you are interested in providing comments around this specification. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • N/A • N/A Cultural Fit Criteria • N/A • N/A Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 75% Cultural fit 5% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. Can you provide more details about joining the engagement meeting? The engagement meeting event is at 14:00- 15:00 on Thursday 22nd of April.Please contact us to receive a Microsoft Teams meeting invite link. This won't be a formal calendar invite so you will need to join at the above time. 2. What is the CCS view on using the digital marketplace for pre-tender market engagement? Does this follow the guidance on such engagements outlined by CCS? The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy are running a pre-market engagement exercise. The Digital Outcomes specialist framework has been used to facilitate this in this instance because eventually the full specification will be competed through this framework. CCS Guidances advises that for PTME if you have draft requirements then this needs to be shared with all suppliers. A CCS contact has advised us that best practice would have been to use GOV.UK Notify to contact all DOS suppliers. CCS guidance however mentions flexibility in terms of how PTME is done. 3. There are two questions to answer to apply for this opportunity. Both questions are N/a yet an answer is required. What do you suggest? There is no need to formally apply for this opportunity (via DOS) as we are currently in a pre-tender market engagement phase. We are interested in hearing from suppliers in order to help refine our formal requirements that will be out next month.Please get in contact with us directly at openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk 4. Can you expand a little more on your expectations around a partner hosting and maintaining the service ? Suppliers will be expected to provide plans on how to host and maintain the service throughout Alpha and Beta. BEIS are still exploring options with regards to the live service. 5. Would data scrapers and RegTech see the ORP as a competitor to their work? We have engaged as part of our research with some of these companies and they have seen this as additional value on top of the data they have. The purpose of the ORP is to enable the RegTech market. 6. Are there any cases of how suppliers can visualise the API? We do not currently have any views on the visualisation of the API. However the BEIS internal Digital Regulation Navigator can be looked to as an example use case for the API. 7. What is the expected volume for storage ? We would welcome feedback from suppliers on storage and its potential implications on cost to use in our thinking. We have chosen particular sectors to help understand the scale and cost from suppliers. 8. Are all the data sources non security marked and open data therefore no role based access control (RBAC) models will be required? Legislation and guidance on gov.uk is all open access. We anticipate most of the work here will be in compiling the data. 9. Will the supplier who worked with you on the Discovery be bidding? The supplier who took as part in the discovery is not currently involved in the Alpha phase and is not excluded from bidding. We are unable to comment further on the potential bidders as part of the tender process. 10. Do you envision a model like the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) sandbox approach? We have previously engaged with the FCA to learn lessons from their team, however have not discussed this point so far. Phase 3 of the project, is around trusted research environments and we will explore governance models on how generated metadata can be pushed back to the API. 11. what are the key pillars of the business case? What would a successful outcome look like ? The outputs of the business case are the database and API; a common standard for the data; editorial tools and a trusted research environment. The outcomes are providing businesses with accurate and comprehensive regulatory data to reduce information search costs on business and make the UK the best place to start and scale a business. Finally, the National Data Strategy priorities to make public sector data available for innovation and to improve decision-making across government. 12. Do you expected unstructured data to the storage ? We are aware regulators will provide guidance in different formats. Part of the goal is to convert this data into a common data format. There would be unstructured data in the database in the meantime before this standard is set. 13. You mention ingesting guidance on legislation. As this could come in all shapes and sizes and especially quality. Are you expecting companies providing advice and guidance will need to be authenticated? Will this require them to prepare data using the ORPML format? Our current view is that the ORP API will be an authoritative data source that will only accept data from official sources such as regulatory websites or legislation.gov.uk. We expect third party companies to only be consumers of the API. Any guidance they publish themselves will be separate from the ORP and will not need to be authenticated. 14. What security clearance will be needed from potential suppliers? We will confirm this before the official tender. As part of previous procurement we have only asked for the baseline personnel security standard (BPSS) 15. How will the invitation to tender be issued? The invitation to tender will be re-issued through DOS to support fair and open competition. 16. Will the alpha phase be public facing? We do not expect the alpha phase of the project to be public facing. 17. might the ORP in the future provide data on Standards and ISOs that regulations might refer to or require. Yes although this is not an immediate priority. 18. Is there a requirement in the alpha or beta to link the database to data sources and maintain alignment where the source data is changing? In the alpha phase we are expecting to ask regulators for hard copies of their documents that we will then ingest into the API. In the Beta phase we would then start exploring direct database links. Comments around how to maintain alignment with changing source data would be welcomed at this time. 19. Do you have any technical guidelines, or overall strategy about selection of languages, frameworks etc? Even OSS vs COTS? We have no comments on this particular aspect at the moment however, we but would appreciate feedback on it from suppliers. 20. Is the expectation that the ORP does not initially need to 'discover' new regulation/guidance documents as they are published on source websites etc.? This is not a feature that we've considered as we were assuming we would progress from manual data ingestion to a back-end integration. However this is an interesting feature recommendation and we would welcome an assessment of the technical feasibility of this. 21. Is there need for a workflow element to support regional/foreign language for example Welsh or Hindi? Initially we would focus on reproducing the languages of the published source documents and providing options where multiple languages are available. 22. What considerations have been made for upload volumes? We do not currently have information on the volume of documents to intake however we would appreciate and indication from suppliers on how costs may differ depending on volume. 23. It was mentioned that there was no fixed tech stack for this work, although BEIS’ current environment is AWS Python based, as is most internal capability. Would an alternative stack to AWS be considered here? BEIS haven’t decided how exactly we’ll be hosting the ORP. Whilst BEIS internally have certain environments, we aren’t necessarily committed to using them. For the purpose of the Alpha we would likely expect suppliers to come with ideas around hosting and development. BEIS internal data expertise at the moment is limited in resource and would primarily be used to help us assess supplier proposals as opposed to building on the ORP. 24. Can you please provide some more technical details regarding ORPML? If it has not been defined yet, can the winner of the eventual tender help to define it and are there technical constraints on this? ORPML is envisaged as a thin, high-level metadata wrapper over content provided in Akoma Ntoso (for primary/secondary legislation) or document markup for guidance notes. During the Alpha, BEIS would expect to work with suppliers and other stakeholders (such as The National Achives) to design ORPML. We don't have any hard technical constraints at present. 25. ORPML is envisaged as a thin, high-level metadata wrapper over content provided in Akoma Ntoso (for primary/secondary legislation) or document markup for guidance notes. During the Alpha, BEIS would expect to work with suppliers and other stakeholders (such as The National Achives) to design ORPML. We don't have any hard technical constraints at present. The ORP places great value on data interoperability and would expect to work with any future suppliers and stakeholders to decide on the technical design of ORPML. We don't have any hard technical constraints at present and are open to any feedback on how this might be designed. 26. Will technical decisions (e.g., the software or language to be used) for the alpha be made after this ‘pre-tender market engagement’ closes and prior to listing the actual tender listing in May? The Alpha requirements that will be published on DOS will continue to leave things open with regards to technical decisions around software, language etc. We will be collating views from pre-market engagement and might use this to inform what technologies we think are relevant, but this is not a hard constraint and will be open to suggestions. We will expect suppliers proposals to include their own technical choices and explain why these choices are suitable. 27. What is the deadline for suppliers to submit proposals to BEIS? We have now extended the deadline until the 7th of May. Please email any proposals directly to openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk 28. How do we submit our proposals? Is it by email or using the DOS framework? Please email all proposals (using the proposal template) to openregulationplatform@beis.gov.uk.You do NOT need to make an application on the DOS framework for the premarket engagement.