Thanks to all who took part in the OSI Toolsets Request for Proposals competition. We received more than 220 proposals, and have tried to evaluate each of them fairly and thoroughly. All proposers should by now have received a response from the toolsets program. If you sent a proposal to the Toolsets RFP by September 30th, 2003, and have not yet received a final response, please send an email to toolsets@osi.hu indicating the name of your organization, the name of your proposal, and the email address that you submitted the proposal through. We will try to respond to you as quickly as possible.

A list of proposals receiving funding through this RFP will be posted here as soon as all contractual details have been resolved. We hope to reach this point by the end of January 2004.

In reviewing the proposals, we have found a number of complementary projects. The Information Program has an interest in supporting collaborative proposals; we are currently analyzing the possible synergies between proposals we received and will contact some proposers in the future to suggest the formation of collaborative working groups.

OSI would like to thank the E-Volve Foundation for its technical assistance in the OSI Toolset RFP process. E-Volve assisted OSI in the development of criteria, and in evaluating the over 220 proposals received during this grant cycle.

OSI is looking forward in the coming months working with E-Volve and others to share the knowledge gained during this process that it helped assemble.

OSI will also be working with Aspiration (Aspirationtech.org) to run some of the proposals through social source evaluation metrics in order to better hone those tools against proposals considered very strong by other measurement criteria.

Again, thank you for your interest and participation in this RFP.

The RFP Evaluation Process

The evaluation process was rather rigorous. Since the OSI staff knew many of the potential proposers, the internal OSI reviewer’s first guideline was not to discuss submitted proposals with any of the submitters prior to final evaluation and decision in order to insure complete fairness.

Over 60 objective criteria were applied to each of the applications and then used to create a comprehensive database of proposals.

E-Volve’s team of skilled technical reviewers (Betsy Campbell, Katrin Verclas, Paul Hagen, Rem Hoffmann, Todd Koym of the Edgerton Foundation and Dan Robinson of E-Volve) reviewed all the proposals and applied the criteria and comments to each proposal.

The review criteria and proposals were placed in the OPA database designed by Bellanet and with modifications by E-Volve to support this process. This database was then used by OSI to form the basis of an objective determination, based on OSI’s goals and objectives for these grants, to narrow the applicant field and identify the most promising applications.

From these reviews, the highest overall ranked proposals (those approximately thirty or forty proposals receiving a high ranking of 4 or 5 out of 5 score) were selected for further review by two OSI staff members, CTO Jonathan Peizer and Program Officer Janet Haven. In addition, ten of the most important individual measurement criteria were summarized, weighted and summed to produce a score separate from each proposal’s overall ranking. Those proposals with lower overall ratings (2’s and 3’s) but with high individually summed scores were selected for further review by the two OSI staff members. Finally, a random sampling of about fifteen proposals with low overall ratings (0-3) were selected for further review. As a result about 60 of the best proposals as well as a random sampling from the entire group were analyzed by at least 3 people. The dozen best of these were distributed for further review by experts familiar with the technology or the sector it was designed to address. Melissa Pailthorp, the Director of Aspiration also reviewed the finalists as did Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski of the Tachtical Tech Collective.

Finally an OSI Information Program Board of three members reviewed the final choice proposals suggested by Janet and Jonathan and authorized a subset of the best proposals to be funded, and another subset slated for further review.

There were some proposals that were quite good but were not selected because they did not conform to the RFP criteria—(e.g. they were CMS’s, they focused too heavily on administrative tools, they were very US domestically or Western audience oriented, etc.).

The entire process was designed to select quality proposals that were also relevant to OSI’s work and focus.