18f / head-start-eclkc-procurement

Head Start's ECLKC Procurement

The Office of Head Start and 18F are conducting market research for an upcoming requirement supporting the OHS's infrastructure.

We are issuing a Request for Information to learn more about the marketplace and get feedback on the high-level ideas. The RFI Google Form is now closed to submissions, but an excerpt of the RFI's questions is available in this repo.

Agency background

The Office of Head Start (OHS) is responsible for administering the Head Start program, which provides grants to local public and private non-profit and for-profit agencies to provide comprehensive child development services to economically disadvantaged children and their families. The office is located in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

There are over 1,600 Head Start grantees, ranging from small agencies with little organizational capacity serving less than 100 children to large agencies with complex staffs serving tens of thousands of children. A number of grantees also have delegate agencies which provide all or part of the required comprehensive services. Since its beginning in 1965, Head Start has served more than 33 million children and their families. In FY2020, Head Start provided over a million children with services to support their early learning, health, and family well-being.

In service of its mission, OHS operates four primary IT systems:

• The Head Start Enterprise System (HSES) is the centerpiece of OHS’s IT, collecting program data and making it accessible to staff.
• The Information Technology - Aligned Monitoring System (IT-AMS) provides a custom interface for the grantee monitoring process. It receives data from HSES through daily data transfers.
• The Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center (ECLKC) is the public face of the program, and provides access to knowledge and resources for programs, regions, and states. It also offers an API that provides access to Head Start data.
• The Smart Hub is an in-progress system to collect and process data about OHS’s training and technical assistance programs for grantees.

These systems connect to each other, and use a variety of distinct technology stacks. In addition to these systems, OHS also operates a collection of applications built by the National Centers, a group of external organizations to which OHS has awarded grants and with whom it collaborates. These applications are housed within the AWS environment maintained by the ECLKC project.

Project background

OHS is seeking support for the management for the infrastructure of its IT systems, including:

• The management and configuration of cloud hosting tools such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers and Platform-as-a-Service providers.
• Design and implementation of DevOps tools and practices such as deployment pipelines and continuous integration.
• Consultation with product teams on infrastructure-related tasks, and with OHS leadership on technical strategies.
• The management and configuration of shared services such as central authentication tools and internal data APIs.

The Contractor will coordinate with the OHS IT Governance Board, aligning the tasks with OHS goals and mission.

This infrastructure and DevOps support will use agile principles incrementally designing and building infrastructure tools and practices for use across the OHS organization. This involves identifying, scoping, and prioritizing tasks within the objectives set forth below.

The infrastructure team’s objectives include:

• A healthy ecosystem for developing and deploying software
• Documentation of the infrastructure, including configurations for supported applications and processes for common tasks
• Continued authorization to operate the infrastructure and the products using it
• Customer service and support for product teams at OHS, including support for developed processes or tools, consultations on infrastructure-related questions, and assistance with migration to the shared infrastructure
• An incremental, flexible strategy, produced collaboratively with OHS, for architecting and scaling infrastructure across multiple systems
• Standard processes or tools for common product team tasks, such as automated testing and continuous deployment

OHS requires the contractor to have the capability to successfully ramp up and have available qualified staff who are fully knowledgeable of hosting, production and maintenance services.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING for additional information.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.