Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2021-07-20
Buyer: Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e.V. / Zukunftswerk
Country: DE
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72000000

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
This notice serves as a prior information and as a means of transparency for the negotiated procedure without competition. Interested bidders can send their expression of interest in the procedure to zw-admin@iass-potsdam.de until 26 July 2021.
The aim is to provide the Zukunftswerk with a series of collaboration tools to support and enhance its work at every stage of the process. All these tools should be accessible via a single point (collaborative platform) connected to the website (please note: the website itself is not included in this consultation). We encourage the contractor to integrate different existing tools and services rather than developing new software per itself. We are agnostic regarding the tools' legal and business models (i.e. open-source, proprietary, software-as-a-service).
The Zukunftswerk pursues a bottom-up approach and works closely together with local actors in France and Germany who are pushing for societal transformation (e.g. ecological change). However, the Zukunftswerk shall not be the sole ‘control tower’ to coordinate exchange once French and German initiatives found interest in collaboration. Through an online-platform we wish to overcome the language barrier and render the collaboration among French and German initiatives more co-creatively, more transparently and thus more continuously.
The Zukunftswerk works together with public administration, civil society as well as volunteers and researchers in France and Germany. The common denominator is that they are all involved in bringing forward societal change. Some work in full-time contexts and others on a voluntary basis. French and German are the working languages with our partners, not English.
Our online platform is not meant to be a continuous burden. Therefore, collaboration should also be possible without a personal profile/registration and the platform does not thrive on the constant input of users. Rather, we pursue an approach of a shared workplace. The Zukunftswerk provides proactive moderation and sends signals to involve the users, e.g. in the preparation or follow-up to an exchange (e.g. What topics will be discussed in the next dialogue?). Thus, it is not so much a constantly active online platform as a co-creative online engagement designed in collaboration phases.
The most essential function is that content (texts, photos, videos, pdfs) can be shared without language hierarchy between French and German initiatives in order for them to react to the content. These comments also have to be automatically translated. The layout of the shared workspace needs to be easily adjustable to the context of the collaboration project (e.g. timeline and documentation for a series of peer dialogues, transparent process of drafting policy recommendations) in order to be usable for the research team, the dialogue team and the resonance space team of the Zukunftswerk. Since we work with some initiatives only once or sporadically, it is essential that collaboration access may be granted by sending just a (password protected) link.
The potential benefits of an online platform can be best presented by showcasing an example of what happens after a Franco-German dialogue. We organized a dialogue with 10 representatives of local initiatives from France and Germany. All information about the dialogue was sent in advance by mail (including attachments) in French and German separately to the participants of the dialogue. After having shared their experiences during a simultaneously translated dialogue, a lot of additional questions come up after the event. The French participants wrote a long email answering all the open questions. That meant for us having to translate the received mails into German and rewriting them a bit in order to make more sense for the participants. The reaction from the German side had to be translated again into French to be forwarded to the French actors.
Basically, a heavily manual process with only e-mail communication, where transparency is lacking and the flow of exchanges is heavily dependent on the Zukunftswerk’s resources. An online platform