Q A_20150904.pdf

Solicitation FA7014-15-R-5025 Media Assessment Tool—Questions and Answers

Question #1: Is this effort for a COTS product or could it be for an organic system?

Government Response: The government believes there are already existing commercial products that will meet the requirement of the PWS. Therefore, no software development time is built into this requirement and thus all capabilities required in the PWS must be provided at the start of the period of performance. In addition, requirement 1.5 of the PWS requires the ability to search media archives going back at least five years prior to the award of this contract.

Question #2: Is a contractor currently performing the same or similar work? If so, is there a contract number available?

Government Response: This is a new requirement for contract support.

Question #3: We see that your team requires major news sources, including broadcast, monitored globally. Are there specific regions/markets/countries that are essential and/or are more important than others?

Government Response: Main focus is U.S.; however, the AF must have visibility across the world as any region could flare up at any time

Question #4: What is the need behind sentiment/tone scoring and other potential qualitative analysis of your coverage? Is this a new need, and if so, why?

Are you having issues with the accuracy/insights you're receiving now? How are you planning to use this information?

Government Response: We need the sentiment/tone to measure how the AF is portrayed in the media to inform AF communications. This is not a new requirement.

Question #5: What is the purpose of requesting a 5-year archive of news? Our company can provide this, but A.) we have a few different ways on doing so, and B.) we want to provide some industry-wide expectations for your team around the availability (or lack thereof) on news that is that archaic.

Government Response: Having access to archive information, we can evaluate recent historical references on specific topics to help inform what has or has not worked before and to help inform future AF Communications.

Question #6: Your team is requesting full-text of stories. We simply want to make sure your team is aware that specifically for web-based news, this is a violation of copyright infringement?

Government Response: The government understands and follows copyright laws and will limit distribution of any products provided by the contractor, if applicable, to meet copyright law. All services provided by the contractor must be 100% copyright compliant and all products provided must be legally allowed under copyright law. See revised language in Performance

Work Statement (PWS).

Question #7: How did your team arrive at the number of at least "100,000" journalists to be included in your chosen media database? This is a very low and arbitrary number, and we assume quality is important, specifically in the quantity, depth, and accuracy of contacts in verticals you care about such as military and defense. For this requirement specifically, Our team is concerned that given the low number, combined with your team potentially deciding on a vendor without further discussions, may leave your team highly dissatisfied with your selected media database.

Government Response: We asked for "over 100,000 active journalists" based on our initial market research. The key requirement is "active journalists," going beyond 100,000 to meet this requirements is perfectly acceptable. Quality, quantity, depth, and accuracy are all important for this requirement, both on journalists that cover military and defense, as well as on other topics.

Question #8

Can you let us know what you mean by also submitting a "redacted" copy?

Government Response: A redacted copy as detailed in Attachment 2, para. 1.0 (b) , Instruction

To Offerors (ITO) states, “The redacted copy shall not provide any information that will allow the evaluators to identify the contractor who submitted the proposal.”