FSI OH eXist Support - Sole Source Justification - 9.6.2024 - (002)_Redacted.pdf

SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED

SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION FOR SIMPLFIED ACQUISITIONS

FAR Part 13.501(a)(1)(ii)

1. Identification of the agency and the contracting activity:

In accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 13.501(a)(1) in accordance with 41 U.S.C. 1901 or the authority of 41 U.S.C. 1903, the Department of State (DoS), Foreign Service Institute (FSI) proposes to award a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) on the basis of other than full and open competition with eXist Solutions GmbH for Enterprise Support for eXist on behalf of the Office of the Historian (FSI/OH).

2. The nature and/or description of the action being approved:

The Office of the Historian (FSI/OH), within the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) at the U.S. Department of State (DOS), is responsible, under law, for the preparation and publication of the official documentary history of U.S. foreign policy in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. FSI/OH also prepares policy-supportive historical studies for Department principals and other agencies and conducts an array of other initiatives, ranging from briefing memos to multi-year research projects.

FSI/OH maintains a public website at history.state.gov (hereafter, HSG). HSG is one of the Department’s top five mission-critical public engagement websites and is consulted on a constant basis by policy makers, scholars, and the general public, with over 20 million hits per year from around the world. In addition to a full text archive of the FRUS series, which contains over 300,000 documents from 550 books published since 1861, HSG contains a history of U.S. diplomatic relations with every state in the world, a database of all of DOS principal officers and chiefs of mission since 1789, and other numerous scholarly resources for the study of U.S. foreign relations and DOS institutional history.

At the foundation of HSG was FSI/OH’s strategic decision 15 years ago to adopt the open, XML-based Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines—the de facto standard for scholarly electronic text projects—as the master digital format for FSI/OH’s publications and datasets. Adopting an XML-based format offered many tangible benefits to FSI/OH, and FSI/OH and the millions of visitors per year who visit HSG continue to reap the benefits of this standard. First, TEI allows FSI/OH to describe the rich structural and semantic layers of historical texts. Second, TEI can natively encode “mixed content,” which other data formats like CSV and JSON struggle to handle. Third, since TEI is based on XML, FSI/OH can leverage the competitive and vibrant ecosystem of tools surrounding the processing of XML data, including tools that can validate the data’s conformance to business rules and transform it into formats including HTML, PDF, and

EPUB for tablets and e-readers. XML’s ability to be transformed universally into any target content type has allowed FSI/OH to issue all of its publications and datasets in a wide array of formats—and thereby allowed it to follow the Open Government Directive’s principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration as the cornerstone of an open government. FSI/OH posts the HSG source code and all raw data for its publications and datasets to the HistoryAtState organization on GitHub.

Because of the advantages of XML, FSI/OH sought out the best tools available to organizations that publish large amounts of XML data. Since its launch in 2009, HSG has been built on a free, open-source software package, called eXist-db (hereafter, eXist) and, additionally, since 2016, on TEI Publisher. eXist excels in the storage, querying, and transformation of XML data and has enabled FSI/OH to contribute to all key open government initiatives on behalf of the Department, including the Open Government Directive, the Cloud First Initiative, and the Digital Government Strategy. FSI/OH has also used eXist for numerous internal applications, including a content management system (CMS). Similarly, the HSG and CMS systems’ TEI-based applications use the open source TEI Publisher software package for transforming TEI data into various media formats and for digitally annotating historical documents. Staff install eXist and a specific suite of software on their workstations to facilitate data analysis, reporting, and development of new applications, publications, and datasets.

Because eXist and TEI Publisher play such a critical role in the FSI/OH’s internal and public-facing digital initiatives, knowledge management activities, and publishing and reporting workflows, FSI/OH requires an expertly qualified vendor to provide an enterprise service level agreement (SLA) to support the maintenance and development of its eXist- and TEI Publisher- based applications and cloud-based infrastructure.

3. A description of the supplies or services required to meet the Department’s needs.

The requirement is for an expertly qualified vendor to provide enterprise maintenance and development services for FSI/OH’s eXist- and TEI Publisher-based infrastructure at a total cost of $538,447. To understand the reasons for this expertise, recall that FSI/OH selected the free, open, XML-based TEI standard, to encode its vast collection of publications and datasets; the free, open source eXist database, which excels in the storage, querying, and transformation of XML data, to power its website; and the free, open source TEI Publisher application, to simplify the transformation of its TEI data into various media formats. Therefore, any vendor providing support for FSI/OH’s applications must be expert in these technologies and the many layers of specialized standards surrounding them. These include the following technologies described below.

The vendor providing development services for FSI/OH’s applications must be experts in the XQuery programming language, which is eXist’s server language. In other words, all eXist applications are written in XQuery, and HSG’s applications leverage advanced features in XQuery 3.1, the latest version of this language that is codified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Unlike many leading computer languages, XQuery is a functional language, rather than an imperative one. Learning XQuery requires mastering the functional approach to programming, and many programmers steeped in the imperative approach struggle to adapt to functional programming. Given its origins as a language for querying and transforming XML, it has a small pool of expert developers who primarily work in the publishing industry and scholarly research projects.

The vendor must also be fluent with the eXist open-source code base, a project that is over two decades old with dozens of contributors and a mix of standard Java libraries and third party libraries, as well as extensive custom libraries. A vendor supporting eXist must be able to debug any problems that emerge in eXist’s parser (ANTLR), web server (Apache Jetty), range and full text search indexes (Apache Lucene), caching (Caffeine), WebDAV (Milton), and XSLT (Saxon) facilities. Some of these are tied to old versions of these libraries due to incompatibilities with newer versions. Some are custom forks for libraries that have been abandoned by their originators, so the eXist community has forked these projects to provide vital support for them. eXist also has custom libraries for testing its own conformance with the W3C test suite for XQuery. Debugging issues that might arise in eXist require fluency with all of these layers and their particular incarnations and interactions in eXist.

The vendor must also be proficient with the TEI Publisher open-source code base, a project that is over eight years old and also has dozens of contributors—and the TEI ODD Processing Model specification that the project implements. The project’s source code is written primarily in XQuery. Its primary function is to read in project-specific processing guidelines, written in the TEI ODD format, and generate media-specific transformation libraries. Providing development services for TEI Publisher thus requires expertise in XQuery, TEI, the ODD format, and all of the source, intermediate, and target formats (TEI, HTML, XSL-FO, LaTeX, PDF, EPUB, CSS, etc.).

Furthermore, HSG’s eXist servers and TEI Publisher applications are housed in the Amazon Web Services cloud. A vendor providing support for HSG must thus be an expert with tuning OS and Java memory settings to enable eXist to run at peak performance on specific AWS EC2 instance types and not run out of memory and file handles. The HSG application makes extensive use of caching in the application, in the database, and in the upstream Nginx web server. The vendor must be expert in all layers of the application in order to accurately and effectively diagnose problems.

In sum, only a vendor with expert knowledge of the open standards and open-source software listed above—eXist, TEI Publisher, and the full stack of libraries and layers supporting them—can responsibly provide development and maintenance services for FSI/OH’s HSG infrastructure. Only the services of a qualified developer will ensure FSI/OH can continue its numerous, high-priority, in-progress development projects that are essential for advancing FSI/OH’s modernization plans. If the contract is not awarded to a qualified vendor who could not accurately diagnose the sources of problems and maintain enterprise service levels, FSI/OH’s website could fall victim to surges in traffic, denial of service attacks, or cybersecurity attacks, threatening FSI/OH’s ability to carry out its Congressional mandate to publish the FRUS series.

4. An identification of the statutory authority permitting other than full and open competition:

• FAR 13.501(a)(ii) under the authority of 41 U.S.C.1901 o Prepared using the format at FAR 6.303-2

5. A demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the action require use of the authority cited.

Having performed extensive market research earlier this year, as well as regularly over the last 15 years, FSI/OH determined that at present only one firm, soliciting federal contracts, has the expertise in the standards and technologies described in detail above and is qualified and capable to provide IT development and maintenance services for them: eXist Solutions GmbH.

This firm is the world’s top expert in eXist, the free, open-source database and application server that FSI/OH has used since 2009 as the foundation of its public website and associated applications. Its director founded the eXist project in 2001 and is the lead developer of the open-source project, as well as the TEI Publisher project that FSI/OH has used since 2015.

eXist Solutions GmbH has demonstrated its expertise in these standards and technologies by having previously provided FSI/OH and others in the field of scholarly publishing with enterprise eXist and TEI Publisher support services. At present, no firm is better suited for the task of providing support to FSI/OH.

6. A description of the efforts made to ensure that offers are solicited from as many potential sources as is practicable, include whether a notice was or will be publicized as required by Subpart 5.2 and, if not, which exception under 5.202 applies.

FSI/OH has sought out firms who might fulfill this requirement. Most recently, on January 19, 2024, FSI/OH posted an RFI on SAM.Gov, to which five companies responded. After a thorough review of the responses, FSI/OH determined that at present only eXist Solutions GmbH had the requisite capabilities.

Additionally, in 2020, FSI solicited this requirement on SAM.GOV resulting in responses from six companies, of which only two were found qualified by the TEP, eXist Solutions and Evolved Binary. The government awarded the contract to Evolved Binary. However, the government chose not to exercise the second option year, due to poor performance by that vendor.

7. A determination by the contracting officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable. Note: dollar amounts may not exceed statutory limitations for the commercial items test program identified in FAR 13.500.

A determination was made by the Contracting Officer that the anticipated Cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

8. A description of the market research conducted (per FAR Part 10) and the results or a statement of the reason market research was not conducted.

FSI/OH has sought out firms who might fulfill this requirement. Most recently, earlier this year, FSI/OH conducted an RFI, to which 5 companies responded. After a thorough review of the responses, FSI/OH determined that only eXist Solutions GmbH had the requisite capabilities.

Prior to this, a solicitation for this service issued in June 2021 produced only two responsible offers, based upon which one vendor, Evolved Binary, was awarded the contract. However, Evolved Binary was unable to provide the required services, and the contract was not renewed in July 2023.

Following this episode, a contract was awarded to eXist Solutions GmbH to maintain continuity of services.

eXist Solutions GmbH, has competently restored services neglected by the previous vendor, met all important development milestones, and helped FSI/OH respond to unplanned server migration mandates from IRM and unexpected cybersecurity attacks.

eXist Solutions GmbH personnel have undergone Moderate Risk Public Trust (MRPT) background investigations—a process that took months—and they have proven their trustworthiness and adherence to all Government requirements for vendors.

9. Any other facts supporting the use of other than full and open competition such as:

The market research described above did not produce a reasonable expectation of obtaining offers from two or more responsible small business concerns that are competitive in terms of fair market prices, quality, and delivery. Therefore, the requirement shall be awarded as a sole source direct award to eXist Solutions GmbH

10. A listing of the sources, if any, that expressed, in writing, an interest in the acquisition.

11. A statement of any actions the agency will take to remove or overcome any future barriers to competition before any subsequent acquisition for the supplies or services required.

By selecting open standards and free, open-source software to power the HSG and CMS infrastructure, FSI/OH ensures there are no barriers to competition for solicitations for support services for it. Any firm interested in providing development and maintenance services for future solicitations can freely study the aforementioned standards’ specifications, download the eXist-db project’s source code and documentation; study the O’Reilly book on eXist-db; contribute to the eXist-db open source community repositories and discussion forums; develop expertise and experience in the software; and provide development and support services that can form the basis of a capabilities statement, During the course of this base-plus two option periods, FSI/OH will continue to monitor developments in industry to identify firms soliciting federal contracts for procurement with open competition. Before the contract nears its end, FSI/OH will issue another RFI to invite firms to share their capabilities. FSI/OH looks forward to reviewing future responses from capable firms.