PRE-PROPOSAL_TRANSCRIPTION.pdf

DIMOC DIGITIZATION & STORAGE

PRE-PROPOSAL TRANSCRIPTION

5 MAR 2013/0900 (PST)

00:03:43 MARILYN JACKSON: All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming.

Welcome to beautiful Southern California. It’s very nice here. We came up from the East Coast where they’re getting hit with another snowstorm I guess so we’re happy to be here, very happy to be here.

00:04:05 Okay. We’re going to have – Mike is going to introduce the government team. Then what I’m going to do is just kind of go over your proposal submission requirements, see, you know, I don’t know how many people have actually filled out a government solicitation. So there’s a lot of paperwork involved and we’ll kind of go over those requirements. We’re going to have a demonstration of the Defense Imagery website, which will be in here, correct? And then a tour of the holdings and then a question and answer session.

00:04:36 And the thing that’s important with the Q and A session, we need to be able to make sure we capture everything so especially if your questions get a little complicated, we may ask you to submit them in writing so that we can get a thorough answer or response to you. So, Mike.

00:04:56 MIKE EDRINGTON: Good morning. I’m Mike Edrington. I’m the Deputy Director of DIMOC, the Defense Imagery Management Operations Center. I’ve met some of you previously, talked to some of you on the phone. Welcome to the gentleman from Belgium who made a long trip here to participate, and I do appreciate your continued interest in this.

This has been a yearlong effort to get to this point as some of you do know because you participated in our previously Industry Day. We went from taking your questions and an exchange of information and tried to shape it into a Request for Proposal that was more palatable to industry. So I appreciate all the input that we got.

00:05:38 So that said, allow me to introduce the team that has been working on this for about a year.

It’s an unusual kind of contract and it’s taken a lot of effort. First is Marilyn Jackson, our Contracting Officer for the Defense Media Activity that’s kind of shepherded us through this process.

00:05:55 The next person is sitting in the back, Mr. Alan Kaufman. He is the DMA, Defense Media Activity, General Counsel and has been giving me tons of legal advice on this that I desperately needed to negotiate the DOD’s, all the federal acquisition requirements and other things along with Mr. Tom Tinti, our contracting lawyer, who has – did yeoman’s effort to get us through a lot of legal wickets because this is an unusual contract that we’ll be doing.

00:06:28 The next person who is very important that will be with me on our source selection panel is our Chief Technical Officer and our CIO, Mr. Craig Kaucher, who has come out from Washington. Yeah, there’s me, of course, and then Mr. Vince Rotell. He is Director of our Visual Information Services. That’s our customer service for the entire department for visual communications and stationed at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

00:06:57 The next person is Mr. Greg Porter, our Director of the VI Record Center here that manages our holdings, our VI archive. Lastly, but certainly not least is – I’m actually going to introduce two people as Miss Julia Hickey, our Archivist at the DIMOC headquarters in Washington, D.C.

00:07:23 And then I also want to take a point to introduce Dr. Pedro Loureiro. We have two archivists on staff and he is more or less our tactical archivist. He makes sure that we don’t destroy what we have in our holdings. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Marilyn and we’ll get into the briefing. Again, I welcome you all and I look forward to meeting you as we progress through this conference. Thank you.

00:07:50 MARILYN JACKSON: [inaud.] great. Let me know at any time if you can’t hear me. I don’t really like standing behind the podium so just let me know if I need to speak up. At this point now we are in a source selection process so it’s very important that you limit your contacts to Lila or to me and that’s our information there, phone numbers, email, which is also always on FBO with any changes. We need to make sure that any communications come through the contracting office. Okay.

00:08:26 And this is our standard disclaimer. Any remarks or explanations provided during this pre-proposal conference will not change the terms and conditions of the solicitation. Any changes will be accomplished in writing and posted to the government point of entry, which is FedBizOpps or FBO, and we need to have questions addressed in writing and those answers will be provided then also on FBO.

00:08:54 Currently the due date is 5 April. The delivery location is George Meade, 2 p.m. local time.

Now we have had at least one request for an extension so if that’s something that is a consensus, you may want to bring that up during the Q and A session and we can take that under consideration, but any changes – right now that’s when it’s due. Any changes will be posted on FBO.

00:09:25 If you come into George Meade if you’re going to either hand-deliver your proposal or if you’re going to use a courier service like either a private one or UPS or FedEx, you need to remember that it is a secure facility. You’re going to need to access through the gate guard first and then once you get to DMA, there are guards within the building there. So you need to make sure you take into consideration delivering your proposal. You want it to get there on time so please make sure. Guards cannot accept your proposals.

00:10:02 Now, this is one of the things that has changed. We did have in there for ten years for the contract period. Right now we are back to a base plus four option years, but the period of exclusivity will be for ten years. And we’re prepared to provide funds up to one million per year for years one through four, 995,000 for year five.

00:10:32 And these are it says subject to availability of funds. That’s because we are funded on a fiscal-year basis and we have to wait for Congress sometimes a little longer than we want to get those funds. Basis of award, this is going to be a source selection best value determination. We intend to award one contract to one responsible offer whose proposal conforms to the solicitation and is determined to be the best value to the government. And we do reserve the right to either accept other than the lowest price or to reject any or all offers.

00:11:17 Okay. The basis of award. The technical factors – and this is also in the Addendum to FAR Part 52.212-1. All of you have been given a copy and the revised one has been posted on FBO. Descending order of importance, technical approach management plan, that’s the most important and it’s considered approximately twice as important as experience and past performance combined. And then subcontracting plan is the least important. And when combined, the technical factors are approximately equal to price.

00:12:01 All right. We’re going to talk about what to submit, how we’re going to evaluate, and then what happens after that. So if you look at your addendum, you’re going to submit as part of volume one your technical proposal, which is your factor one, technical approach management plan; factor two, experience; factor three is past performance; factor four is the subcontracting plan.

00:12:33 And we need an original, five copies, and one CD or DVD. And if you look through, just kind of go through, it gives you a lot more details within the addendum, which talks about how to, you know, put it together. I’m not going to get into all of that but basically how to organize it and put it together and what other information we need there.

00:13:06 Volume two for the price proposal and the administrative submission. We’ll want your price proposal. That’s factor five. And then a signed offer letter. It can be just something that needs to show your commitment to whatever your proposal is signed by an authorized individual with your company. Your reps and certs, if you’re going to have a joint venture agreement, you’ll want to include that.

00:13:37 And we’ll need your points of contact, including emails, phone numbers, some way for us to get ahold of you. The name, address of the company; the DUNS code, the CAGE code; and your tax ID number. And we may have to talk separately about the gentleman from Belgium how that works. You will have to be registered in CCR though in order to receive an award.

00:14:06 All right. What I would suggest you do... How many of you have ever filled out a government proposal before? Okay. So we’ve got some people with experience at that.

What I would suggest you do as you’re going through, look at factor one under the submission requirements where we’ve asked you what to submit for the technical [inaud.] management plan. Then go back to – hold on – factor one where we tell you how we’re going to evaluate it.

00:14:47 Because we tell you what we want you to submit. We want to have a program management plan; a disaster recovery contingency plan; your program manager’s resume; a quality assurance plan, which we are going to take and turn into our QA surveillance plan; and a marketing plan. So look at what we have asked you to address in each of those submissions and then compare it with how we’re going to evaluate it, what constitutes a good plan.

00:15:24 And make sure, you know, if you have to go through and just kind of as you’re submitting or preparing your proposal, that you just kind of checked off and identified all of those requirements. Put it in detail because the team is going to evaluate it and if they’re missing any kind of details, it could, you know, end up in a detrimental rating for your company.

00:15:46 MS: Question. Are you calling things under factor one formal subfactors...

MARILYN JACKSON: No.

MS: ...in a descending order of importance?

MARILYN JACKSON: No.

MS: Okay.

MARILYN JACKSON: The technical management plan, there’s no subfactors. Can you go back up one? There’s no subfactors within any of this. The technical approach management plan is all one factor.

MS: Would you call these equally weighted?

MARILYN JACKSON: They’re all equally weighted.

MS: Okay.

MARILYN JACKSON: They need to all be addressed and need to all be documented. So, no, no subfactors.

00:16:21 MARILYN JACKSON: Experience is pretty straightforward. We need three projects within the last five years and we’ll evaluate that for the relevance and, yeah, look through there and it tells you what is considered relevant experience. So that’s what we want to see is three projects within the last five years that address those areas that are considered relevant.

00:16:50 Past performance, we need you to complete the top portion of the past-performance questionnaire that we sent out. Because the government team will be contacting, please make sure that you’ve got good points of contact on your past-performance questionnaires and it needs to be for those projects that you’re submitting under the experience factor.

00:17:23 So make sure we’ve got good points of contact. Let them know, you know, that... You can send them a copy of the questionnaire ahead of time. Let them know that we’re going to be contacting them and asking them a series of questions. And you can also include any awards you’ve received, any letters of appreciation, anything, you know, any little pat on the back.

And we are also going to be looking in, for those of you who have had government contracts, we’ll look in papers [ph.] and various other government databases just to see what kind of evaluation forms that you have in there.

00:18:06 Now when we look at this, there’s two portions to it, and you’ll notice that also in the addendum. It’s evaluated first for is it relevant. And it goes without saying I guess, but I’ll say it anyway, if your experience is not relevant, then your past performance is not going to be relevant. So you kind of get hit with a double whammy on that. So make sure you have relevant experience and then your past performance will be relevant.

00:18:38 And then we look at how well did... So it’s the relevance portion and then it’s how well did you perform. In other words, were your customers happy when you go through the list of questionnaires? The subcontracting plan is a requirement for large businesses and it encourages the contractor to utilize businesses from the various socioeconomic programs.

And we do have the list of goals in there from each of those.

00:19:14 Now, this is something we were just brainstorming about right up until the conference. Since we had kind of a change in approach, we were basically kind of forced to reduce from the ten years to the five years. So what we’re going to be looking at is the capacity to store over the five-year term of the contract through the period of exclusivity. We want to see the best schedule of return of digitization and storage for the best price.

00:19:49 Part of your management plan is to come up with your schedule of how, you know, how you intend to get the digits in place. And then we want something that provides the government with maximum access to all content digitized to date during the five-year term of the contract through the period of exclusivity. So that would be for the ten-year period then.

00:20:23 Now, the way that the FAR reads, and the FAR counsel has been working on changing this for several years now, but government wheels turn slowly. The FAR clause is that we intend to award without discussions. I will tell you that we really do plan that we’re going to have to have discussions just because of the nature of [inaud.].

00:20:55 However, please make sure you submit your best proposal the first time around because you may not get a second chance because what will happen – go to the next one – if we do go into discussions, the first thing that we have to do is do a competitive range determination. So if your proposal doesn’t hit the mark, you may be excluded from that competitive range and you won’t be included in discussions then.

00:21:24 So please, please make sure you go through the requirements very carefully. Make sure you’ve addressed everything. And then you can anticipate that you would be included in the competitive range and then we would be having discussions. What we will do though once the team goes through and evaluates and writes up their initial report, we’d have the competitive range determination.

00:21:55 Then we have discussions with all offers within the competitive range. After concluding those discussions we ask you to resubmit based on questions we had, maybe discrepancies, maybe weaknesses, issues we’d like for you to resolve and you resubmit then based on those discussions. Then the team gets together and they have to evaluate your resubmissions in the same manner that they evaluated the initial proposals. So they’re going to have a lot of work.

00:22:33 MS: Will you notify those that are identified upfront as being outside the competitive range?

MARILYN JACKSON: Yes. Once they go through, do their initial evaluation, and let’s say if somebody came in and they missed, completely missed aspects of the technical management plan or if... Experience, you know, it’s hard to say. We might say, “Do you have anything more relevant?”

00:23:05 But if someone really missed the mark a lot, we will notify them that yes, they did – are excluded from the competitive range. And at that time you can be given either an opportunity for a debrief then or an opportunity for a debrief after award of a contract. You get more information if you wait until after the award. So if your company is excluded from a competitive range, you might want to wait and ask for a post-award debriefing.

00:23:41 MS: Do you envision the potential of those companies being allowed back in as a result of discussions should something come up with another company?

MARILYN JACKSON: I have never heard of that happening. Usually if we exclude someone from the competitive range, their proposal is pretty deficient.

MS: Yeah.

MARILYN JACKSON: So...

MS: Yeah. I’m thinking the only opportunity then you would have is if nobody gets the award and we redo it.

00:24:10 MARILYN JACKSON: True. And we have to go out again.

MS: That’s the only other opportunity.

MARILYN JACKSON: That’s true.

MS: There is great knowledge that is going to be emanated from this discovery phase. Do these documents at some point become public records that people could actually see and learn and hopefully revolutionize the industry?

MARILYN JACKSON: Are you talking about the contract proposal or...?

MS: Yeah. The awards or proposals, at some point do they become public domain or public information?

00:24:41 MARILYN JACKSON: That’s something that we really will probably have to be working with counsel on because if a contractor comes in and says they’ve got a proprietary approach that they don’t want to divulge, you know, there may be some ways... We’re going to have to work on how we’re going to set up the contract.

MS: But if it’s from time to time, somebody who doesn’t get the contract wants to set up a complaint so they’ll submit a Freedom of Information Act request for all the solicitations, which are generally releasable, but we never release that information unless – until and unless we go back to the bidder and have them have an opportunity to scrub out anything that they think is proprietary or unique to them that would create a competitive advantage for a competitor and then that gets deleted before anything is released.

00:25:33 MARILYN JACKSON: And under DoD like unit prices are not releasable in general.

MS: Okay.

MIKE EDRINGTON: I just wanted to comment on competitive range. When we go through that, and correct me, Marilyn, you asked if we... I think what you were asking if we’d come back to you and give you a chance to correct what you did. And that’s probably unlikely, but generally when you’re out of the competitive range, you’re so far out that it’s probably not recoverable at that point. All right.

00:26:06 MS: Can you go back to the evaluation criteria slide?

MARILYN JACKSON: Sure.

00:26:18 MS: In the price proposal. Oh, so that was like four.

MS: It said factor five I think it said on the left?

MS: I think so.

MARILYN JACKSON: You want factor five?

MS: Factor five, yeah.

MS: It’s where it’s talking about [inaud.].

MS: Right there.

MS: There you go.

MS: Right there.

MS: There you go.

MS: So how will you really evaluate what the best deal for the government is?

MS: Crystal ball.

00:26:39 MARILYN JACKSON: Good question. That’s what we were kind of brainstorming. What we really want though, we’re going to – I mean you’re going to give us your – as part of your management plan technical approach, you’re going to give us your schedule on how you propose to digitize the content. And what we really want is what’s going to give us the best return on our investment.

MS: In terms of groups of data, quantity of information, how much value it is, what?

00:27:15 MIKE EDRINGTON: How much can you digitize? How fast can you digitize it? How much storage can you provide? Can you integrate with our website? You want me to keep going?

MS: Yeah.

MARILYN JACKSON: [inaud.] I got it.

MS: Yeah.

MS: Yeah, keep going.

MIKE EDRINGTON: The file formats, that you’re going to meet our standards for file formats, H.264, what are the codecs, all those kinds of things that we’re interested in so we can manage it on our end.

00:27:41 You’ve got to take it into consideration because you’re going to market it to the public, right.

So we’re going to look at all those things. All right. Your ability – also we’re going to look somewhat at what your marketing strategy is going to be because we don’t want it to be detrimental to the Department of Defense or the Government of the United States, right.

MS: Sure.

MIKE EDRINGTON: So we’re going to look at all of that. And then we’re going to look at you as a viability as a company or as an institution as the case may be. Okay.

00:28:12 MS: So when you mean storage, as I understand it, you need as much storage as data you’re going to digitize. So what do you mean by storage as a value of...?

MIKE EDRINGTON: That’s it.

MS: And then evaluation criteria?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Well, how much are you going to digitize the first year? I’m not sure.

How much are you going to be able to do? What’s your capacity to digitize in the first year?

And then provide that storage through the term of the contract. Yes, sir?

00:28:34 MS: One of the things that I see when you start to refine codecs and start to really look at the range of things that you guys are looking for is that there’s a low end qualifying like an

MPEG-4.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah. I got that.

MS: There’s a JPEG 2000 [inaud.] at a high end.

MIKE EDRINGTON: [inaud.] long term.

MS: That’s a big range, right?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right. We want the best you can do.

MS: There’s different ways to say best though.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Okay. I get it. Storage is dollars, okay, and whether you go from a simple still JPEG 5 to a JPEG 2000 or let’s say even camera raw, I mean that’s a lot of storage. All right.

00:29:18 MS: True.

MIKE EDRINGTON: So we understand that. That may come up. That discussion may come up in the discussion phase of this thing how we’re going to do it.

MS: Okay.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We have a certain standard right now that we store by and it’s really not optimum even for the Department. It’s not optimum to you as an American citizen really because we store – our capacity to store if we take a still image is what, JPEG 12, is that what it is?

FS: That’s right.

MS: Mm-hmm [yes].

00:29:46 MIKE EDRINGTON: Right. So I would prefer not to store in JPEG. What can you do for us? All right.

MS: So think about low end and high end?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah. Yes, sir?

MS: Is it possible to present a tiered approach with one format being one codec this way and one codec this way, this would be [inaud.]?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Absolutely.

MS: Okay.

FS: What may be important for you to keep in mind too is the technical guidelines from the National Archives about how we have to submit our imagery to them. So if you can make it easier for us so we don’t have to reconvert an image in order to transfer it to the National Archives, I’m giving you some suggestions here, you know, that might be beneficial to us.

00:30:23 And that would fall in line with what Mr. Edrington just said about, you know, what’s easier for you and what works for us on the same end, it needs to be mutually beneficial. [unint.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: The archives has a lower threshold. I mean if I’m dealing in Hollywood, you know, or long-term storage, we know we’re looking at JPEG 2000. A lot of people are, but there really is no standard, is there?

MS: No.

MIKE EDRINGTON: And we all know that sitting in this room, but we’re all looking for what the optimum would be.

00:30:55 And the key is what you put in today, can I get it out tomorrow? And we all realize that as well. So that being the case, the archives has, the National Archives has a certain standard.

Ours is pretty low right now because our capacity to store, current capacity to store. So looking out five years, I’m going to evaluate, I’d like to evaluate on the best that you could give.

00:31:23 And you can keep in mind that the National Archives, we should, that would make it easy for us because they have a standard. But I want to know the best. I want to know who can provide the most for the best, the fastest, the cheapest.

MS: Then there’s a key question that needs to be asked. I’m surprised no one has. You have two very trained, one military historian and one archivist. If we look at the way that the conversation has flowed from the [unint.] to now, there’s been some changes.

00:31:56 What I’m left asking is the DVD that we received, the quality of the records that take the form of film video or audio are going to be all over the place as far as importance of those records, right. Some are going to be like the John Travolta landing at a facility.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right. Right. Right.

MS: Others are going to be, you know, we utilize footage that happens at NASA all the time.

There’s footage, hours upon hours of a rocket ship at a launch just in case something happens, evidence record.

00:32:35 Will we have any opportunity to have those from your community that know why this record is important or are we as industries supposed to come up with our own teams of those that determine the value of your records?

MIKE EDRINGTON: You’re going to digitize to a standard in your proposal. You’re going to determine what that standard is. All right.

00:33:01 Certainly that content you’re going to discover content within our system that maybe that we weren’t as aware of that might be of increased value to us, but the important thing is that you have it, you’ve got it, it’s digitized, and it’s available. I don’t know any other way to couch that. You’re going to make in your proposal we can digitize these formats to these standards.

You have copies of our digitization and storage study.

00:33:30 MS: Sure.

MIKE EDRINGTON: That was posted within Federal BizOpps and so you can take some measurement of those. I certainly understand how videotape gets digitized to this format [unint.] film, analog film; [unint.], you know, 33 millimeter still images. I certainly understand that.

MS: But there’s the split part of it, which is the value or the record in...

MIKE EDRINGTON: I get the value, but you’re increasing our value. You’re doing us a service. I mean...

JULIA HICKEY: Sir, are you...

00:34:00 MIKE EDRINGTON: ...because we get it – we get it into digits. All right. And so I want the best digits. All right.

JULIA HICKEY: Are you asking if you can work with the archivist on staff to enhance the metadata to properly...

MS: Enhance metadata or even the value of the record.

JULIA HICKEY: To properly document the history...?

MARILYN JACKSON: So you want to know which records we have that we know are valuable?

JULIA HICKEY: No. I think the question, and correct me here, sir, I think the question is there’s a tape of whatever and here’s the content and you want to work with the archivist and others on staff who might be able to add historical context to it that may not be in your purview?

00:34:38 MS: Exactly.

JULIA HICKEY: Is that correct?

MS: Correct.

JULIA HICKEY: Absolutely. Yes, sir, we do that on a daily basis.

MS: So we can draw from your brainpower?

JULIA HICKEY: Yes, sir. Yes. Mm-hmm [yes].

MS: Excellent.

JULIA HICKEY: Mr. Porter just made a great point.

GREG PORTER: It’s a partnership. I mean that’s – if we go back to the very beginning of this, we’re looking for a partnership and that’s one of the features of a partnership is you’re not successful if we’re not helping you; we’re not successful if you’re not helping us.

MS: Yeah. Perfect.

JULIA HICKEY: Dr. Loureiro and I have points of contact and not just the two of us, throughout the whole department. If it’s a Marine Corps image and you need additional information, we can tap those resources and et cetera throughout. Does that answer your question?

00:35:12 MS: Yeah. One of the companies I’ve been talking with deals with military footage. That’s their purview. So they reach to your retirees, ex-servicemen to kind of see what their knowledge base was. People that are in service, it becomes this question of I could look at a picture and not know the importance of that picture, right, whereas you guys are going to know well, this is this type of plane; this is this type of thing. You know, that helps to, you know. So thank you.

JULIA HICKEY: Yep.

00:35:46 MS: Excellent.

FS: Can we make sure we get that?

FS: Yes, ma’am.

FS: Okay. Thanks.

MS: Mike, correct me if I’m wrong, but your requirement as a government customer is to digitize everything?

MIKE EDRINGTON: That’s correct. Right.

MS: Okay. What you want to know is what’s the million dollar video or picture, you know.

That’s the other end of the spectrum. It’s not exclusive, you know, but on our end we eventually want all that stuff in digits that we can get access to and use and do for our own government purposes.

00:36:19 You want the million dollar... You want to know which five of the million dollar, you know, photos or videos that you can make the most off of at the, you know...

MS: Yeah.

MS: ...[unint.] the far capitalist end of the spectrum so to speak.

MS: [unint.] spectrum.

MS: Right. Yeah. And there’s a whole bunch of areas.

MS: It’s a discussion.

00:36:39 FS: One thing I did want to make sure we pointed out, if you look at the revised SOO, we did

– before we had excluded or we had put the film assets, correct?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Mm-hmm [yes]. Motion.

FS: Motion assets.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Motion.

FS: Would be at the option of the contractor. We’ve taken that out. We do want to have everything digitized.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We were asked the question why would we want to give that as any option and it’s actually to your advantage because there’s some...

00:37:10 MS: Can you define everything?

FS: Everything.

MIKE EDRINGTON: You’ll see it.

FS: It’s literal.

MIKE EDRINGTON: You’ll see it.

FS: It’s literal.

MS: And but the order is not specified, the order and types.

FS: I believe we have language that says it’s mutually – we’ll work on a...

MIKE EDRINGTON: We’ll work on it...

FS: ...mutual priority schedule.

MIKE EDRINGTON: The order is of concern for what reason? I want to hear the...

MS: What you could [inaud.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: Now, I think I know, but I have an impression, but why are you asking about the order? Because you’ve got a business model you’ve got to conform to.

00:37:44 I mean there’s an order of importance to you and we need to adapt to that.

MS: That’s right.

MS: Otherwise we [inaud.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: That, we understand that.

MS: Okay. Right.

MS: So why is a commercial rate structure an evaluation criteria?

MIKE EDRINGTON: All we want to know is that you’re not bilking [inaud.].

FS: That was taken out.

FS: That was taken out.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Was that?

FS: That was taken out, Mike.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Did we take it out? Oh, that was part of the cost.

FS: That was taken out.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah. It was taken out.

MS: Because you want us to make more money so...

MIKE EDRINGTON: We took it out.

MS: ...we can digitize more stuff.

FS: Yeah.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We took it out.

MS: Okay.

00:38:15 MARILYN JACKSON: Yeah. If you go back to the technical, the four factors, commercial rate structure is no longer in there. We don’t want to – we don’t – we know you in order to make this work, you’re going to need to make some sort of profit off of it. You are going to be the one to determine what that profit ratio is, what you can do, what the market will [inaud.]. [simultaneous conversations]

00:38:40 MS: Marilyn, are your copies over here? The SOO and the...

MARILYN JACKSON: Yeah. There’s some extra copies too.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah. Originally there was – we had discussions with the National Archives. They have some agreements. They want to know like their cafeteria contract, the guy’s not charging $5 for a candy bar. You know, it’s to protect, you know, make sure you’re not gouging, but we have no interest in what... That was taken out.

FS: And those changes were posted yesterday, Marilyn? [inaud.] this morning?

MARILYN JACKSON: This morning.

MS: Just for general information, you keep talking about NARA and NARA’s no cost solution model.

00:39:12 MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: But yet it seems as though there was either a misunderstanding of what that model was or you guys just never pursued it.

FS: No. We did pursue it.

MS: Which would, you know, that model is it will – if I want to buy footage from NARA, I don’t go to NARA. I go to the labs.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah.

MS: And labs have the relationship with NARA...

MIKE EDRINGTON: To pull it.

MS: To pull the stuff...

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: Digitize it. Here’s your file. It seems like...

00:39:40 MIKE EDRINGTON: Well, that’s kind of the same model we’re doing here. We went to a cost share because their main model is the ancestry.com model that they’re using. Ours is a little different because it’s visual content and, you know, the companies that went in there, ancestry.com was pretty clear, you know, you have death records, you have draft stuff.

You’ve got a lot of stuff you can amalgamate and contribute to searching somebody’s ancestry and then return it on the internet.

00:40:14 Ours is a little more riskier. And because of the RFI that we did, that’s where we came up with a cost-share model and we truly... Am I answering your question?

MS: Well, yes and no because if we just look at motion picture film, if I want a copy of the Zapruder film, I don’t go to NARA.

MIKE EDRINGTON: No. I [inaud.].

MS: I go to Color Lab.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: And Color Lab, those guys have made the relationship to digitize upon request.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: All right. Because ultimately it goes back to my question of value of the record.

00:40:48 Some records you’re talking about all that you’d love to see everything digitized.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah. We have an obligation to do it.

MS: Yeah.

MS: We wanted – we’re going to contractually require all of it to be digitized within the...

MS: But the level question...

MS: Within five years?

MS: ...of the codec is related to the value. If I have footage that is extremely important to people, that’s going to yield a higher codec than stuff that’s just general information type stuff. You know, there’s this flow that relates to the cost to yield product of this stuff [ph.].

00:41:24 JULIA HICKEY: And it’s something we anticipated. Obviously the Elvis Presley in Germany footage, you’re going to find greater demand for from your customers than the tank firing or something. I don’t know, you know, versus the standard thing you’re going to see.

But we still want it all digitized. How you market it and sell it and whatever package, i.e., whatever codec you want to use, that’s your business. As long as we’re getting a digit in return, it’s your business.

MS: Okay.

JULIA HICKEY: And now there was a question over here, Marilyn. There was confusion about five-year digitization. It’s five years we want the digitization done.

00:41:59 You get a ten-year period of exclusivity. That was a – I caught that. Does that clarify that question?

MS: Yeah.

JULIA HICKEY: Okay.

MS: I have another question.

FS: Yes, sir?

MS: So there’s over 100 million minutes of the – of motion stuff, right?

FS: It’s a 2010 study and that’s all based on an estimate.

MS: Right.

FS: They did a sampling [unint.].

MS: It’s a big number.

FS: Yes, sir.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Mm-hmm [yes].

MS: You’re not paying us to do it basically except for a small amount of the cost, but you’re going to contractually require us to digitize all of it in this contract? That’s...

MIKE EDRINGTON: Mm-hmm [yes].

00:42:29 MS: A yes or no?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yes.

MS: Yep.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yes.

FS: Well, that’s part of your schedule too that you’re going to come back with.

MS: A hundred percent of every little last...?

FS: That’s our goal.

[simultaneous conversations]

00:42:42 MS: If you can digitize 100 percent – if you can digitize 100 percent for a million dollars a year, then you’re going to have a really good bid because it’s an awful lot of stuff. You may not be capable of doing it. You may be able to say we can only digitize X number of stuff.

This is our rate. This is the rate of digitization we can accomplish.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: And you need to give us an honest assessment of that because we’re going to try to hold you to it and we’re going to evaluate your bid on how – what’s your rate. The higher the rate, the better we like it because our goal’s 100 percent.

00:43:12 MS: Yeah. The goal 100 percent. The higher the rate, the faster at the lowest cost with the right level of qualities, the best quality.

FS: Before the amendment...

MS: So it’s your – it’s your opinion that you can – for five million dollars you can digitize 100 percent?

MS: It’s our opinion that we’ll get that back for five million dollars [inaud.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: Part of that was giving it...

[simultaneous conversations]

00:43:31 MIKE EDRINGTON: Part of the payback was the ten-year period of exclusivity allowing whatever company wins this to market that content to the public and hopefully see a return on investment. This is just seed money. Originally, I don’t know if you were here at the original RFP. The original goal was total no cost.

MS: Yeah. Good try. [laughter]

00:43:57 MS: We are involved in Europe...

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah.

MS: ...in a very similar deal about hundreds of thousands of assets in a completely different area.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah.

MS: In no way I mean we [unint.] digitization and we speak of hundreds of thousands of items. In no way would any of the contract, you know, submitting bidders have done any proposing around that without having an in-depth understanding of the existing contract.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Right.

MS: Based on the [unint.] existing database, discussion with archivists, et cetera because the [unint.] it would be [unint.] business around know that much better than I do.

00:44:35 But I mean that can be so big difference between what the content would be. My understanding from the telephone discussions I attended and reading all the documents is that at this stage I haven’t seen any existing database of even roughly what is in the content because I mean, you know, and as long as we don’t have that...

[simultaneous conversations]

00:44:58 MS: [unint.] few million dollars just to say we want it. If we don’t [unint.].

MS: The digital sources of metadata are going to be key.

JULIA HICKEY: Right.

MS: I know you’ve put 60 days...

JULIA HICKEY: Yes, sir.

MS: ...you put a two months’ period.

JULIA HICKEY: Yes.

MS: To, you know, to go discussing with you, make a, you know, [unint.].

JULIA HICKEY: Do an inventory, yes, sir.

MS: But the prioritization is not important because again you want everything digitized. So of course we want to take the cream to start with, but we need to keep some money to digitize the rest.

JULIA HICKEY: Well, and presumably...

MS: What is the total value of your collection? And for knowing that we need to have access to whatever is available.

00:45:31 JULIA HICKEY: Okay.

MS: Yeah.

JULIA HICKEY: All right. Two things...

MS: Before we could.

JULIA HICKEY: Hang on. Hang on. Two things. It’s a good segue to what we’re about to do, but to answer your prioritization question, and I’ll come back to the whole what’s in our content question when we do the demo. The prioritization, obviously you want to do the cream of the crop right away because then you’d make more money.

MS: No. Not specifically because you may want for technical reasons to do all the [unint.] in one [unint.] or...

MIKE EDRINGTON: Yeah.

MS: There are many things different.

MS: Or you may have agency demands.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We understand that.

MS: There is a lot of things.

00:46:00 JULIA HICKEY: Right. I don’t think anyone’s under the impression that upon award we start, you know, you’re immediately digitizing everything. I mean there probably needs to be discussions on how you go about doing it.

MS: What I mean is how do we know what is your... How can we have a better understanding of the value of the contract?

JULIA HICKEY: Yes, sir. And, Lono, if we could pull up the website. So if Mr. John Yokley [ph.] is in... Yes, thank you. Sir, we talked on Friday. This goes kudos to him, this question he asked and it was a great one and something we obviously missed or just assumed everyone picked up on.

00:46:35 So this is our website, defenseimagery.mil. This is going to be the same exact example I gave Mr. Yokley [ph.] on Friday. He asked the same question, sir. How do I know what – what metadata do you have about your physical media? So if you go and run a search, and I just did a basic one over the phone with Mr. Yokley [ph.] on the word tank, and you leave all of these things checkmarked on the left here, on your left, still images, motion images, A/V, IMI. IMI is an educational product, a training product in the DoD. It stands for something, Mr. Rotell?

00:47:11 VINCE ROTELL: Interactive multimedia instruction.

JULIA HICKEY: Interactive multimedia instruction. It’s a training thing. Anyway, under motion imagery – under motion imagery, you type in a search for “tank,” you get a consolidated list, here’s the number of stills, here’s the number of motion, IMI, etcetera. You see the difference in metadata information we have. So, Lono, could you scroll up just a little bit? Do you see where it says clear JCC stringer selections? That’s what we call a title. Is that what you call a title? Absolutely not.

00:47:42 We didn’t have a metadata structure way back when. We have one now, but this is what this title is for us. This is the metadata we have for this item and scene. The MDAN, that doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s an internal ID number that we use to track this item. Look at all of that information. You have the date shot and we obviously have things older than 2007.

You have the camera operator. A file format’s buried in all this. The shot quality, the camera direction.

00:48:15 And, Lono, if you could scroll down a bit. Then you have this other result, U.S. Army soldiers and Iraqi police search for weapons. Do you see the metadata information? That big one paragraph just above here.

MS: Yeah.

JULIA HICKEY: That’s what we call the caption or did at the time when this was recorded.

It’s not what you would call the caption. It’s not what you would call a description. It’s what we call it. So when you do some of this digitization because these are physical items, we would work together on enhancing the metadata to answer your question, sir.

MS: Excellent [ph.].

00:48:44 JULIA HICKEY: The caption down here, could we document more, could we keyword more of what that clip is, what that segment is? Absolutely. And you’re going to have different keywording requirements for your clientele than what we’re going to have. So we’re going to have to work together on that.

MARILYN JACKSON: So look at how long it is, 14 seconds. That may be all it is.

JULIA HICKEY: This is just one example. We have footage going back to the 1940s, potentially just a bit earlier. Some of this we don’t know, but I can tell you very clearly for the still physical media we have in our holdings, we do not have metadata that you can search on right now.

00:49:18 For the physical motion media, bare minimum we have this. Now, is that enough for you? I, you know.

MS: Well, I think it’s fantastic that we have that information. I think, however, from a very practical point of view at this stage of evaluating the value of the global [ph.] collection of [unint.] 400,000 items, we just – I don’t think we can from a practical point of view just access your website, make a few keyword search and see what you have.

JULIA HICKEY: Right.

00:49:50 MS: Would it be feasible maybe to have a... I mean what we did in previous projects was to [unint.] there were sessions where the potential bidders were accepted for, you know, one or two days discussion about making... It was not searching the database. It was complete abstracts of the database in I don’t know whatever form it takes. No matter, whatever. So that you can regroup, okay, they have 25,000, you know, items which are more or less [unint.] because the way we [unint.] the content is to say okay, that kind of content, we can send it to that market segment.

00:50:29 That kind of content, we can send it, but we need to regroup the content in kind of larger boxes.

JULIA HICKEY: Yes, sir. We would anticipate the inventory period would be used for that.

We have any number of databases and Mr. Porter can certainly explain more about...

[simultaneous conversations]

00:50:46 MIKE EDRINGTON: He wants to know ahead of time. We were talking about [unint.].

JULIA HICKEY: And that’s a question that goes to my leadership.

MS: Can we do that?

MS: At the CSV file can you just provide that information that’s in there?

JULIA HICKEY: Marilyn, are we allowed to do that?

MARILYN JACKSON: Allowed to provide this?

[simultaneous conversations]

00:51:01 MS: ...a hundred thousand searches, but it’s not realistic for us to do that.

MS: It’s no way. Exactly.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We’ll provide you what we can. There’s a lot in our holdings that we just don’t know what’s there frankly and that’s part of it. I mean that’s where we’re at.

We’re trying to get it – part of this is we’ve been trying to get a control on it. We know we got [unint.]. We know we’ve got, you know...

MS: Yeah. Some stuff.

MIKE EDRINGTON: ...modicum.

MS: So we’re searching this. It’s in the database and all databases you can export a CSV file? That’s all we’re [ph.] asking.

MIKE EDRINGTON: Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

00:51:32 JULIA HICKEY: Oh, sir, we can do it technically. It’s whether or not contract really...

MARILYN JACKSON: Yeah. That’s fine. We can do that.

MS: Will you allow us to do that?

MARILYN JACKSON: We can do it and provide it. That’s my understanding is that you can pull it down.

MS: No. No. Up and down, yes or no, that can happen, but it’s an absolutely huge file, correct?

MS: It can be hundreds of thousands of [unint.], but to... That’s the way we analyze [unint.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: He’s coming down. He’s our DANS guy here.

00:51:57 MS: Yeah. I think we have the ability. Legally we can give you any information you need.

It’s just a question – we have to give it fairly to everybody. So it’s like to access so it’s just a question of logistics. Can they give this access to everyone?

MS: Two quick questions. One is...

MIKE EDRINGTON: One second, let’s let...

LONO KOLLARS: Hi. I’m Lono Kollars. I’m the Chief of Multimedia Services. That’s a two-part answer. We have two primary databases, the CSRS MIMS database, which has all of our physical content and for now all of our motion metadata.

00:52:35 And it has all of our still and motion metadata, some of which the still has been pushed into the DAMs that we have. So it’s an Artesia backbone for DAMs. It’s a Sequel backbone for MIMs. So we can do those dumps but independently.

MS: Oh.

MS: Yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine. So you get two files instead of one.

MS: Right.

MS: Yeah.

MS: But it will crossover. Some are in both places but very little.

MS: That’s fine.

MS: It’s just [unint.] to me that we [inaud.].

JULIA HICKEY: Yes. Lono, stay here.

00:53:07 MS: The Artesia DAM kinetics for metadata is an XML file that can be reimported into a different...?

MS: I don’t know that. It sounds like a logical assumption to me.

MS: Yeah. I’ll...

MS: We’ve never tried it.

MIKE EDRINGTON: No. We haven’t tried it. Our defense asset management officer works for me and I’ll ask that question, but if you’ll post that question as well, I would appreciate it.

MARILYN JACKSON: Send it to Lila and a copy to me.

MS: Okay.

MIKE EDRINGTON: And then, Marilyn, if you make sure I see it, then I can talk to his name is Paul Robinson and certainly we’ll try to accommodate any of those kinds of questions.

00:53:45 MS: Okay.

MS: Okay. Thanks.

MS: One of the things Pedro Loureiro, the other archivist just brought this to my attention, part of this data dump what you’re going to find is both released and unreleased imagery, okay. I’m not sure we talked about it yet this morning or not, but it’s all going to be in there with the understanding that released imagery is available to you now. We’re working on releasing the unreleased imagery and so you can anticipate the majority of that stuff also being available to you. Okay. But it will be clearly outlined within the metadata that’s made available.

00:54:16 MIKE EDRINGTON: Let me qualify one thing about released or unreleased. That means it’s just not publicly released. It’s not classified imagery in any way. It just got into our system and some public affairs officer hadn’t reviewed it. We’re working right now to get an authority that allows us – oh, you just have it so.

MS: Is there a chance that there’s any classified snuck into any of this?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Well...

MS: There better not be.

MIKE EDRINGTON: There better not be. [laughter] We’re in trouble.

00:54:43 MS: Yeah, but if you get a CMI and then into our system is a classified...

MIKE EDRINGTON: I got it. Look, the stuff comes in.

MS: We would be at fault. The government would be at fault.

MIKE EDRINGTON: We would be big-time at fault. We have procedures now for imagery that’s coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan as – it goes immediately into the classified vault into a classified system. We have definitive firewalls between those two systems.

00:55:14 I would say – can I give you a hundred percent? I can give you 99.99.

MS: Just a question on exclusivity for the ten years. If anybody outside of the DoD wants material, they have to go through us or...?

MIKE EDRINGTON: They go through you.

MS: For ten years?

MIKE EDRINGTON: Correct.

MS: And then we are not obligated to lock you in at a rate commensurate with a bid, but we can commensurate with regular pricing outside of the contract?

00:55:46 MIKE EDRINGTON: Whatever the commercial pricing structure is.

MS: Right, commercial [inaud.].

MIKE EDRINGTON: That’s what you’d charge I would assume.

MS: Okay. And then also you would direct them toward the winning bidder from here?

MIKE EDRINGTON: That’s correct.

MS: For the next ten years.

MIKE EDRINGTON: That is correct. The only part of it that we want is that if it’s a DoD or government customer, they would come... Let me – if it’s a DoD customer, they have a CAC card. They have their ID card. They CAC in through our site. You’d have them link. They could do a federated search. They’d get a return. So there would be no charge to those, okay.

MS: All right.

00:56:16 MIKE EDRINGTON: If I get a State Department customer, they then have to go to my VI Services to get it. Do you get me? They would have to go to them. All right. But if it’s a commercial entity or a public customer, they’re directed to you.

JULIA HICKEY: So then the State Department goes to Mr. Rotell at the customer services and is pointed over to you. Does that make sense?

MS: Yeah.

JULIA HICKEY: Okay. Just to finish that. Yes, Mr. [unint.]?

MS: So the…