Pre-offer Conference Transcript - Social Media Tool.pdf

Social Media Archiving Solution – Pre-Offer Conference Transcript October 1, 2024, 1:00 PM PST

Q: Can someone walk us through what the goal for this project is? Are you (Agency) looking for a three, five year-term contract?

What's your timeline for the capture of the data and the solution and the preferences in terms of the SaaS offerings?

Any inputs on what you're looking for in terms of the solutions capabilities?

A: Timeline-wise, our standard contracts run between one and five years. We're definitely interested in starting with at least a three-year contract. We do have an attachment for the solicitation that goes through the capabilities that we're hoping for pretty extensively. So please look at that if you haven't already.

This is an ongoing need which would adjust over time. Currently we have a level of total accounts, for example that we are needing to capture, but that will shift over time as we are live connecting to a couple different political offices and then the second part of that is we will have an increasing number potentially of inactive accounts that we also have to capture and maintain to a point until such a time as we can export that data.

So for example, a governor serves four or eight terms here. We are capturing their social media accounts. When that governor leaves office, those accounts are essentially frozen or suspended. The new governor has new social media accounts where our responsibilities here at the state archives will be to capture that content from the previous governor and move it to sort of an archive status. The idea would be to have that data “on ice” for access for a time, and then we would like to be able to export that data to our own repository, no longer maintain it in the active client and then of course we'd have new accounts, so it kind of be a rotating basis.

You mentioned SaaS. That is our desired model. Our internal IT resources can vary over time and on prem installations involve really extensive process that can really slow these things down. So we are looking for a fairly lightweight solution where most of the most of the heavy lifting takes place in the cloud via a SaaS model with connectors where we can then export data to our own systems at a later point.

Q: I'm sure you have done some surveys of existing solutions in the marketplace and yet you chose to go this IRFP route. Was there a reason to choose this route rather than soliciting responses from select vendors?

A: We (Agency) have a fairly strict procurement rules in the state where any contract that's going to exceed a certain monetary threshold is required to go to RFP.

We are able to do short term, stopgap contracts in a pinch, but this is a long term solicitation so this is the only route we have for available to us.

We do have price agreements that we can utilize which have executed contracts we can sort of piggyback off of, but it doesn't really give us the flexibility to see what's new in the market and choose what seems to be the best fit for our needs.

Q: Do you have any idea as to how much volume of data you think currently exists in the social media for the 10-12 users you’ve listed?

A: I don't know that we've ever seen it in a in a data volume metric. It's not how it's been measured traditionally. From what we can tell, we've got about from 2016 to 2023 in terms of time frame and then each account had various postings according to their own social media schedule. We never got a sense of how much data is in that per say, but it does fit those year time frames.

Currently we've been doing that for about 10 accounts. Realistically, we'd be looking for as many as 15 or so at any given time, as different offices come in, new platforms arise and things shift a little bit.

Q: Is there anything that the current client does not provide that you're looking for in this solution? You're saying you're starting from scratch.

A: The biggest thing is bulk export of old data. We've struggled with that. The built in tools aren't really built for it, and we've not had a lot of success. You can export subsets, but say we have a governor account, for example. 8 years old, and that governor is no longer in office. We don’t want to maintain all those inactive accounts within the active client in perpetuity. There's a certain utility for a while, but then after a while, when especially as it gets older, the access needs reduce somewhat. We have to keep it, but we don't necessarily want to be keeping it actively up there. And in that scenario, we need an option to essentially bulk scrape and download that account in a way that's useful to us, and that's been a shortcoming with what we’ve had.

On a broader scope, we've been using the current tool for about five years and the market keeps changing, so we really want to see what the offerings look like comparatively.

Q: So there are couple of ways to look at this. One is the discovery use case, meaning that most of the requirements to be met are four-year related and that's kind of the discovery use case, but are there also any needs for litigations and more active case management and things like real time capture, etc.?

A: Not a whole lot. For the governor's office, for example, we are in the Secretary of State's office. As the state archives, we have a responsibility to retain permanently valuable records, but we're not responsible for the active day-to-day management of them while they are still in active office. So in that scenario, any of those sort of real time events are something that the governor's office themselves are managing.

I would note that we're leading this because this responsibility to retain records, but we are going to be working with the governor’s direct IT support. So there could be a benefit to that. I can see they might choose to use it that way, but I can't speak for them.

While it might be something that they would want to take advantage of once it's in place, since this is State Archive’s project, not the governor’s, we haven’t discussed that yet.

For the other side of this, we are within the Secretary of State's office and we do also support that elected office and those individuals. In that role as users within this agency, I could see us having a role in doing that. It's not our number one concern, but it is certainly something that we could potentially take advantage of that, so it's being able to identify cases, capture, track, etcetera would be beneficial. I would not say we'd be doing full on management within it because we have other solutions that the agency uses for management of those requests. It would be more of a freeze and fulfill sort of thing within this.

Q: It sounds like, potentially, if once this gets implemented then there could be some consideration maybe for other departments in the state to, like you said, leverage that if the need arises, so be nice to maybe do some kind of executive briefing with a lot of the different departments. Once you get this fully implemented and works well.

A: As you're well aware, a lot of government agencies are looking to implement things like this, and some already have, and the first thing an agency that's looking is going to do is ask, hey, what are you all using? I think there's absolutely some fringe benefit potentially for folks involved. Secondary, once there's an established contract, other agencies often will look to that for a piggyback.

REMINDER:

I want to remind everyone the references are a little bit different than they have been in previous solicitations. For anyone interested in submitting a proposal, please send the reference form to your references and then they can send it to the Secretary of State purchasing Inbox directly. You don't have to collect them back and then send them to us. You can send them to as many references as you like, if there’s any concern about them being received on time, so send it to as many as you like.

We'll just use the first three that we get for each proposer.

Q: There could be certain items which may require an NDA between the state and the vendor for disclosing certain information. And since we may not have those in place, we may have to indicate that we can disclose it after an NDA is signed.

A: That might be something that you can mention with attachment B.

REMINDER 2:

We will likely be selecting a couple of proposers with the high scores and then having a follow up interview and demonstration the week after this closes, so please keep that in mind.

Q: If we have additional questions, they’re due tomorrow, right?

A: Questions are due by noon (PST) tomorrow (10/2/24), so yes, you can send follow up questions. You can send them directly to me (Chalyce) or the purchasing inbox that's in the RFP.