One the main reasons the General Services Administration established the team at 18F was to find ways to speed up the acquisition process around technology, particularly software. The team has come up with a lot of ideas to achieve this but the most recent is perhaps the quickest — and cheapest — option to-date.

18F's micro-purchase pilot — an auction to see whether the government could purchase code using the agency credit card — was largely successful, prompting the team to create a standalone website to host more of these auctions.

The first set of proposals were posted on Jan. 11, with five opportunities to bid on work. The auctions started at $3,500 — the maximum for using an agency credit card without going through the full acquisition process — with the lowest acceptable bidder winning the contract.

The auctions opened at 1 p.m. and as of 1:30 Monday, bids on four of the five projects had fallen below $2,000 and dropping.

Two of the project seemed to get rock-bottom bids out of the gate, with one receiving a $1 bid and another a $2 bid shortly after the auctions opened.

These bids were actually due to a bug, according to an 18F spokesperson. Due to a problem in the code, the commas were being dropped from bids, making a $1,000 register as $1. That was fixed as of Monday afternoon and regular (read: slower) down-bidding continued.

The original pilot auction actually resulted in a coder offering to do the work for $1. The team doesn't expect this will be the norm going forward but is interested to see the results of this next set of auctions.

"We learned a great deal from the first auction and have numerous hypotheses around how future auctions could play out," said David Zvenyach, 18F director of acquisition management. "We want to first test the validity of our platform with the next batch of auctions."

Two of the projects ask for work on the micro-purchase site itself, including fixing spacing issues on the auction details page and creating a display that shows the individual auction start times.

The other three opportunities ask for fixes to 18F's Tock app, which employees use to track their hours and submit time sheets.

Bidding closes on all three projects at 5 p.m. on Jan. 12.

People and companies interested in competing will have to sign up for the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) before being able to bid.

Note: The original headline and story were changed to explain the "comma bug." As of the evening of Jan. 11, there were no $1 bids on any of the five auctions.

Aaron Boyd is an awarding-winning journalist currently serving as editor of Federal Times — a Washington, D.C. institution covering federal workforce and contracting for more than 50 years — and Fifth Domain — a news and information hub focused on cybersecurity and cyberwar from a civilian, military and international perspective.

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