Tuesday, February 3 was a big day for GSA, and for me personally. In the morning, I had the incredible experience of meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office to talk about the work that's going into developing the Agile Delivery Services marketplace.

While that discussion was going on, 18F and GSA’s Office of Integrated Technology Services (ITS) held a pair of Industry Day events for our upcoming Agile Delivery Services blanket purchase agreement (BPA). More than 700 people registered for the events, showing just how much interest there is from the private sector in this new BPA.

During both the online webinar and the in-person gathering at the GSA Auditorium, GSA’s expert panel — consisting of 18F’s Noah Kunin, Aaron Snow, Russ Unger, and myself and ITS’ Hassan Harris and Giovanni Onwuchekwa — laid out why we’re creating this BPA and how we envision the marketplace working.

The audience raised a number of questions for the panel, and offered some great suggestions, many of which we’ve now decided to incorporate in the upcoming Request for Quote (RFQ). If you couldn’t make the webinar, you can view a recording of it, and we should have video of the afternoon session shortly.

It was great to see so many people in the GSA auditorium to hear keynote speakers Adam Neufeld (GSA Chief of Staff), Kay Ely (Director of GSA IT Schedule 70), Greg Godbout (Executive Director of 18F), and Ryan Panchadsaram (U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer) discuss the value of this BPA to GSA and the government at large.

To underscore how unique this initiative is, several media outlets covered the events, including Federal News Radio (which also live tweeted the event), NextGov, FedScoop, and FierceGovernmentIT.

The events also attracted some positive tweets, including this one from @Ken_2scientists: “Listening to the @18F Agile Delivery Services Industry Day Q&A: I don't think I've ever been more optimistic about our government ...”

On behalf of the 18F and ITS team, thanks to all the vendors who responded to the Request for Information (more than 280) and participated in the Industry Day events.

Be sure to monitor GSA eBuy and FedBizOpps for more information on the upcoming RFQ.