The North America Procurement Council (NAPC) is a social enterprise dedicated to the development of local, regional and national business networks that contain the procurement solicitations of all government agencies and a substantial number of private organizations. We believe that all government procurement should be published in free and open-access web portals in order to support the democrati
c process, reduce govt. As of Jan 26 2015 we have 95 different portals online that feature procurement solicitations (requests for bids, requests for quotes, requests for proposals (RFPs), requests for qualifications (RFQs), request for information (RFIs), etc.. The portals also feature news and classified ads. Geographic Portals: There is a portal for each U.S. state and a national portal for the U.S. and Canada, plus a portal for the Caribbean and Latin America. Industry & Market Specific Portals: There are currently 40 portals for specific industries and markets, including one just for minority & woman owned businesses and one that features grants available. The current list of portals is at http://www.napc.pro/portals/
In 2014 we posted 695,914 business opportunities with a contract value of more than $2 trillion. Each month the portals have more than 250,000 unique users generating over 4 million page views. Usage is currently growing at the rate of 5-10% each month. Each of the state and national portals is owned by the people. This means that the people of Alabama own AlabamaBids.com, the people of the United States own AmericasBiz.net and the people of Canada own CanadasBiz.net, and so on. The NAPC will retain ownership of the other portals. At present the portals are supported primarily by Bid Ocean, Inc., which has donated the software, server space, data and administration. A small amount of revenue is currently being generated from advertising and subscriptions to email delivery of daily reports. The cost of just acquiring and entering the data is more than $1 million/year. Servers and administration runs about $30k a year and another $12k is spent on customer service. No taxpayer money has been spent on any of the sites. Our goal for 2015 is to increase awareness about the portals and greatly boost the number of users and advertisers. In April we will be launching a crowd-funding campaign through Kickstarter or Indie-GoGo and will launch a national media campaign. We are confident that the sites will become financially self-sufficient by 2016 through advertising, donations and the sale of upcoming apps and premium services. Once the people-owned sites are financially self-sufficient and the software is complete we will solicit proposals from other organizations to take on the administration of each portal and will ask the public to vote for which organization they would like to run their portal. The NAPC may offer to continue to administer all portals but the choice of who administers each portal will be up to the people. The people of Texas will vote for which organization they want to administer TexasBids.com. The people of the United States will vote for who they want to operate AmericasBiz.net, and so on. In every case, the people will retain ownership and control of the portal. All finances of each portal must be public and transparent and all major issues voted upon by the people. We believe that the purpose of government is to serve the needs of the people. The NAPC and the portals it creates can serve as an example of how public services can and should be run, democratically and efficiently.
