Our technical committee has been working very hard to sort through all of the responses we’ve received to the RFP. We were very pleased with the quality and variety of proposals. We’ve made a preliminary decision and are moving ahead with one vendor. We expect to announce our final decision within the next three weeks.

We are still working on evaluating the proposals we have received, and will be in touch with respondents as soon as we can — likely within another week or so. Our apologies!

A couple of the proposals we’ve received were written in Spanish, and we’ve needed to get them translated so that our entire committee could consider them carefully. The committee has not yet met in full to review proposals, but we hope to do so by January 10th. If the delay causes problems for people’s timelines, we will definitely take that into consideration and offer room for changes.

We’re excited to have received six very solid proposals, and are no longer accepting any new ones. The technical committee is hard at work evaluating them (a process taking a bit longer as we await translations of proposals). We’ll post more details here as we have them.

We have received urgent pleas from two groups needing just a bit more time, and so we will accept proposals through Tuesday, December 19th.

Must respondents represent an established institution, or could it be an individual or group of people getting together for the purposes of responding to the proposal?

It could be any of these things, but we will be looking for a good track record at building similar kinds of sites, and we will want to feel confidence that we can trust the respondent to accomplish what they say they will do. We will be able to issue payment checks to an individual or an institution, but if to an informal group there needs to be one person to whom the check is issued and they then disburse it.

You refer in 2.22.2 to RSS. Why do you need such syndication?

We will be using this in a variety of ways. Imagine someone doing a specialized search for something, and then having that search available to subscribe to using RSS, and in that way they are automatically notified if new content matching that search shows up. This might be one way, for example, that people would stay in touch with specific channels of content.

Do you expect to present multimedia as well as allow its exchange?

Well, we’re not building YouTube! At least not yet. So we’re not really expecting to be able to stream multiple formats, more we expect to be able to present things in their original format. Images we would like to show up in some way, but video and audio files people would have to download to access.

Can you say more about your idea of the folksonomies?

We are expecting some free-form folksonomy… fields in the meta-data that allow for free-form description of item. We also want users to be able to add tags to items created by other users. We will also need the ability to remove tags that are spam or inappropriate in some way (obscene, etc.).

Can one content item belong to several channels?

YES, if approved to do so by the channel administrators.</P