These 8 companies bid to redesign and host the City of Baltimore’s website

After unveiling a new website in early summer 2012, the City of Baltimore is now interested in redesigning its website again.
According to the bidding document issued by the city, the “Mayor’s Office of Information Technology (MOIT) is seeking a qualified vendor to provide a cloud-based solution for the design, development and annual hosting for the City of Baltimore’s website.” The new site must “maintain similar look and feel of [the] current city site.”
Per the bidding document, it also appears that some of the impetus for the new site is to integrate the city’s current website with open data tools:

• The bid says the vendor chosen must make sure the new website is integrated with “community collaboration sites.” Councilmatic is mentioned by name. It’s the Code for America tool that allows city residents to track city council legislation and subscribe to e-mail updates about bills as they move through committee. A version of the tool is in use in both Philadelphia and Chicago.
• The new site must have “GIS functionality for the mapping of city buildings and offices.”
• Among the bullet-points under “design and functionality” is one that says the new site must be integrated with an “open data portal (Socrata).” Socrata is a Seattle-based cloud company that is working to standardize government data releases, and its Open Data Platform was used in the making of the city’s OpenBaltimore open data portal.
• In addition, the company chosen to redesign the website must “act as a resource for open data, citizen hacking, or other community-based projects.”

As for the bidders themselves, one of the eight is The Canton Group from Baltimore city, and three others are Maryland-based. Hat-tip to Baltimore Sun city hall reporter Luke Broadwater for tweeting out a link to a list of the bidders — see page 2 — which we’ve itemized below:

1. CivicLive, a Toronto-based company with a bid of $99,000.
2. Pro Site Builder, LLC, a Georgia-based company with a bid of $68,000.
3. Strativia Software, a Largo, Md.-based company with a bid of $242,400.
4. Interpersonal Frequency, LLC, a New York City-based company with a bid of $286,367.
5. Mirage Software, Inc. (doing business as Bourntec Solutions, Inc.), an Illinois-based company with a bid of $600,150.
6. The Canton Group, based in Canton in Baltimore city, with a bid of $840,244.
7. TISTA Science and Technology Corporation, a Rockville, Md.-based company with a bid of $558,720.
8. Eco-Consulting, Inc., a Silver Spring, Md.-based company with a bid of $150,500.