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Contract Opportunity

This is a notice of intent to solicit and award a sole source contract .

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Procurement Operations (OPO) on behalf of the DHS Science & Technology (S&T) Directorate, Systems Engineering and Standards (SES) Division hereby issues this notice of intent to award a sole source contract to World Wide Web Consortium Inc., 401 Edgewater Pl #600, Wakefield, MA 01880.

Background

The standards program in S&T Office of Science and Engineering (OSE), Systems Engineering and Standards Division, provides various enterprise-wide services to DHS in the areas of technical standards and conformity assessment. Such services include the funding of organizational membership in consortia groups, trade associations and professional societies that develop and promote technical standards and conformity assessment schemes. The choice of which memberships and sponsorships we fund is based primarily on the level of activity or engagement by DHS staff in the various activities of these groups; therefore, these memberships and sponsorships are obtained via a sole source agreement. The rates of these memberships range depending on the size of the organization and the benefits or services it offers.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards and guidelines to help build a web based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy and security. The W3C is an international multi-stakeholder community where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop open web standards.

W3C's global standards constitute the toolkit for web solutions that scale, enabling innovators to solve hard problems, providing the proper foundations to meet requirements for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security on the web. Standards that meet the varied needs of society are created not by one company but through the work of the Web Consortium community:

Members: More than 400 Members from around the world lead the development and implementation of standards.

Staff: W3C is a public-interest non-profit organization whose revenues come primarily from Membership dues. These and some grants support a staff of about 50 people.

Developers: Over 12,000 developers worldwide participate in the standards development.

Scope

The OSE SES received requests from individuals in the Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) to participate in W3C. SVIP is currently working in partnership with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, US Customs and Border Protection and the DHS Office of Privacy in areas related to standards based digital credential technologies and privacy enhancing technologies. In this work we are actively using the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model standard (Verifiable Credentials Working Group) and the W3C Decentralized Identifiers standard (Decentralized Identifier Working Group) that are critical components to mission success. Membership in the W3C would enable DHS to participate directly in these and additional relevant working groups to ensure that the standards we are dependent on, support our use cases and enable global interoperability of solutions that does not lock the Government into proprietary solutions.

Place of Performance: The primary place of performance will be online or at designated conference centers.

Period of Performance: The anticipated membership is 36-months: a 12-month membership and two optional 12-month membership periods.

A determination by the Government not to compete based upon responses to this notice is solely at the discretion of the Government.

This is a notice of the intent to award a sole source contract. It is published for informational purposes only and not a request for competitive proposals. Therefore, no solicitation document exists for this requirement. Any firm believing that they can fulfill the requirement may be considered by the agency. Interested parties may identify their interest and capabilities in response to this synopsis. All questions and/or comments regarding this notice shall be addressed in writing to the Contract Specialist, Mariaah Daniel at Mariaah.Daniel@hq.dhs.gov and the Contracting Officer, Danette Williams at Danette.Williams@hq.dhs.gov by February 13, 2024, 10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Savings time. Questions by phone will not be considered.

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