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Call for Bids - Redesign of ICANN.org

Answers to Questions Vendors Have Asked

Thanks for your interest in redesigning ICANN.org. We’re excited at the prospect of having a dramatically improved site. If you would like to bid on the project but have not received our RFP, you’ll find it below, followed by our detailed requirements:

All responses are due no later than January 17, 2011.

Questions Asked After the RFP Deadline

  1. I see that the date when proposals were due has passed. How many proposals did ICANN receive, and who bid on the project?

  2. What should the responding vendors anticipate from the evaluation process?

Note to Vendors: We originally targeted Friday, February 4, to announce our short list of 3 firms being considered to help us redesign ICANN.ORG. Due to the amount of proposals received, we need more time. We now intend to announce our top three candidates one week later, on Friday, February 11, 2011. Watch this page for further updates.

Announcement: As of 10 February, ICANN's proposal evaluation committee has narrowed the vendor selection to four finalists. In alphabetical order, they are:

Andalucia Web Solutions
Forum One
Four Kitchens
Revere Group

ICANN again thanks all the responding vendors for their proposals.

Asked Questions (whether Frequently or Not)

We have approached 28 vendors with our Call for Bids. As of this writing, 11 have responded with follow-up questions and thus far, 8 have said they plan to respond in full. In order to keep a level playing field, whenever any of the vendors asks clarifying questions, we also post them here so that all bidders have access to the same information.

  1. From which physical ICANN office will this project be run?

  2. Where is the site hosted?

  3. Is ICANN encouraging bids solely from firms near ICANN's Marina del Rey office, or from any qualified firm, regardless of location?

  4. What is your budget for this project?

  5. What is the timeline for the project?

  6. What are the main drivers for the project?

  7. Will ICANN accept a proposal that includes two firms working in partnership?

  8. Do you have a CMS preference for the re-designed site?

  9. Will a consultancy’s work with ICANN be limited to interacting with a project committee, or will the consultant be involved in public-facing discussions with other members of ICANN's community, including constituents from other countries?

  10. Does ICANN plan to make public the proposals it receives in response to this RFP?

  11. Are you letting the vendors know who is bidding on the project?

  12. What degree of maintenance is required to support the legacy file management system? ... What makes the file management system "unique"?

  13. Will you need SSO [single sign-on] between [ICANN.org] and Confluence?

  14. Can you clarify Confluence's role in the content workflow?

  15. Can you clarify the "file container" (8.2.1) and "link container" (8.3.1) aspects of file management (section 8 of the spreadsheet)? We're not sure what's meant by "replacing BODY content with a file attachment."

  16. Can you clarify ability to "patch the site upon evaluation of new security releases of upgrades" via a mobile devices? ... "included" in 15.1 of the spreadsheet.

  17. Item 16.1 seems to include mobile support "develop[ing] custom features upon redesign" - please clarify.

  18. What domains are in scope for the RFP?

  19. What do we do with the other pieces of software that the site interacts with?

  20. Will there be any integration between ICANN.org and ICANN's newsletter publishing platform?

  21. What powers the Dashboard, and how should that data be brought into the refreshed site?

  22. What kind of hand-off or processing should be done with ICANN's job listings page, which comes from a third party?

  23. Will the community at large provide input/feedback on aesthetic design and/or information architecture? If yes, at what key junctures? Do you have a review process/ timeframe in mind?

  24. Will ICANN provide all graphic assets (i.e. images of the businessman in Nepal or the church lady in New Zealand) or will vendor be responsible for originating and/or acquiring graphic assets on ICANN's behalf? Will any other graphics assets, other than photos, be provided or required, such as video or audio? If yes, please clarify.

  25. Will ICANN provide all editorial content (existing, instructional text, new content that may emerge during IA, etc.)? Please clarify vendor's role in editorial, if any.

  26. Will mobile platforms access the site using browser or custom "apps"?

  27. What is the Acronym Helper app referred to in the requirements?

  28. Please clarify requirements around the Vocabularies/Taxonomies

  29. What is the existing system?

  30. What are the requirements for content migration?

  31. URLs with 2 character internationalization: What about the localization (es-ES, es-mx, etc)?

  32. In the Requirements doc, line 1.4, ICANN asks for a "mark up," i.e. Mark up the design in adherence to best practices for accessibility, browser compatibility, search engine optimization and web compliance standards. Is this a written doc or an actual mark up on top of a design comp?

  33. Requirements 2.1.1 - Is there a specific purpose for having customizable columns?

  34. Requirements 2.1.1 - Can we designate these column switches by section?

  35. Requirements 2.5.2.4 - Content Aggregations refers to customized content listings?

  36. Requirements 2.5.2.5 - Does the administrator need to be able to do this with or without technical (i.e. css styling) knowledge?

  37. Requirements 2.6 - Can the metadata be auto-generated instead of ported for content that is not database driven?

  38. Requirements 6.1 - Can you explain this line item more clearly?

  39. Requirements 6.3 - Is there a specific type of content for these imports that will need to be enabled?

  40. Requirements 6.3 - Will this information simply need to be displayed and not edited inside of the CMS?

  41. Requirements 6.3 - Will there be multiple types of content to import regularly?

  42. Requirements 12.4 - What kind of customization were you thinking of giving the end user?

  43. Do you envisage admin selecting certain individual pages from the Wiki which have interesting content and displaying them within a sub section of the ICANN .org website?

  44. Do you envisage displaying large sections of the content from the Wiki in the ICANN website, noting that some sections, such as the public comment forums, extend to tens of thousands of pages?

  45. One of the key requirements of project is to offer a role based navigation to users. How does system differentiate between types of users? We have not seen any authentication interface on icann.org? Do you foresee to offer different sections for different archetypes?

  46. We are unsure (though it has been answered in RFP and Q&A Page) on the domain names which are in scope. We have figured out following domain names:

  47. We are assuming that the admin interface (exposed to admin users) would be only available in English language. Please confirm.

  48. A bridge has to be created in between the new system and Confluence WIKI. Does the integration between the new system (what content to be shown on the main site) and Confluence has to be fully automated (Synchronization daemon runs which keeps synching the content between the two systems)? Or should it be a manual activity (Admin staff exports the content in an XML format and imports it in the system)?

  49. In summary of requirements it is mentioned that content administrator should be empowered to aggregate the content. Does this mean that administrator should be able to group the content (may be by tag, type, Author …)?

  50. It is being assumed that ICANN.org will continue with the same set of third party providers like Brightcove, Flickr…. Please confirm?

  51. How do you envision Site Tracking to be done? Would you be open to Google Analytics?

  52. Would the users or content (in addition to confluence) be shared between sites?

  53. Site exposes pages like http://icann.org/en/registries/rsep/ and http://www.icann.org/en/registries/rsep/submitted_app.html. Do you intend to keep them as plain static pages? Or you intend to create interface (create seed entities to accept things like Registry, ) for generation of such pages?

  54. In the RFP it is mentioned that we need to have multistep/multipage submission. Is this required for all content creation form? Please clarify.

  55. RFP talks about the requirement per which generation and transmission of granular and customizable external feeds in XML is required. Can you please elaborate on this? How will this be used?

  56. From the outlines in the documents it seems that ICANN is interested in developing mobile versions of website (and not the native version). Please confirm.

  57. We are assuming that all the currently available languages are to be supported in mobile site, too. Please confirm.

  58. Do we need to expose all the features on the mobile version of site too? Or we need to just expose a limited set of features? Please elaborate.