(UPDATED)    I have received information that Devlin eBusiness Architects, the winner of the TTC Web-redevelopment contract, may not be in a position to live up to its contractual obligations. This information, from a confidential source, is not verified, and indeed Devlin refused to confirm or deny it. And the claims might or might not be true and might or might not represent a violation of the terms of the TTC contract, especially deliverables.

Because the new TTC site is a high-profile public project from a public body using public funds, clear accountability and transparency are required, while maintaining confidentiality of contract terms. The issue has to be able to withstand public comment.

Of course I endeavoured to verify or disprove these claims. I E-mailed Devlin these questions:

• Were there any firings, terminations, or dismissals at Devlin since the awarding of the TTC contract? In particular, did a creative director fire, terminate, or dismiss staff?
• Did relatively large numbers of other staff, or any staff, leave the company voluntarily? If so, did that happen after other employees were fired, terminated, or dismissed?
• At present, does Devlin have positive cashflow? Does income exceed expenses month-to-month? [I didn’t ask about actual dollar figures.]
• How many full-time front-end coders do you have on staff? Has that number changed since the awarding of the contract? If so, by what percentage or number?
• How many freelancers or contractors are being used on the TTC job, and in what capacities?
• The Web RFP, at §5.2(i), required proponents to submit résumés “for each team member.” Proponents were also required to provide an organization chart naming, at minimum, one each of project manager, senior Web/application architect, Web developer, Web-accessibility expert, tester, and copywriter. Have the identities of persons named in those lists changed since awarding the contract? If so, how many identities have changed?
• At present, is the project under budget, over budget, or exactly at budget to the penny?

A read receipt was issued from a Devlin E-mail account, indicating that the message was opened. But there has been no response. (I gave them a reasonable deadline for response.) Devlin can issue answers to these questions in any reasonable form and I’ll link to them.

I cannot attest to the veracity of my source’s claims. However, the last thing anyone needs is a high-profile contract like this going wrong for any reason.

Update

(2008.03.28) Gee, guess who’s looking for a technical lead/architect (sic) and a bog-standard Web developer.

Today marked the end of my latest quixotic photography project, GermanIce™: Typological survey of icing-sugar-white German vehicles.

As with the previous quixotic project, Back of truck, I stopped at 100 photos (plus a final meta-GermanIce™).

Definitions caused a great deal of friction during this project.

• How white is white? For a few years, a white closer to cream was popular, especially with Beetles. Now BMW has a dusky off-grey white (not an oxymoron) that borders on a metamer.
• What about country of origin? Volkswagens sold in Canada are or were made in Germany, Brazil, or Mexico. Audi (hence Volkswagen) owns Lamborghini, Volkswagen owns Bentley, BMW owns Mini and Rolls-Royce. Some BMWs are built only in the U.S.; Beetles are built only in Mexico; Mercedes M-class SUVs are American-made. Smarts are arguably German, but they’re all built in France. In essence, I faced the Swindon paradox: The badge may say Honda, but if it’s built in England, is it a British car? I decided to stick to classical German marques (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen) irrespective of country of manufacture.

How did I find these cars? The same way I found backs of truck: Through everyday life.

I do this instead of writing books and earning a living. Everything comes back to that, of course. Also: I don’t drive.

Today is the seven-year anniversary of my signing my (“first”) book contract – with New Riders for Building Accessible Websites. What exactly else have I been doing in that time, and how many more seven-year periods do I realistically have available?

I have been discouraged from publishing the full range of offences New Riders carried out against me. Such discouragement, while troubling, is hereby acknowledged. The offences are similar to those visited upon other New Riders authors. I am not the only author to have been called up immediately after the book went to press in order to be told I was the most difficult author they’d ever worked with. I suspect I am the only author whose refusal to appear at a conference was held against him, despite the complete absence of an invitation to such a conference or its having ever been mentioned. Other authors were probably not also accused of incurring a $12,000 cost overrun, or of acting as though in-house editors and copy-editors weren’t any good. A fair cop both ways – but ask other authors how many errors I found in their finished books and corrected for free.

Other authors did not have existing English words crossed out and replaced with nonsensical soundalikes (akin to renaming Star Trek as Star Track because you knew the word “track,” hence obviously “trek” didn’t exist). Nor did other authors, at zero incremental cost to the publisher, arrange for professional typesetting and copy-editing, only to be presented with a book index set in the wrong font and on the wrong grid. It was specifically stated that an index did not have to be designed or typeset and did not have to match the rest of the book.

Here’s what didn’t happen to me: The publisher didn’t refuse to buy a font for a pittance and did not fail to imprint its logo on the corner of the cover reserved for that purpose, leaving a triangular black void.

The editor who levied these various charges against me and another author later told me to my face there was no recollection of having levied those charges against me. Perhaps the episode occurred during a blackout. (I don’t have blackouts.)

The book, a critical success but commercial failure (a common conjunction), sold 2,493 copies in the U.S., 1,042 overseas, 102 electronically (as by the O’Reilly Safari service), and, very disturbingly, 219 in Canada. That’s 3,856 – actually an excellent sales figure for a Canadian book, if you want to look at it that way. New Riders could still attempt to recoup $2,239.10.

I granted certain rights to the publisher. As of 2008.02.04, I regained those rights. I own the book free and clear. I intend to remove outdated components (e.g., tables for layout), add nothing substantive, zip the remaining files into an archive, and distribute it via Bittorrent.

Full copyright protection will remain in effect and will be very prominently indicated, enforced, and defended. Just as you would not expect me to dine out on a prime rib and a shrimp cocktail, so should you not expect me to engage in anything resembling Creative Commons licensing. I’m interested in copyright reform, but not interested in Creative Commons. (Scratch a copyleftist and you find a Creative Commons zealot.) I am interested in demonstrating that a distribution method like Bittorrent is copyright-agnostic and that copyrighted works can be disseminated that way with full consent of the owner. You may have other interests.

I do not know when I will get around to this task. It won’t be very long. I could use some help with editing and Bittorrenting.

I will never write another computer book, but I have seven years’ backlog of other books to catch up on. (In some ways I still wish I were Ben Hammersley.) I don’t have an agent, any money in the bank, a salutary reputation, legitimate prospects, or anything else that could build upon basic writing talent and 20 years’ journalism. So don’t worry, this whole enterprise will probably fail completely, as my significant coterie of longstanding detractors might hope.

Nonetheless, it can now exclusively be revealed that the title of my next book is Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English.

Because they were the only qualified bidder.

It was a two-envelope process – one envelope for proposal, the other for finances. Your proposal was scored against criteria and you had to score 75% or higher. Only bidders who scored that high had their financial envelope opened. Hence only then did the TTC know each bid amount.

For the Web-site redesign, there was one qualified bidder, Devlin. Only its financial envelope was opened. (TTC told me that to my face and in writing.) There was no occasion to select the lowest bidder because there was only one bidder. This explains why Devlin’s overbudget bid had to be accepted.

I presume that Devlin was unique in actually costing out some of the nonsense requested in the RFP, including text-to-speech and machine translations. I have no evidence of that yet. Another effect of this procedure is that nobody at the TTC knows what the other bid amounts were.

And there I was thinking some kind of funny business was afoot. I have no reason to think the evaluation process was anything less than aboveboard.