Accelerated delivery of preliminary terrorism event data

This is a request for information (RFI) and notice of intent that the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) plans to solicit only one responsible source under the authority of 10 U.S.C 2304(c)(1), as implemented by FAR 6.302-1(b)(1). The Government intends to award a sole source contract to the University of Maryland for accelerated* delivery of preliminary terrorism event data surrounding intentional acts or immediate threats of violence by non-state actors from the University's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism (START) Global Terrorism Database (GTD) for a period of approximately 12 months. *NOTE* "Accelerated" means data will be current with a maximum of four months lag behind real time as opposed to the typical two years lag behind real time. This notice is NOT a Request for Proposals (RFP). Any response to this RFI will be treated as information only. No entitlement to payment of direct or indirect costs or changes by the Government will arise as a result of contractor submissions of responses to this RFI or the Government use of such information. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary or competition sensitive information contained in their response. USSOCOM's requirement is as follows: The inclusion criteria for the data must be: 1. The violent act was aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal; 2. The violent act included evidence of an intention to coerce, intimidate, or convey some other message to a larger audience (or audiences) other than the immediate victims; and 3. The violent act was outside the context of legitimate warfare activities in so far as it targeted non-combatants. The data must be provided from research that relies entirely on unclassified sources, primarily media articles, to identify terrorist attacks and systematically record details of the attacks. In order to maintain the validity of the resulting data, each case collected and coded must be supported by at least one valid source. The requirements for delivery of the data are: 1. Data will be delivered via email on a monthly basis, on the last business day of each month. 2. Event data will be delivered with a maximum of four months lag behind real time. 3. Data will be delivered in XLSX file format and will include information on the date, location, perpetrators, weapons, tactics, targets, casualties, and consequences of terrorist attacks worldwide 4. The following quality control measures must be conducted on delivered data: a. Deduplication of events b. Review of coding by domain supervisors (e.g., location, perpetrators) c. Review of inclusion criteria by data collection manager 5. Insufficiently valid data sources that are not corroborated by high-quality, independent sources must not be included in the final data for general release, but must be delivered as an auxiliary reference. 6. Increasing the frequency and decreasing the lag time of data deliveries allows analysts to work with more recent data, however the details of terrorist attacks do evolve over time as new information becomes available. All preliminary data delivered should be subject to change, as the data collection process continues and additional information is added. Each monthly data delivery will be cumulative, and include any necessary changes to previously delivered event data. All responsible sources may submit a capability statement to illustrate their expertise and ability to satisfy the requirement, which shall be considered by the agency. If the Government determines to compete the proposed effort, all responsible sources may submit a proposal or quotation, which shall be considered by the agency. Only responses from potential sources will be considered. Any responses to this RFI must be in writing and delineate how the vendor can meet the requirement stated above. A determination by the Government not to compete the proposed effort on a full and open competition basis, based upon responses to this notice, is solely within the discretion of the Government. Responses are due no later than 7 August 2015 at noon, Eastern Time. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Interested parties may submit information for consideration of their capabilities to michael.hawkins4@socom.mil.