The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded four firms a place on the Web Agility Program Support Services 3 (WA3) Blanket Purchase Agreement: CTAC, Forum One, Bixal, and Agileana.
We want to start where most award announcements end — with the other three names on that list.
The company we're keeping
If you have spent any time in the Drupal community over the past decade, you know these firms. You have seen them at DrupalCon. You have read their case studies on how to make a federal website actually work for the person on the other side of the screen. You have sat in their sessions on accessibility, on content governance, on the unglamorous discipline of keeping a large CMS platform healthy year after year. They have shaped how our whole industry thinks about digital government.
Agileana has spent more than a decade building Drupal for federal agencies and mission-driven organizations. For much of that time, CTAC, Forum One, and Bixal have been the firms we measured ourselves against — not as rivals to be beaten, but as the standard for what serious, community-engaged practice looks like. Watching their contributions to the Drupal project made us better at ours.
So being named alongside them on WA3 means something to us that a contract number does not capture. Congratulations to all three. We are glad to be in this company.
What WA3 actually is
WA3 is run out of DOT's Office of the Chief Data and Information Officer, and it continues a program that goes back several years through Web Agility 2. It gives the Department a mechanism for the web work that keeps its digital presence functioning: web planning and implementation, design, content development, training, accessibility, and website development support across DOT's web environment.
The BPA carries a ceiling of approximately $61 million over six years.
That scope is broader than any one of us, which is the point of a multiple-award vehicle. DOT gets four capable teams and the ability to match the right one to the right task order. Task orders will be competed, and we will compete for them. That is how the vehicle is supposed to work, and it is a good thing — it keeps all four of us sharp and gives the government real choice.
Competitors and colleagues are not opposites
There is a version of the government contracting story where every other firm is an obstacle. We have never found that version to be true, and Drupal is the reason why.
Open source makes the arithmetic obvious. When Forum One contributes a module, we benefit. When Bixal publishes what they learned about accessibility remediation, our clients benefit. When CTAC pushes the state of the practice on federal CMS governance, the whole .gov estate gets a little better. We compete for the work and collaborate on the tools — and the tools are shared infrastructure that none of us could build alone.
The same logic applies inside a BPA. Four firms working under a common program, on a common platform, for a common client, produce something closer to a shared standard than four separate silos would. We would rather be measured against strong peers than be the only option in the room.
Why the mission matters
DOT's web properties are how the public reaches the Department. Someone looking up a safety recall, a grant program, a regulation, a set of compliance requirements — they arrive through a website. Whether they find what they need, and whether they can use it if they have a disability or a slow connection or a small screen, depends on work that almost nobody sees.
That is the work WA3 exists to support. It is not glamorous. It is genuinely important, and it is paid for by the people it serves, which is a standard we take seriously.
We are proud to be part of it, and to be part of it alongside CTAC, Forum One, and Bixal. We are looking forward to the next six years.
Agileana is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business in the Washington, DC area, building Drupal for federal agencies and mission-driven organizations since 2007.
