Federal Government To Dump MERX

MERX is the MERX Canadian Public Tenders service.  Its where the federal and provincial governments put their RFQs and RFPs and the like, asking private companies to bid on contracts for various goods and services.  Except no more  This notice appeared recently on (ironically enough) MERX:

The Government of Canada is moving its electronic tendering service from MERX to Buyandsell.gc.ca/tenders on June 1, 2013.

Starting June 1, 2013, federal government tenders (tender notices and bid solicitation documents) will be published and available free of charge on a Government of Canada Web site on Buyandsell.gc.ca/tenders.

As noted, billions of dollars change hands through MERX.  I wonder how viable the service will be without the federal government on board.   And actually, this is a story that has some small news value.  Since MERX is where Cdn governments go to buy stuff from the private sector, it is often the first place where you can get an idea of what they are really up to.

Modelling An Arctic War

Interesting timing.

On the same day that the Tories make negotiating Arctic boundary disputes its top foreign-policy priority in the Far North, the government also put out a "notice of proposal" on Merx for a Synthetic Environment For Arctic.

What the hell is that, you ask?

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) an agency of the Department of National Defence (DND) requires services related to developing state-of-the-art in modeling arctic phenomena for scenarios. The intent of the Work to be performed is to develop a real-time, immersive, interactive, three-dimensional synthetic environment for the Canadian North which enables exploration oft he common operating picture and course-of-action analysis.

Outside of the core project, there are several optional "work packages", one being:

Optional Work Package 2 (Task Authorized Support Option): Thiswill consist of one (1) option period of one (1) year for theprovision of task authorized support services to DRDC. Services may be used to perform additional user trials, training, furtherd evelopment of uncovered Modelling and Simulation (M&S)limitations and/or execute a series of virtual war-games.Support services will be provided on an as and when requested basis.

Synthetic environments are Internet simulations that represent activities at a high level of realism, from simulations of theaters of war to factories and manufacturing processes. Here's a bit from the wiki article on synthetic natural environments, which is what DRDC is looking for:

A Synthetic natural environment (SNE) is the representation in a synthetic environment of the physical world within which all models of military systems exist and interact (i.e. climate, weather, terrain, oceans, space, etc.). It includes both data and models representing the elements of the environment, their effects on military systems, and models of the impact of military systems on environmental variables (e.g. contrails, dust clouds from moving vehicles, spoil from combat engineering).

A honking big (price tag: up to $150,000) virtual Frozen North to play war games on. Because I guess negotiations sometimes fail!

Damn! I want one!