Location: European Union (flexible)

Deadline for applications: 31 August 2023

Project duration: 1 November 2023 – 31 October 2025

The Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) tracks, monitors, and reacts to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and Candidate Countries. This project provides legal and practical support, public advocacy and information to protect journalists and media workers. The MFRR is organised by an alliance led by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) including ARTICLE 19 Europe, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), Free Press Unlimited (FPU), International Press Institute (IPI) and CCI/Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa (OBC Transeuropa). The project commenced in 2020 and is co-funded by the European Commission.

The consortium is seeking a subcontractor who will be tasked with ensuring the smooth running of the monitoring tools and systems used by the MFRR consortium. Responsibilities will include hosting the Mapping Media Freedom (MapMF) platform and its connected tools and systems, ensuring uninterrupted access, enhancing existing functionality, and implementing requests for new features that are identified during the project lifecycle. The tools and systems comprise: the Alert Explorer, Editorial System, ReportIt form, and News & Tweets Observer.

Objectives and tasks details

Operate, update, and improve the Alert Explorer system:

• operate database system and search engine
• geocode alerts and keep map data updated
• adapt UI to changes in recorded data structures
• adapt filters, search, charts and display to changes in categorisation
• add and improve charts for existing data on demand
• implement (light) design changes on demand
• implement backups and verify restorability
• install software- and library-patches, etc.

Operate, update, and improve the Editorial System

• operate editorial system web application
• operate notification infrastructure (Slack push services)
• implement feature requests
• implement backups and verify restorability
• install software- and library-patches, etc.

Operate, update, and improve the reporting tool ReportIt

• operate and improve external submission form ReportIt
• operate notification infrastructure (Slack push services)
• operate the connection between ReportIt and Editorial System

Operate, update, and improve the internal platform News & Tweets Observer

• continuous monitoring of news sources (up to about 1000 keywords and keyword combinations from 10000s of sources (domains))
• continuous monitoring of Twitter (up to about 1000 accounts and 10000 keywords) (due to the recent pricing changes for the Twitter API with switched off free Twitter API depending on the availability of an affordable solution financed by MFRR)
• predict relevancy to press and media freedom in general as well as to MFRR main categories based on the trained machine learning model
• perform detection of mentioned locations in texts and assign respective countries
• present collected tweets and news on export dashboard, including filtering on confidence, date range, language, countries, etc.
• collect expert feedback on prediction and use it for reinforcement learning by retraining the machine learning model
• implement backups and verify restorability
• install software- and library-patches, etc.

Operate,  update, and improve hosting infrastructure

• ensure overall system security
• install security patches and software updates
• create and keep backups (at least 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly), test restorability

General

• assist in feasibility planning
• assist in planning new features

Based on the experience in software development and previous MFRR project implementations, not all necessary features can be anticipated from the beginning. New feature needs might arise during the project duration for different reasons, such as new or extended geographical or topical focus areas based on political developments, or the identification of new needs concerning the data structure, internal processes, or the presentation of the tools.

The sub contractor is expected to work in an agile manner answering the potential agile feature needs. Before implementation potential features will be discussed with the MapMF consultant at ECPMF in terms of needed resources, outcome and priority.

The support covers the following main topics where processes and features are already in place, which need to be maintained and potentially expanded: public presentation of the platform, usability,  content expansion & linking, quality measures, information flow processes and optimisation (like push services), quantitative analysis of the press freedom situation through the provision of detailed statistics in a defined format, text data retrieval, and processing. 

Eligibility criteria

The selected provider will need relevant knowledge and experience conducting:

• Ruby on Rails including Shakapacker, Hotwire-Turbo, AlpineJS, and TailwindCSS 
• TypeScript, Preact, MobX, Leaflet, RegionBound, MapShaper
• MeiliSearch, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Tile38, Slack API 
• GIT, Gitlab-CI, Docker, Docker-Compose, Library and code style auditing 
• Unit- and Integration Testing with MiniTest and Capybara 
• Python, Django, Spacy, Tensorflow, Twitter API, NewsAPI
• Ubuntu (as host and guest)

Furthermore, the provider needs third-party liability insurance.

Award criteria

Quality of the offer (60%), including:

• Methodology & technologies proposed
• Previous experience in projects or programmes related to monitoring technologies
• Technical competence and experience

Financial offer (40%).

Eligible tenderers will be invited for an interview to discuss their credentials and proposed plan. All tenderers will be informed about the outcome of submission by email.

Applications

Interested parties must provide a short proposal outlining their approach (two pages maximum). This should be accompanied by:

• CV(s) of staff who will be involved in carrying out the evaluation;
• proposed methodology & technologies for carrying out the tasks;

Tenders shall be submitted by email only (with attachments) to the email address antje.schlaf@ecpmf.eu with the reference “MFRR-IV TECHN SUBCONTRACTOR”. 

Deadline for submission: 31 August 2023.

Interviews with eligible applicants are tentatively scheduled to take place between 1-22 September and can be conducted in person or remotely.

The financial offer must include consultancy fees and travel and subsistence if relevant and any other expenses, if any.

We look forward to hearing from you!