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In July 2024 the ActivitySim partners (approximately 14 agencies) were notified that AMPO did not intend to continue to extend administrative support for the ActivitySim project beyond June 30th, 2025. AMPO's decision kicked off a multi-month effort (conducted by the ActivitySim partners) to evaluate as many options as possible along with documenting the various tasks that were being covered by AMPO and partners that may not have been commonly known or planned for. The remainder of this page captures first a list and record of all options considered, then followed by a record of the tasks that were captured.
ActivitySim started as a collaboration of larger MPOs with ABMs. AMPO became a natural pooling ground as a common facilitator between the original 3 partnering agencies. If the majorities of the partners in the pooled fund already have a professional connection to a given agency, there's a natural strength / benefit to using that agency for administrative services. In 2024 when the administrative support with AMPO ended, the ActivitySim partnership was still made up of a majority of agencies with paid support to AMPO, but two DOTs and several international partners had also become ActivitySim members. The lesson here might be to consider and monitor the membership of the pooled fund and evaluate what's needed to facilitate a diverse partner base.
AMPO provided extremely reasonable pricing structure, only charging the pooled fund 8% for administrative duties. This low charge was possible given that AMPO exists to help support the MPOs that made up the majority of the paying ActivitySim partners. Not all entities would be able to sustainably charge such a rate. A pro and con for AMPO is their size. On the positive the small size of AMPO makes them highly agile and flexible, quick to adapt to change (like adding state DOTs or international partners) without the bureaucracy and chains of management approval and sign-off that large entities typically carry. The negative to being small is that they don't have the same bench strength in account management or legal support that large agencies would have.
Building on the discussion under AMPO - Somewhat of the opposite set of pros and cons would exist with partnering with FHWA or a State DOT(s) (or even a large MPO). FHWA or a State DOT offers huge bench strength when it comes to account / finical management, legal support and other administrative functions. However, while the number of subject experts are vast, their bandwidth is typically minuscule. Many government agency workers typically have workloads and priorities beyond their 8-5, and therefore have long wait times to respond for support and also complex management chains to approve getting project priority. An effort like ActivitySim would be very difficult to keep as a priority item on any State or FHWA to-do list. It might not get dropped, but getting consistent and timely service / responses (reasonable customer support) could not be guaranteed for any length of time.
With FHWA specifically, conversations highlighted that any pooled fund facilitated through FHWA would need to be sunset every 3-5 years. New pooled funds could be opened, but they would likely be re-evaluated on this constant 3-5 year cycle.
AASHTO was also discussed, and is likely comparable to these large agency options. AASHTO may not have the 3-5 year restriction placed on it, but it would likely be champion dependent. Finding an internal partner within AASHTO that was invested in seeing ActivitySim succeed, and acting as an internal champion to keep AASHTO's involvement stable over the long-term. Recent staff changes at AASHTO make it unlikely that this option could be implemented within the relatively short time period we have to identify and transition to new home
Being investigated. Key questions concerns; how would we keep them invested in the long term, how much would they need to charge to be invested?
Universities have largely been removed from consideration. The key concern here is that a University is envisioned to required an ownership/leadership role in the project. ActivitySim partners are looking for an administrative home, not a technical lead. Similar to issues with large agencies, universities have large bureaucracies and management / approval structures for creating this type of partnership / arrangement. Also, staff (champion) turnover at universities can be high and the ActivitySim partners would see significant risk/uncertainty any/every time the facilitating partner at a university were to shift. Therefore Universities have largely been written off a poor match.
The one exception may be TTI. TTI option being investigated currently - Key questions exist around how the partnership would retain control of development/direction and how the cost of administration would be kept low. Additionally, concern exists around the tiers of bureaucracy within an entity like TTI and how ActivitySim would be kept a priority given champion turn over or similar inflection points in the relationship.
Developing a specific Administrative entity for ActivitySim would give the partners the highest amount of control over how the project was run and managed. This option should also allow the partnership to keep costs as low as possible. The negatives are somewhat similar to the AMPO option. A non-profit specific to ActivitySim would have a small/skeleton crew of paid staff. The bench strength for legal and administrative services would be highly dynamic (limited to a very small contracted pool at any one time). Keeping contracted support resources would likely fall to the partners to sustain, each time a contract expired. This option would require the highest degree of partner support in efforts to keep the administrative side of the partnership running correctly. Ideally, partners could be paid by their agencies for this contributed time, but it does create a different dynamic than previously existed under AMPO's administrative support in that an internal support "org-chart" would need to be created and managed to help spread the work load across all partners (not just one or two key champions) and therefore, contributing partners would have to expect both a money and TIME contribute (where TIME was not previously explicitly required).
In summary, this option likely offers the most freedom and control for the partners, but at the cost of the most personal involvement and invested time.
As opposed to formally pooling funds, one option might be to have a more informal development and cost sharing approach. Under this contract, no administrative body would be needed to structure collecting and distributing development funds. Instead a "hand shake" agreement would exist to keep the principles of ActivitySim alive and that multiple agencies would actively and collectively develop and agree on tasks that will be completed under ActivitySim and will use their own separate and isolated contracts and resources to work on agreed upon tasks toward a common development vision. This option would require a much larger amount of people management than fund management. People's expectations would have to be highly managed with egos checked at the door. It would likely be easy for frustration and resentment to build up if certain contributors were putting significant time and resources in (unbalanced contribution) and new or smaller contributing partners started to change the artistic direction/vision of the project. The partnership would probably need to expand on the key principles that hold the partnership together, by calling things out like:
- Community - Working towards what’s best for all not the individual agency
- Knowing where we have been - We all lose if we return to each agency developing what works best for them
- Contribution - The project will die if contributors don’t… contribute. Partners should be budgeting at least 35k/yr in funding and time that is specific to the collaboratives’ benefit (beyond the benefit/work of the agency).
- Know thyself - Pull requests that were not reviewed and approved by collaborative at the beginning, middle, and end of the work, will not be accepted.
- Volunteer - The collaborative needs partner time in addition to funds. Plan on holding at least one chair within the org chart.
This option would pay one of the contributing firms to manage the administrative side of the partnership. This key contractor would have the other firms as subs and would develop a software license (or similar) with all desiring partnering agencies. This has some attractive key benefits;
- making buying in extremely simple
- less to no issues with letting any partner in across the globe
- likely the lowest time requirement option on the partners side
But also creates some key concerns / issues, similar universities and other largely entities:
- how do partners maintain control
- what's a reasonable time frame for one firm to keep administrative control
- what profit level needs to exist for a firm to want to continue this function
This needs further investigation, but it might be possible to have multiple pooled funding options running at any one time. Does the partnership have the ability to manage several of these, giving multiple pathways to membership.
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Consultant Related Tasks
- Developing contracts
- Establishing contracts
- Developing task orders
- Executing task orders
- Receiving invoices
- Reviewing invoices
- Paying invoices
- Tracking expenditures
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Partner Related Tasks
- Developing partner MOAs
- Developing partner funding agreements
- Sending and tracking MOAs and funding agreements
- Executing MOAs and funding agreements
- Support agency-specific admin / procurement tasks, such as adding AMPO as a vendor
- What info provided? Tax ID? Other?
- TO DO: AMPO to forward email threads from various agency procurement interactions
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Overall Projects Tasks
- Developing website collateral
- Updating website as necessary
- Developing print collateral
- Conference coordination
- Reviewing materials
- Development of logo / marketing info
- Transmit logo information
- Development of trademark
- Maintenance of trademark?
- Transfer of copyright to new entity (in repo)?
- Update license as necessary?
- Ensure license history is clean and plan for moving forward
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Transition Tasks
- Develop inventory of historic executed agreements
- Identify and and transmit all historical executed agreements not already in the shared drive
- Transmitting all historical financial documents and history
- Identify number of past years (5 years, ideally) to request / transfer
- Data items
- Income received from partners and dates
- Payments to consultants and dates
- Consultant Invoices
- Direct costs
- TO DO: Reach out to AMPO’s accountant to request financial history information
- Archive organization
- Transferring trademark to future ActivitytSim home
- Transmit unexpended funds to from AMPO to new ActivitySim home
- Establish new contracts between existing vendors and new ActivitySim home
- Establish new task orders between existing vendors and new ActivitySim home
- Review financial history to establish new overhead rate and direct expenses allocations
- Establish new internal administrative expense tracking system
- Finalize what the AMPO allocation is this year
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Questions
- How are we going to track all expenses and time in advance of transition to new ActivitySim home, so that transfer of funds is clean?
- Should we set aside off-the-top additional admin funds for new ActivitySim home
- AMPO Research Foundation is a nonprofit federal 501(c)3 - can / should we set up parallel organizartion? What is the relationship between AMPO 501(c)4 and AMPORF 501 (c)3?
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Tasks
- Dig up emails from May/June discussions about AMPO costs and expenses to ensure that financial handoff is clean
- Identify new ActivitySim home by January 2025
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Organizational Start Up Tasks