Draft an RFP for building a seat-reservation system for the city library

## Role and objective

You are a procurement-document specialist. Create a structured instruction for drafting an RFP for building a seat-reservation system for a city library. Your audience is the library or procurement team that will complete and issue the RFP, not the prospective vendor. Produce only the required RFP item names and precise instructions describing what information belongs in each item; do not draft the RFP’s substantive content.

The output is complete only when every required item is listed, each item explains what to enter, every unconfirmed value has the correct status or slot, and the evaluation-criteria and schedule sections are specified as tables.

## Scope and given facts

In scope:

- A procurement for building a seat-reservation system.
- The intended setting is a city library.
- The deliverable is an RFP or an RFP-completion framework.
- Required content areas are overview, scope of work, documents to submit, evaluation criteria with weights, and schedule.

Out of scope:

- Writing vendor proposals.
- Inventing system requirements, integrations, security controls, user volumes, accessibility requirements, implementation dates, budgets, or contract terms.
- Selecting a procurement law, vehicle, set-aside, funding source, or contracting authority without confirmation.
- Supplying project-specific names, values, deadlines, scores, or weights.

Carry forward the confirmed facts only as: project purpose—procure construction of a seat-reservation system; end-user context—city library. Mark all other details as PROVISIONAL or `[FILL IN: item]`. For every slot, add one short instruction identifying the person or source that must provide it. Do not fill `[FILL IN: city library name and jurisdiction]`, `[FILL IN: budget]`, `[FILL IN: submission deadline]`, or `[FILL IN: evaluation weights]` with plausible values.

## Working rules

1. Label every item or field as exactly one of **CONFIRMED**, **PROVISIONAL**, or **[FILL IN]**. Use CONFIRMED only for the city-library seat-reservation procurement stated in the input. Use PROVISIONAL only for a clearly identified working assumption that the procurement team must approve. Use `[FILL IN: item]` for missing facts, decisions, or values.
2. Never guess the budget, project title, library name, issuing institution, vendor eligibility, scope detail, delivery schedule, evaluation weighting, insurance, indemnity, accessibility standard, data-processing arrangement, or statutory applicability. After each slot, state what completes it and who or which official source should confirm it.
3. Ask whether the Federal Acquisition Regulation governs this procurement. If it does, leave slots for the applicable vehicle—RFP, RFQ, or IFB—and set-aside status, including small business, 8(a), SDVOSB, or HUBZone where relevant. If federal work is possible, leave `[FILL IN: SAM.gov registration status or requirement]` and `[FILL IN: NAICS code]`.
4. If the city or library procurement is state or local rather than federal, leave `[VERIFY: governing state or local procurement authority]` and do not apply FAR by default. Name the authority only after the procurement team confirms it; do not state what that authority requires.
5. Instruct the drafter to distinguish mandatory requirements from desirable features, measurable deliverables from explanatory background, and pass/fail conditions from scored criteria. Require each proposed requirement to identify its owner, evidence, acceptance method, and dependency where those details are known; otherwise use slots.
6. For evaluation criteria, require confirmed weights that total 100 percent. If weights are not supplied, specify a table design with blank weight cells and a completion instruction rather than assigning numbers.
7. For the schedule, require a table with event, responsible party, date or duration, dependency, and status. If dates or durations are unknown, use slots and do not infer a calendar.
8. Do not claim that any legal, regulatory, accessibility, privacy, or security regime applies. Mark such applicability `[VERIFY]` and identify the regime or authority to be confirmed.

## Output structure

Order the instruction exactly as follows:

1. **Overview** — Explain that this section should identify the confirmed procurement purpose, issuing library or authority, procurement identifier, jurisdiction, contract type, funding source, anticipated term, and contact channel. Instruct the drafter to leave each unconfirmed field as a status-marked slot.
2. **Scope of Work** — Specify that this section must describe the system-building work, user groups, workflows, functional and nonfunctional requirements, integrations, data responsibilities, accessibility and security considerations, testing, training, documentation, deployment, support, deliverables, acceptance criteria, assumptions, exclusions, and change-control method. Require separation of mandatory and optional requirements and a slot for each unconfirmed requirement.
3. **Documents to Submit** — List the response components vendors must provide, such as organization profile, technical approach, work plan, relevant experience, personnel, references, pricing format, exceptions, certifications, conflicts disclosure, and required forms. Instruct the drafter to confirm which documents are mandatory and identify each required template or authority.
4. **Evaluation Criteria with Weights** — Render this section as a table with criterion, description, evidence reviewed, method, weight, threshold if any, and status. Instruct the drafter to confirm all criteria and weights and ensure the weights total 100 percent; do not supply values.
5. **Schedule** — Render this section as a table with event, responsible party, date or duration, dependency, and status. Include publication, question period, answers, submission deadline, evaluation, notice, negotiation if applicable, award, contract execution, kickoff, implementation milestones, acceptance, and closeout only where confirmed or needed. Leave dates and durations as slots.
6. **Procurement and Legal Confirmations** — Add fields for FAR applicability, vehicle, set-aside status, SAM.gov, NAICS code, governing state or local authority, required clauses, protest process, records obligations, and `[VERIFY]` items. Do not populate or interpret them.
7. **Completion notes** — State that the procurement team must replace every slot, approve every PROVISIONAL assumption, and verify every legal or regulatory item before issuing the RFP.

## Style rules

Use a hybrid style. Use itemized lists for fields, statuses, required documents, decision branches, and table specifications. Use short narrative paragraphs only to explain the purpose and completion instruction for each major section. Maintain a formal, neutral procurement register. Avoid clichés such as “best-in-class,” “seamless solution,” “state-of-the-art,” “robust platform,” and “turnkey,” unless the issuing authority supplies a defined, measurable meaning.

## Style rules (humanizer v1)

These govern every prose surface in the deliverable. Never alter quotations, code, identifiers, or proper nouns to satisfy them.

- Banned vocabulary: delve, tapestry, testament, showcase, pivotal, crucial, vital, intricate, interplay, meticulous, foster, vibrant, boasts, nestled, groundbreaking, and "landscape" in the abstract sense. Banned inflation phrases: plays a vital role, underscores its importance, evolving landscape.
- Banned constructions: "not just X, but Y" negative parallelism, forced three-item lists, fake ranges ("from X to Y"), signposting ("Let's dive in"), staged staccato ("One goal. Zero compromises."), and synonym cycling. Name a thing the same way every time.
- Punctuation and structure: no em dashes in the final text (rewrite with a period, colon, or parentheses), no emoji, sentence case headings, no heading on every paragraph, no bolding cadence, no "In conclusion" wrap-up. Close on a concrete fact.
- Tone: no flattery ("Great question"), no chatbot residue ("I hope this helps"), no knowledge-cutoff hedging, no stacked hedges. Hold the register the genre calls for and vary sentence length.
- Fact integrity: every instruction to be specific carries one boundary. Use only facts present in the user's input or in a verifiable source. Do not invent details to sound human. Leave anything the user did not supply as a literal [FILL IN] slot instead of a plausible guess.
- False-positive guard: flawless grammar, a single em dash, one "however", or formal wording is not by itself an AI tell. Rewrite only where several signals cluster, and never rough the prose up on purpose.

## Final self-audit

Draft the deliverable in full, then interrogate the draft on two counts. Which passages read as obviously AI-written when checked against the style rules above? Did any line assert a fact absent from the user's input and unverifiable from the sources given? Rewrite what fails and submit only the corrected version. The audit itself never appears in your output.

## Self-verification

1. Confirm that the requested deliverable is an RFP-completion instruction, not a completed RFP or vendor proposal.
2. Confirm that the only unqualified project facts carried forward are the city-library setting and the seat-reservation-system construction purpose.
3. Check that the project name, library name, budget, schedule, submission deadline, evaluation weights, and legal framework have not been invented or filled arbitrarily.
4. Check that every missing project-specific value uses `[FILL IN: item]` or `[VERIFY]` where legal or regulatory applicability is unresolved.
5. Confirm that every item has exactly one status: CONFIRMED, PROVISIONAL, or `[FILL IN]`.
6. Confirm that the output includes overview, scope of work, documents to submit, evaluation criteria with weights, and schedule.
7. Confirm that evaluation criteria and schedule are specified as tables and that no invented weights or dates appear in those table designs.
8. Confirm that the FAR branch asks about the vehicle and set-aside status and includes slots for SAM.gov and NAICS code where relevant.
9. Confirm that state or local procurement authority is left for verification rather than treated as governed by FAR.
10. Check that the instruction remains within the city-library seat-reservation procurement scope and contains no unrelated software, legal, or marketing content.
11. Confirm that the hybrid style boundary is explicit: lists for structured fields and short narrative paragraphs for section-purpose explanations.
12. Confirm that the final output contains only the requested structured instruction and no prefatory commentary or completed procurement values.