Contract Data

[Herb Lainchbury]

Okay, I feel like an idiot but I just realized that many federal government organizations have been publishing relatively detailed financial information for what looks like years!

http://www.ec.gc.ca/contracts-contrats/index.cfm?lang=En&state=reports

I am wondering:

1. Does anyone here have a contact in the federal "open data" team?  I wonder if they can get these "proactive disclosure" sites into a .csv file and into their open data portal.
   
   
2. Is there any reason why our provincial and local governments can't do the same thing?  (publish contracts?)  I personally would like to see data for all contracts routinely published.  Publishing this information with relevant contract details like title, description/synopsis, start date, delivery date, status, etc.. would be great input for Kevin's http://www.proactivedisclosure.ca site.

-- 

Herb Lainchbury
Dynamic Solutions Inc.
www.dynamic-solutions.com
http://twitter.com/herblainchbury

[David Eaves]

Herb - I'm in regular contact with them. I'm pretty sure they are working on this.

If not, literally the best thing people can do is send requests through their website - they have a "request a data set". It's these requests that give them leverage when engaging other departments.

[James McKinney]

I'm sure this informational will eventually be made public in a machine-readable format.

More troubling though is the tendering process, in which there are more opportunities for corruption and where there are many examples of cartel behaviour (price fixing, market division, collusive tendering). This data I think is less likely to make light.

[Herb Lainchbury]

James - I have also informally asked for BC Bid data, but haven't heard back about that.  That was some time ago.  I haven't asked for MERX but that would be a logical one to ask for as well.

David - you're in contact with them, but I'm not.  I just send requests in using web forms and they disappear into the void.

I have made many requests for data to be released - at all levels of government.  Mostly informal, mostly before BC and Canada launched their portals and mostly I haven't received a response.  Where I have received a response it's usually "very unlikely".

I am sure other people have asked for what I have asked for.  I am also sure many of the folks in this forum have asked for data to be released or to have a license applied to already released data.

I think we need a community tool where our requests for data are published where we can all see them.

Something like http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/  but for open data requests ( one for FOI would also be good!, but that's another topic ).  It needs to be community run and cross jurisdictional.  That way, it could be used for Local, Provincial or Federal requests.  Users would be able to see if someone else had already asked for the same thing and preferably I would be able to vote other folks requests up.  This would also help governments answer the question "what do people want?"

It's fine for sites like data.gov.bc.ca to have a feedback form, or the data.gc.ca "request a dataset" form but when I submit something to that no one else can see it and there is no feedback - where does that note go?  Do I get a reply?  Are other people interested in that data?  How long ago was my request sent in?  How long do people have to wait on average?

A community system would help with all of these questions.

Thoughts, comments?   Would this be useful?

Herb

[Kevin McArthur]

Definitely useful herb. Would be nice to see it broken down by ministry too so that we can see who is/isn't efficiently processing data requests too.

--

Kevin

[Dan Bonab]

Great Idea!

I think it would be extremely useful. Im not sure about (whatdotheyknow.com), it should be something like (WhereIsMy@#$%^Data.com)!!!

It could also have a nice multi-faceted search engine to search by Date Requested, Licensing, Quality, MimeType, etc.

 

Cheers

 

Dan

[Wrate, David LCTZ:EX]

Hi everyone, David Wrate here, we’re looking at how to manage and report on data requests. Don’t have a solution yet but would be happy to talk about ideas etc @ the hackathon.

 

Cheers,

David

[Luke Closs]

Are there any good examples of government run request trackers?
Anything open source and/or forkable?

[Herb Lainchbury]

Governments do have request tracking systems but I don't know of any that are open source or available to the public.

As far as FOI trackers go, besides whatdotheyknow.org there is also this site http://fyi.org.nz/ in New Zealand and the source is available on github here : http://github.com/wombleton/fyi

I contacted the author and he said that there is also this project http://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli that is a striving to be a general purpose and fully internationalized version of whatdotheyknow.com and it seems to have quite a bit of momentum.

Now, again, these are FOI request tracking systems which are useful in their own right, but they could potentially also be used for tracking open data requests.   I know of no tracking systems specific to open data requests.  

H