Comment period - next steps...

[Tim Davies]

Hello all,

Thank you to everyone who has been commenting and providing input into the standard over the last month: your input has been extremely helpful.

We hope we have now captured the majority of the key issues* to consider before the initial release of an open contracting data standard later this year.

You can find a detailed list of the issues we have logged at https://github.com/open-contracting/standard/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Acreated-asc (Use the labels filter if you want to find only those to do with fields, documentation or particular use cases)

As you may know, this year of prototype development has been taking place through short iterations of work on the standard. The final planned iteration in this phase is due to take place at the start of November, so between now and then, we do invite any further feedback on the issues linked above. 

To give a rough sense of our plans and activities in the next 6 weeks:

• Field missions are taking place in Mexico and Senegal to explore the details of the standard with governments and different data users.
  
  
• We will be working hard on providing much clearer documentation and guidance on the standard - turning the current beta into a clear and accessible standard. 
  
  
• At the start of November we will be making substantial updates to the schema based on the all the issues noted, and will release this by mid-November;
  
  
• We will be developing a proposal for the Open Contracting Partnership on the future governance of an Open Contracting Data Standard - which will hopefully offer greater clarity by the end of the year about how future updates to the standard will be managed;
  
  
• The Open Contracting team at the World Bank are working to engage with businesses and organisations who may build tools to publish or consume data in the standard. For more on this contact sdave...@worldbank.org 
  
  
• We will be scoping out how far the current model could be extended in future to cover other kinds of contracts (the current model is based around procurement), reporting back on what might be required to cover land and extractives contracts. 

Thanks again for your support and interest in this project,

Regards

Tim Davies

Open Data Research Coordinator, Web Foundation

(*In so far as this is possible within the constraints of a one-year iterative development project)

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Tim Davies

Research Coordinator, Open Data Research Network

+44 7834 856 303

@timdavies | @odrnetwork | www.opendataresearch.org 

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