Tender docummentation of bidders

[Myroslav Opyr]

Hi,

In our system bidders are expected to apply with their own tender documentation, and that documentation is expected to be valuable part of Tender Releases (if I properly understand te term).

From Tender data structure documented at http://ocds.open-contracting.org/standard/r/master/#tender I do not see a place to have that documents in.

I see following options:

• have all documents (both from procuringEntity and from bidders into attachments) - this would make that collection ambigous and would need to annotate the source of attachment then)
• have more complex structure of bidders array, to contain not plain Organization but Applications, that would consist of Author (Organization) and other relevant details to that Application, including attachments array.

Am I missing something?

I'm new to Open Contracting, thus pardon me my intrusion, plase. Is this list proper place to discuss the standard and its use in the systems, or https://github.com/open-contracting/standard/issues is better place?

Regards,

Myroslav Opyr

[Tim Davies]

Dear Myroslav

Many thanks for this valuable comment: and yes - discussion of the standard and implementation is welcome on this list, with the goal that anything that looks like it needs attention in the standard update process gets turned into an issue on GitHub.

For your point - what are the things other than Organization and Attachment that you might publish about bidders in your systems? Can you point us to examples of data that might help explore this more?

Your question makes me wonder whether we might instead need a 'Bids' array, which then includes the bidder 'Organization', 'Attachments' but then that can also include other meta-data, such as date of bid, value etc. if there are cases where this is currently captured and published...

All best wishes

Tim

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[Myroslav Opyr]

Hi,

In our case during tenderPeriod bidders provide Applications, and only after that bidder becomes full fledged participant of a tender. During Application process bidder is offering the price and one or several documents (as required by tender conditions). Usually among documents are:

• Description of the item offered (as one or several documents, i.e. proposal, product certification)
  
• Documents about Bidder itself (licenses, confirmations, guarantees, etc.) that are necessary for qualification process (probably within awardPeriod)

We need to have these documents (as well as price) public and as part of tender documentation for later inspection (since it helps fight awardPeriod corruption by cross-checking that documentation among Bidders, and other interested parties).

We are differentiating the Bidder Application from Bids, since we call Bids only actions in Auction (see below) and Bid consist of only smaller price submission (not any different document).

There is other topic that is slightly related are the bids and Auction. We are a bit confused about "numberOfBids" field since it is in no way descriptive or valuable in our case, since after the tenderPeriod is over we have short Auction when in several rounds bidders reduce their bids, and we'll be publishing log of the auction as well as "final bids" of bidders in structured form (since it is essential for qualification and award period).

One of the ideas is exploiting notices approach: Tender has Notices that can be Amendments, similar can be applied to Application, and Auction bids will be just amendments to Bidder' original Application, and last bid will be stored in Application.value With Amendments documenting that field history. The problem here is that Amendment neither stores original values of the field(s) nor the date they were originally submitted in.With all that complications Notices/Amendment approach to store field change history becomes not manageable :)

Regards,

Myroslav Opyr

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[Mathias Huter]

Hi Tim, 

Georgia currently publishes the identities and all bids of all participating bidders (once the winner of the tender has been identified). I don't know of other countries that have followed this model. In Georgia, tenders are awarded through an e-procurement system and besides timestamps for each submitted bid, there is also data on each bidder – they have a profile on the portal with company ID, address, name of the entity in various languages and contact information. Also, various documents submitted by each bidder are released (click on "technical documentation" in the link below). 

For example, this tender for army boots: https://tenders.procurement.gov.ge/public/?go=92212&lang=en. 

Overall, the procurement data published by Georgia includes: 

* Meta data on tendering process 
* All bids of all participating bidders, including their identities (once a winner of the tender has been identified);
* All relevant documents related to the process, released by either the procuring entity or bidders/the selected supplier, whereby outdated versions of these documents remain accessible;
* Budgets available for planned purchases from all public bodies in the current year;
* Signed agreements and meta data, including outdated versions/amendments;
* Payments made towards a specific contract;
* Communication between interested parties and government agency to clarify technical details;
* Whitelisted companies (preferential conditions for previous successfully delivered contracts);
* Blacklisted companies (barred from public procurement for one year);
* Complaints filed over a specific tender (which can be done by anybody using an online form on the platform), and decisions of a dispute resolution board addressing complaints (see alsohttps://tenders.procurement.gov.ge/dispute/, in Georgian only). 
* Bills, receipts and contracts from single-sourced purchases, as well as meta data to these transactions, payments made for these contracts, and the legal basis for conducting a single-sourced purchase rather than a competitive tender are made available as well (one shortcoming is that users cannot see which purchases have been classified and are thus not published).
* A registry with profiles of all registered users, government entities as well as companies.

(To explore the site go to tenders.procurement.gov.ge. After setting the correct language (click on "ENG"), visitors can access the website as "guests" or create a free account, which will give them access to more data and to customizable alerts.)

 

Regards, 

Mathias

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[Sarah Bird]

From Tim "Your question makes me wonder whether we might instead need a 'Bids' array, which then includes the bidder 'Organization', 'Attachments' but then that can also include other meta-data, such as date of bid, value etc. if there are cases where this is currently captured and published..."

This is a good suggestion, and also ties in with an issue we have on scores received by bidders: https://github.com/open-contracting/standard/issues/36

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[Sarah Bird]

Also, I would encourage you to remember that the standard is not exclusive. You are welcome to add on your own data even if we do not specify it. So in the case of the supplied tender documentation, you would be more than welcome to add on extra fields. Of course, its helpful if the standard is structured in such a ways that this is easy to do, so making the "bids" array rather than the "bidders" array would facilitate this.

I mention this because I am surprised (pleasantly) that people would be willing to publish submitted tenders - this often gets classified as commercially confidential data.

[Myroslav Opyr]

Hi,

In our case we have position, that if you are not eager to disclose your documentation, you are not obliged to take part in tender. Additionally you are able to request changes to tender conditions to be able to disclose less.

Regards,

Myroslav Opyr

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[Sarah Bird]

Awesome!

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