Priority Media Use Cases

[Michael Roberts]

Hi,

Thank you for all the contributions to date on Media and Open Contracting Data Standard. Its really useful to learn more about some of the issues related to laws and access to contracting data. I wanted to also go back to the question: 

3) What media use cases might be priorities for an open contracting data standard?

In the web meeting last week, the following questions were mentioned. Do you agree that these are some of the key question journalist might wish to ask? Are there others?

• What are the biggest suppliers in my city, state, country?
• What are the biggest authorities in terms of contracting?
• Which industries are taking up a lot of money?
• Is there a lot of defence spending or a lot of infrastructure spending?

• What are the biggest suppliers in my city, state, country?
• What services were to be provided under what timelines?
• Who are the organizations that put in offers but did not win the contract?
• In terms of asking these questions the most interesting bit is not the tender announcement but instead the contracting awards. 
  
  

Just as a reminder when you post for the first time, please introduce your (name, organization, and interest in Open Contracting Data Standard)

Cheers,

Michael

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Michael Roberts

Open Data Technical Manager

@michaeloroberts | mich...@webfoundation.org
World Wide Web Foundation | 1110 Vermont Ave NW, Suite 500, Washington DC, 20005, USA | www.webfoundation.org | Twitter: @webfoundation

[Peralta Ramos Momi (Gerente de Desarrollo Multimedia)]

Hi, I am Angelica Peralta Ramos from LA NACION in Argentina , I lead the data team . Since 2011 we started doing data journalism in Argentina and we realized we have to build the datasets ourselves! as here there is no Foi and little open data.  So we have a data catalog, a section, a blog, we organized two DATAFESTs and we started leading the way opening data as we report. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/data . Our interest is to put public data closer to the users so they can help keep govs accountable, but with a sense of urgency because here is a lot of corruption (rated 107  in Transparency Corruption index) and corruption is killing people as well.

 

Here in Argentina the Official Gazzette publishes the names of directors of companies, so with contracts what happens is that they create many and then compete or there are cartels of providers .

 

Regarding your questions they are perfect! but we are not interested in "the biggest" but in ALL of them. If the cost of publishing the open data of one and many is the same, it´s ok to know the biggest but also the new ones, the small ones and all the universe.

 

Another thing is to normalize and treat companys as entities. For this we have to work with unique IDs , here is "cuit" that identifies companies and DNI´s are for persons. So then we can cross data from federal, province or municipality. Very important to structure data and make the connections between them in a data model thought to present in multi dimensional social graphs (front end) and easy to export for crossing databases by ID. ( I dont code but I know Fredrich is the one there! )

 

Regarding the tenders here is very very incomplete data, some are with the announcements complete, some dont, some show prices and competitors and some not and we have to search different sites like Official Gazzette National and from provinces (all different formats and mostly PDFs) and Argentina Compras (contracts site) or each Agency one by one to find if there is published data. We need all the information to compare at detail level of prices, so we can help build an open data platform to make it easy for users or citizens to monitor these contracts.

 

This "Who are the organizations that put in offers but did not win the contract? " is VERY VERY important, and showing the members of the organization as well (connecting these to other organizations and participation in tenders). I´m not a specialist and perhaps I missed some of the chat the other day for language barriers . Sorry if I´m saying something that may sound not feasable or has already being discarded.

 

Best

 

Angelica

@momiperalta

 

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De: publi...@webfoundation.org [publi...@webfoundation.org] En nombre de Michael Roberts [mich...@webfoundation.org]
Enviado el: jueves, 22 de mayo de 2014 08:32 a.m.
Para: publi...@webfoundation.org
Asunto: [public-ocds] Priority Media Use Cases

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[Lisette Garcia, FOIA Resource Center]

Definitely feasible and not discarded already.

For Argentina companies doing business in the US, look to SEC's Edgar Database if publicly traded, CFTC if involving commodities and LEI for unique ID #, now being standardized thanks to the recently passed Data Act I mentioned.

My only concern is that this committee seems to be starting from the ground floor of its own necessarily limited experience rather than assessing what is known and has been accomplished in this field already. The risk is redundancy of efforts already underway elsewhere and little advancement of the general scheme overall. For instance:

http://datacoalition.com/issues/data-act.html "The DATA Act is the nation's first legislative mandate for data transparency. It requires the Department of the Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget to transform U.S. federal spending from disconnected documents into open, standardized data, and to publish that data online."

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/webfoundation.org/d/msgid/public-ocds/6F6C299B29908949B00ACF1251350F290263EFABFF79%40SRVMAIL2K7.lanacion.com.ar.

[Lisette Garcia, FOIA Resource Center]

"Our diverse working group includes government leaders, open data experts, and civic startup founders, including, but certainly not limited to the innovative minds behind Accela, Appallicious, Code For America, GovFresh, OpenCounter, OpenGov and PopVox. These civic-minded innovators are coming together to help create more transparency, accountability, efficiency and economic development."

http://techwire.net/open-data-opportunity-embrace-21st-century-economic-development-california/