Update - Presenting 2 Use Cases for Open Contracting Data and Seeking your Feedback

[Lindsey Marchessault]

Dear All,

Over the past few months, we have been speaking to quite a few stakeholders in our community of practice about how they are using (or seeking to use) contracting information. We have also held some great web meetings with practitioners. For example, in our last meeting, we explored the demand for contracting data from the perspective of civil society with special presentations from Seember Nyager of the Public and Private Development Centre in Nigeria, Ivan Begtin of the Informational Culture organization in Russia, and Eduardo Bohórquez of TI Mexico (a recording of the meeting is here and a summary is below).

The objective of these meetings and consultations has been to capture the real needs and circumstances of the publishers and users of public contracting data – to demonstrate what can and could be done with open contracting data and to shape the development of the Open Contracting Data Standard.

In our consultations thus far with government, civil society, donors, journalists, auditors, and the private sector, four primary use cases emerged. These users are wishing to use open contracting data in order to:

• Achieve value for money for the procuring entity;
• Enable the private sector to compete for public contracts;
  
• Monitor service delivery for effectiveness; and
  
• Detect corruption and fraud in public contracting.
  

Two of these Use Case stories have already been written up and can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zdgqSf-LUFVxO6Y_7v1cQf7l0vx35-p502jAI49JRmQ/edit#heading=h.ccqgex8wpf0s

At this point, we would very much appreciate your feedback on what we have so far. 

• To what extent do you agree with these priority use cases?  
  
• Is there anything you would add to these use cases?  
  
• Is there another use case that we should consider? 
  
• How do you feel that our current data model responds to the user needs?  
  

It would be great if you could share your reactions either as comments in the google document or as a response to this email (or both).  

Looking forward to your input.

Best regards and happy 4th!

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Open Contracting Data Standards

Community Web Meeting - Civil Society Contract Monitoring Use Cases

(Held Friday May 30, 2014, 8am EST)

The Topic:

Civil society has an active role to play in holding governments accountable for public spending and effective service delivery. In many countries around the world, civil society organizations are actively monitoring public contracting and contractor performance - helping governments to avoid corruption, over spending, and to improve the quality of goods, works, and services ultimately delivered to communities. In order to do this work effectively, civil society needs access to contracting information, space to operate, and a mechanism by which to deliver feedback to decision makers and achieve results. In this meeting we will explore how civil society organizations in Nigeria, Russia, and Mexico are currently using data on contracts, and how they could use data in future - identifying key use cases for an open contracting data standard.

Presenter: Seember Nyagar, Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), Nigeria.

Seember began by introducing her organization, the PPDC and explained that they became interested in public contracting to combat ‘white elephant’ projects – where projects are completed but without producing something of value. Because it is not possible to monitor everything, PPDC developed monitoring platforms in high priority sectors: energy, health, education, and oil and gas. Seember explained that by monitoring the stages of public contracting, it is possible to identify that which is stopping projects from performing as they should. For example, for tendering and award, PPDC wants to know that the process is conducted so as to give the contract to the right organization with the right skills. For that, they look to the competitiveness of the process, the amount of the contract, and its duration. During performance, they look out for delays and the causes of those delays, working with contractors in the process to identify the impediments to good performance. They also look at budget and spending trends. To ensure that information is strategically engaged with and to build momentum, PPDC has started to link facts gathered through data to compelling stories to motivate others about this work. One of these is http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/158077-tragic-consequences-secret-contracts-seember-nyager.html. More info is available at http://www.procurementmonitor.org and http://library.procurementmonitor.org

Presenter: Eduardo Bohórquez, TI Mexico

Eduardo gave insight into the long process that led to increased openness of the Mexican procurement system, and how citizens are now participating in that system. Eduardo explained that the Mexican federal eprocurement system dates back to 1995 and that there are over 100,000 procurement process per year. This means that it is a major challenge to gather data and to make sense of it. Furthermore, citizens could only identify problems with contracts after they were awarded. Therefore, civil society began to push for procurement reform that would enable them to gain access not only to the data but to the process itself. In 2002, the social witnesses were able to participate in the contracting process. In 2006, the law was changed to make it necessary to release tenders for comments before the process starts. However, the next need identified was to build the capacity of government and citizens to achieve best results in complex public procurements –to use the available information strategically for procurement policy and integrity of the process.

Presenter: Ivan Begtin, Informational Culture, Russia

Ivan explained that Russia, although federated, has a unified procurement system that publishes data for both federal and local governments (http://zakupki.gov.ru). He explained that Organizational Culture is collecting , analyzing, and combining this data on the platform http://clearspending.ru. In order to better use this information, they provided the data as open data and built an API. They also hosted a contest for developers to create applications using the data and got 17 applications (http://clearspending.ru/apps).

Following the remarks of the presenters, participants asked questions and a facilitated discussion ensued, covering:

· Criteria for monitoring the quantity and quality of public contracting data

· Communicating and building on successful outcomes of monitoring outcomes to gain momentum (in response to which Seember shared:https://storify.com/seember/verifying-the-performance-of-power-sector-contract)

· The challenges of aggregating and analyzing data from multiple sources (such as in a federal system) and

· The importance of geographic location information for local monitoring.

Full audio of the web meeting available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlXhH8HWPvE.

[Ian Makgill]

Tim,

You've got the right reasons for doing this in the four steps listed above. They're broad categories, but I think that there's a couple more points to mention:

1. A good standard allows for greater public or journalistic investigation. There's a huge gap between wanting to know what's going on and spotting corruption and knowing what is happening is a critical part of the conversation around open contracting.

2. A standard creates new business opportunities for private sector organisations like ours (www.spendnetwork.com) and OpenCorporates. Sure that's not more important than fighting corruption, but it is important if we want open data to thrive and grow (W3C and World Bank can't do this forever). Its also important that government data isn't just consumed by companies who then just release it behind an exorbitant paywall.

As to usefulness, yes we're happy that the standard is useful, its clearly a work in progress but it clearly has the right structure and we're looking forwards to using it in anger.

Ian

[Lindsey Marchessault]

Hi Ian,

 

Thanks for your comments. I want to also take this opportunity to remind the community that our priority use cases are still open for comment here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zdgqSf-LUFVxO6Y_7v1cQf7l0vx35-p502jAI49JRmQ/edit?usp=sharing

 

Looking forward to further feedback as we incorporate these inputs into the serialization of the standard.

 

Best regards,

 

Lindsey

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[Pascal Robichaud]

Have you been able to get feedback from people in the different industries.

For exemple, Engineers in the road industry?

Pascal

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/webfoundation.org/d/msgid/public-ocds/CANju6%3D%2Byu2Bcj83CcRH2A_NF6Bs6ebzyQBAyFESkf7bhFPCQ-g%40mail.gmail.com.