[open-government] Open Contracts Portal in Slovakia Launched!

[Matej Kurian]

Hi,

Open Contracts, a project of Transparency SK and Fair Play Alliance went 
live yesterday. Perhaps it might be of interest to people in 
spending/accontability community.

Open Contract Portal is a project developed by Transparency SK and Fair 
Play Alliance aiming at increasing transparency and accountability in 
public spending by empowering citizen. Slovakia has mandated online 
publication of state contracts from Jan 1, 2011, however  delivery of 
this measure is still far from perfect. The contracts are to be found on 
not less than 8.000 sites according to some estimates. Contracts 
publication quality is lacking, and sites provide no space for citizen 
monitoring or public feedback.

Open Contract Portal is an effort to address such imperfections. In a 
way it is a showcase of what decent contract publication portal should 
look like - it concentrates more data in one place and brings 
value-added functionality such as advanced filtering, full-text search 
and other on-demand reports. For example, business community members can 
request notifications via RSS  feed if a new contract above 100k euros 
mentioning IT is published. Furthermore, users can highlight text in 
contracts, comment and rate contracts.  To reduce the volume of 
contracts, users are provided option to look at pre-selected (TI-AFP 
methodology) contracts that might be of interest.

You will find the site at www.otvorenezmluvy.sk (Slovak only), or at 
http://bit.ly/OpenContracts (Google Translate).
Project code is availabe at https://github.com/otvorenezmluvy, full 
documentation soon to come!

Feedback will be much appreciated!

Matej

-- 
Matej Kurian
programovy koordinator
Transparency International Slovensko
kurian at transparency.sk
(+421.02).5341.72.07

www.transparency.sk