[open-government] Public Procurement Transparency in Sydney Australia

[Zander Furnas]

**apologies for cross posting**

Today at Sunlight, as part of our Transparency Case Study
Project<http://sunlightfoundation.com/casestudies/>we released an
in-depth case study on public
procurement transparency in Sydney
Australia<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/02/03/case-study-public-procurement-in-sydney-australia/>.
I wanted to share it with you all. Below is the summary of our findings.

Findings:

In recent years there have been two major steps forward in public
procurement and disclosure in Sydney, Australia. First, e-tendering portals
have been widely adopted which have lowered the practical barriers to the
collection and dissemination of procurement information. Second, the legal
framework surrounding public access to government information in New South
Wales was updated in 2010 with the Government Information (Public Access)
Act (GIPA). To investigate the impacts of these reforms we conducted
interviews with local procurement experts with relevant experience. We also
undertook a small-scale data scraping and analysis pilot project to
illustrate some of the difficulties of using Sydney procurement data as it
is disclosed.

These conversations have provided us with a detailed picture of procurement
disclosure and data use in municipal New South Wales, and in Sydney in
particular. A few findings have become clear:

   - These two reforms provide the foundation for a robust and modern
   procurement disclosure regime. GIPA provides a mandate to make information
   public by default, which is an important step toward real transparency. At
   the same time, the use of e-tendering provides the means to easily capture
   and manage relevant contracting data in digital formats that facilitate
   aggregation and analysis. At the national level these trends have led to
   the default disclosure of bulk procurement data through the country's many
   open data portals.


   - The joint promise of ICT facilitated data collection and dissemination
   and default disclosure has not been realized in Sydney, with these two
   reforms operating largely in isolation from each other. This expansive
   disclosure regime has not been applied to publicly releasing exports of
   bulk data captured and managed by Sydney's e-tendering platform.


   - Essentially all disclosure in Sydney comes in the form of PDFs made
   available on the city website. There is a wealth of valuable information;
   the amount of disclosure is the highest we have observed in our three case
   studies. But because this information is not released in machine-readable
   bulk formats, public data use is unnecessarily limited.


   - Pre-award tendering and post-award contract management are governed by
   separate authorities under the city council. The result is a lack of
   continuity in procurement monitoring and the absence of a robust post award
   disclosure regime. Some information is made available in council meetings
   and annual reports, but there is no systematic process of contract
   management disclosure that would facilitate public oversight.
   - We found evidence of little, if any, public engagement with
   procurement data. This may be the result of procurement's low public
   salience in Sydney, or of the barriers that exist to using the data. In
   either case, greater public and civil society engagement with municipal
   procurement is desirable as an outside check on malfeasance and inefficacy.

You can read the full case study
here<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/02/03/case-study-public-procurement-in-sydney-australia/>
.


Best,
Zander
-- 
Alexander Furnas
Research Fellow | Sunlight Foundation <http://sunlightfoundation.com>
@AlexanderFurnas
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