[open-government] Global Campaign for Opening Up Contract Data

Sat Jun 21 03:27:50 UTC 2014

Hello Daniela,

The Open Contracting Partnership (www.open-contracting.org), a
multi-lateral partnership of organizations that OK(f) should consider
joining as part of this campaigning, have been exploring this space for a
while. They OCP Community of Practice at http://pro-act.org/ has collected
together a list of Contracting Portals at
http://pro-act.org/page/government-portals

For the Open Contracting Partnership, the Web Foundation (where I work some
of the time) have been working on the iterative development of a pilot data
standard for Open Contracts that might help in making really concrete
demands for specific documents, and meta-data, about contracts.

For that project the team have been assessing many different existing
contracting data portals, building a comparison tool at
http://ocds.open-contracting.org/opendatacomparison which maps out (
http://ocds.open-contracting.org/opendatacomparison/datamap/) which
different providers are publishing what fields of data.

Many of the team will be at OKFest, and will have a session to start
exploring how to broaden community engagement in the developing Open
Contracting Data Standard, as well as having some space for digging into
the details of the field specs / data models etc.

In terms of building an OK(f) campaign - one area to focus, as the
discussion on Libraries points, may be on specific sectors - and even on
particular kinds of contract terms that the open knowledge community wants
to see more contracts include. There are a growing number of resources out
there on contract monitoring, and thinking about how to tailor some of
those to monitoring the extent to which contracts increase or diminish the
commons, alongside focusing on a default of contract disclosure, may be one
of the most valuable ways to build on the community's strength.

(As an aside: it would be interesting to know how Open Knowledge came to
decide on this campaigning focus...and whether there are particular
contractual obligations on OK from funders around the campaigning activity
being undertaken....)

All the best

Tim

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Daniela Mattern <daniela.mattern at okfn.org>
wrote:

> Hey,
>
> my name is Daniela - I joined Open Knowledge Central in February and
> before this I have been working for 11 years in Brazil.
>
> Open Knowledge wants to run a Global Campaign for opening up contract
> data? I think this topic very exciting:
>
> While I was in Brazil I encountered a lot of problems to opening up
> contract data - for instance I was working with community leaders in a slum
> in São Paulo and they were receiving funds from the City of São Paulo, the
> Federal government and the World Bank to install water sanitation. The
> community leaders reported that the work was to be done in the whole slum
> but the construction company didn't do it ... They also reported that the
> government send a person to evaluate and supervise the work but that the
> supervision had not been done properly - on the day of the evaluation the
> company showed the work in some parts of the slum where it had been
> delivered. They got the approval that the work had been finalized although
> the work wasn't finished.
> Then I made Freedom of Information requests to get access to the contract
> - the problem was, that the tender had been handled by a Ministry and then
> the contract was administered by a state bank. The Ministry was not in
> possession of the contract and the bank informed that the whole process was
> bank secret.
>
> I wanted to know, whether any of you has also tried to open up contract
> data so far and which process you followed. Has it been successful?
>
> I also wondered how we could organize a Global Campaign that forces a lot
> of political leaders to open up the contract data. This would be so
> important, to my mind: If people had the terms of reference and the
> contracts they could effectively monitor the work that is being delivered
> by the companies.
>
> I have currently only found a data base of Open Contracts for Slovakia
> <http://www.opengovguide.com/country-examples/in-slovakia-government-contracts-are-published-online/>
> - do you know any other examples?
>
> Thanks for your ideas!
>
> Daniela
>
> --
>
> Daniela Mattern
>
> Open Data Project Manager | skype: e1aste2000
>
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-- 

+44 (0)7834 856 303
@timdavies
http://www.timdavies.org.uk
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