[OpenSpending] Recap from EU procurement Hack Day & Community Call 15 May 19CET

Fri May 10 06:22:25 UTC 2013

All, 

Thursday last week 18 civic coders and journalists from across Europe from 
Norway to Slovenia met up in Brussels for quite a brilliant hack day 
looking into the EU procurement register. Here are some of the takes from 
the event. 

## Procurement Hack Day - Outcomes
* Scraping and parsing TED into OpenTED 
Thanks to Friedrich Lindenberg we had a prepared scrape of the TED-data to 
work with. During the day several people got together to build and improve 
the parser. 

You can find the latest updates here - we'd love your help: 
https://github.com/opented/opented

* Finding a way around poor data quality
The poor data quality of the TED database remain a major challenge. Many 
important fields in the dataset such as "contract amount" or "number of 
bids" for the contract apear to be non-mandatory, which cause them often to 
be left blank. In other cases amounts are assigned in the wrong format 
using commas and decimals interchangeably. We're working to get some 
numbers on the overall data quality and would be eager to hear from you, if 
you've got ideas for ways to help clean the data. Using Open Refine might 
be one way to go, when we have a fully parsed dataset to work on. 

* Public bodies
As the EU procurement register is supposed to include all public contracts 
above 150,000 EUR from governments as well as municipalities and public 
utility companies, TED has been viewed as a potential source for mapping 
public bodies. The current breakdown from the scrape have indicated that 
TED might include address data and other information on 70,000 public 
bodies. We look forward to get these data unlocked and would love your help 
on this as well.   

Link to the current work on public bodies here: 
https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies

* User stories - ideas for data journalism on the data
During the Hack Day a good handful of datajournalists gathered to line up 
more than 20 questions on procurements relevant to journalists, which 
should be investigated when the data becomes available. 

Check the full list of questions relevant to data journalism here: 
http://lopad.org/opented

## Follow up  Community call Wednesday May 15 @ 19:00 CET
We're eager to follow up on the Hack Day and give everyone who could not 
attend a chance to get up to speed on the project. Therefore we'll be 
organising a Community Call Wednesday May 15 via GoogleHangout. 

Agenda: 
* Follow up from EU Procurement Hack Day May 2 in Brussels. 
    - Status on parsing of the data
    - Ideas for data journalism stories based on the data
* Anatoly from the datajournalism project Texty (Ukraine) will join us and 
share some insights about their award winning procurement database
* Add your topic here

All details on how to join here: http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/28

If you want to get involved in the project, I'd encourage you to get in 
touch via the list. 

All for now, 
Anders

-- 
Anders Pedersen
Community Coordinator
OpenSpending
Open Knowledge Foundation
Twitter: @anpe
Skype: anpehej
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