Open Contracting: connecting governments, citizens and companies through data
Fecha de la noticia: 20-07-2017

How much money has your government invested in the latest public service or infrastructure built in your city? What exactly was the money invested in? How was the hiring of the final suppliers decided? Has the successful tenderer duly complied with all agreed services? These are, in principle, simple questions that any of us might ask ourselves on occasion. However, answering all those questions is not a simple task today. In order to do so, it would first be necessary to be able to openly access all the information concerning the complete contracting cycle: from initial planning to contracting and execution to final monitoring of the proper execution of the public contracts.
Every year governments around the world spend billions from their budgets through public procurement procedures. If these procurement processes are made more open and transparent, we would also be getting governments to save public money through more efficient procurement, better use of resources and, at the same time, fostering a more conducive environment for investment and public and private innovation. However, obtaining access to this massive amount of information and then being able to analyze it is no trivial task at all.
To meet this challenge the Open Contracting Partnership has arisen. This is a global network which aims to promote a change in the tendering system from closed to open by default, thus supporting organizations interested in improving transparency and efficiency in public procurement by means of common principles of proactive publication, participation and monitoring. In the centre of all these efforts is the Public Procurement Data Standard, designed to provide governments with a reference guide and the documentation and resources required when sharing tendering data in an efficient, open and reusable manner.
How then can we make the our governments’ procurement more accessible and transparent? The partnership gives us some simple guidelines to follow:
- Commit to open data for public procurement.
- Carry out an analysis of the starting point.
- Prepare a customised implementation of the standard.
- Publish the data.
- Use available data to monitor contracts and detect inefficiencies.
- Learn from the data and improve contracting processes.
- Show results and share them with others.
There are already several projects that are making use of the open procurement standard to make public contracts more accessible. Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, United Kingdom, Ukraine, all of these have already adopted the standard to improve the transparency of their procurement systems and 14 other countries have recently pledged to do so in the near future. But in order to be able to count on increasingly open public procurement, the collaboration of all the agents involved will also be necessary, from the commitment of governments to continue publishing the data of the entire contracting process to the active participation of civil organizations and citizens, in order on the one hand to increase the demand for public data and, secondly, contribute to a thorough scrutiny of the results thanks to new tools to facilitate the process.
Next November we will have a new opportunity to connect with the partnership at its annual meeting and thus contribute to a more efficient public procurement, as well as to explore the challenges of open contracting in specific sectors or new forms of innovation in contracting. This annual meeting will take place on 28 and 29 November in Amsterdam and experts and innovators in Open Contracting are called on to articulate and define collectively how to take new steps in open contracting worldwide.