Open Contracting

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    Open Government, Government of Canada. (2014, June 6). Open Contracting. Retrieved from http://open.canada.ca/en/open_contracting
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Votes: 105

Open contracting is about the increased disclosure of government contracting and procurement processes and decisions. This includes opening up information on contracts for both goods and services. Disclosed information should include the planning, decision making, scoring, and awarding of all contracts.

By opening up the contracting process to greater public oversight, the government can encourage increased private sector participation in the public tender process. Currently, contracting with the government is in the domain of larger firms and middleman companies who possess the context-specific knowledge on how to work within the current, complex system. Lowering the barriers to entry will increase competition and save the government money.

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Comments

Submitted by Mathieu Gauthi… on July 01, 2014 - 2:16 PM

Le gouvernement fédéral du Canada devrait planifier le développement d'une nouvelle version de achatsetventes.gc.ca qui sera 100 % conforme aux «Directives sur l'ouverture des données des marchés publics» de la Sunlight Foundation et compatible avec le «Open Contracting Data Standard» de OCP/Web Foundation : http://sunlightfoundation.com/procurement/opendataguidelines/fr/ http://ocds.open-contracting.org/standard/

Submitted by James McKinney on June 30, 2014 - 7:21 PM

I would encourage the government to: - Endorse the Open Contracting Global Principles [1], like the UK and Scottish government have done [2]. - Use common company identifiers across departments, notably Public Works and Industry Canada. Common identifiers make it possibly to link up datasets and follow the money. - Aggregate all contracting data on buyandsell.gc.ca, which is already a destination website for this information. Currently, each department proactively discloses contracting data on its own website, making it more difficult to retrieve this data. - Publish granular spending/disbursement data, in addition to the existing budget and contracting data. See, for example, New York City's checkbooknyc.com. - Follow and contribute to the development of global Open Contracting Data Standards. [3] 1. http://www.open-contracting.org/global_principles 2. http://www.opengovpartnership.org/tags/procurement 3. http://www.open-contracting.org/open_contracting_data_standards

Submitted by Edward (on beh… on June 24, 2014 - 1:13 AM

> One of the challenges of Open Contracting is providing information in a format that is useful for study and research, but also > understandable for all Canadians. What would you like to see included in the planning and decision-making information that > you recommend to be disclosed? How do you think we could best present this information to Canadians? It’d be handy to have a guide that answers: * Why was something procured * Who were the involved parties, including those that didn’t win * Why the winning bidder won; how were bidders scored / what was the rubric used? To be more specific, the Sunlight Foundation has a great proposal on these sorts of things here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/procurement/opendataguidelines (linked to from http://www.opengovguide.com/standards-and-guidance/open-data-guidelines-for-procurement/ ) It would be super cool to see this kind of data come directly out of Merx.

Submitted by open-ouvert on June 11, 2014 - 2:10 PM

Thanks for your comment. Open Contracting is certainly one of the emerging Open Government themes we are seeing in a number of countries. In fact, several OGP member nations – including the UK, the US, and Hungary – have already made commitments to make their contracting and procurement processes more open. If you’d like to check out the OGP’s Open Government Guide, you can get some more information on illustrative commitments for Open Contracting: http://www.opengovguide.com/topics/public-contracting/ One of the challenges of Open Contracting is providing information in a format that is useful for study and research, but also understandable for all Canadians. What would you like to see included in the planning and decision-making information that you recommend to be disclosed? How do you think we could best present this information to Canadians?