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Open_Contracting Welcome to the Etherpad for the session on Open Contracting! 

This etherpad has been created to help you to get the most of this  session; to start and share the conversation before the festival, to document it during the festival and to spread the word about the outcomes after OKFestival. We've provided a template which we hope will help you to get started,  but please feel free to change it to better suit your needs.

BEFORE THE FESTIVAL

Title of the Session and Link: OPEN CONTRACTING: Disclosing Data, Engaging for Results / http://sched.co/1tYgCGt
Date and Time: Wednesday, July 16th: 2:00-4:00 pm
Facilitator Contact Details: Felipe Estefan - Open Government Strategist, The World Bank - @FelipeEstefan
Organizing Team: Marcela Rozo, Steve Davenport, Tim Davies, Michael Roberts, Sarah Bird, Lindsey Marchessault, Ana Brandusescu, Katelyn Rogers, Eva Vozarova, Palo Lacko and Urs Buercky

Session Hashtag: #OpenContracting

Participants: pre-event, to get in touch with each other (feel free to add your Twitter handle):
@OpenContracting, @FelipeEstefan, @Marcela_Rozo, @DavenportSteve, @TimDavies, @MichaeloRoberts, @EvaVoz, @PaloLacko, @birdsarah, @jwyg, @danohu, @anabmap, @ocdata

Pre-Festival Materials: 


AT THE FESTIVAL
 
## Participants - name, contact (if you want to leave it), number of attendees

## Notes from the session

Marcela Rozo, "Open Contracting Partnership", World Bank

Eva Vozarova, Palo Lacko, "Fair Play Alliance", Slovakia

Bibhusan Bista, Nepal

Q&A
Q: What format does data arrive in?
A: Slovakia - PDFs, which need to be OCR'd. It's a lots of work, but it is possible
Q. where does open contracting end and privacy starts? e.g. can I be transparent about public servants' salaries?
A: private sector often cites commercial confidentiality as reasons for not to disclose. some work is going into the initial tendering process, to declare which parts can not be kept confidential beforehand, rather than letting companies claim their proposal was written with theunderstanding that it would be kept confidential. Work is being done to define general directions as of what should be transparent and what should be protected.
Q. to what extent does having a company registration number help in working out the true beneficiaries of a contract?

There is work going on establishing linkages between companies to understand who is really benefiting from a given contract

Open Contracting Data Standards
Michael Roberts, Web Foundation

Sarah Bird
Lindsey Marchessault
Michael Roberts

Group sessions

  1. Governance - Lead: Josema Alonso
  2. Standard - Lead: Sarah Bird 
  3. Demand - Lead: Lindsey Marchessault
  4. Tools - Leads: Ana Brandusescu & Steve Davenport

Governance (Lead: Jose Alonso)
Participants: Andrew Lamb (Appropedia Foundation), Maggie Murphy (Transparency International)

Standard (Lead: Sarah Bird)
Participants:
* Jed Miller
* Kees (Foreign Affairs) & Roderick (Cordaid) - both from Dutch Government
* Jeni Tennison 
* Ian - Open Spending

Jed - has been working on extractives and had been thinking and holding discussions last year on how to handle data interoperabilty

Ian - building neural networks to match company networks to companites house - 180,000 companies in UK data set

How to do unique identifiers for government departments

Agreed that the way to do any generic identifier in the absence of unique identifiers:
- freestyle field
- uri
- id
- prefix / system for id (maybe a uri)

difference between who the payment check went to & who the contract is with

also need to think about historical company ids

cordaid has been thinking about results frameworks and the challenges with making that data comparable & aggregatable

we need to think how things should be formatted & structured so that people can *get value*
======

The big things I got out of our session were:
1 - agreeing a system for a typical / generic way to handle unique identifiers (in the absence of unique identifiers) - which hopefully has sufficient redundancy to link in the future
2 - agreeing with Jeni that a simple parent_unique_contract id would be sufficient to enable us to do nesting of contracting processes (e.g. in the case of sub-contracting)
3 - a meeting with Kees and Rodrick to discuss results in IATI and what we can learn from that for open-contracting where we will also have milestones & deliverables (we also discussed at that meeting the possibilities for linking IATI and Open Contracting - where does IATI stop and contracting start)

Demand (Lead: Lindsey Marchessault)
Each member of the breakout group on demand first introduced themselves and what they hoped could be achieved using contracting data - the group was comprised of government representatives, journalists, researchers, monitors, and campaigners. There were two strong use cases that came out of these introductions - the desire to achieve value for money and the desire to to detect corrupt and fraudulent activity.  We broke into two groups. The V4M group discussed the motivations of the government to adopt open contracting principles and standard - wanting to better track spending, more efficient procurement processes, lowering barriers to entry for small and medium sized enterprises, to get more competition and lower prices. The anti-corruption group discussed identification of collusive and corrupt practices and some of the approaches of identifying indicators in procurement data that are red flags of corruption. The input from these discussions is incorporated in the User Cases for the Open Contracting Data Standard.

Tools (Leads: Ana Brandusescu, Steve Davenport)
Participants: John Adams ( DFID, IATI), Mark  Brough (PublishWhatYouFund), Chris Adams (Product Science), Eva Vozarova (Fair-Play Alliance, Slovakia)

Leading questions: 

What tools are needed make open contracting supply and demand side work?

What are the tools that drive adoption?
What is your experience with previous tools? good? bad?

Issues:
        e.g., no unique ID to link contract to procurement


AFTER THE FESTIVAL

## What did you learn and/or make?

## How/what could you teach others?