A project to support release and reuse of public procurement data is being launched by Open Knowledge Sweden and the Swedish Agency for Digital Government (DIGG), probably the first project in Sweden to trace and visualise public procurement patterns with the involvement of both data suppliers and data users.
Open Up! - funded through VINNOVA’s (Sweden’s innovation agency) first ever Civic Tech call - will develop an open source platform to make procurement easier, more transparent and efficient. It will contain a dashboard that visualises public procurement patterns and features that allow user-friendly analysis of the data, while the data will be published automatically (by API) on Sweden’s open data portal. The platform will make it easy for public institutions to open up their procurement data and facilitate the reuse of data . “DIGG will be actively involved in the project by opening up its own procurement data (‘accounts payable’), by sharing knowledge about the procurement process in the public sector, and by hopefully becoming a driver for change for other public institutions”, says Kristine Ulander, Digital Strategist at DIGG.
The internationally renowned School of Data-model will be used to involve stakeholders (journalists, companies, civil servants) in the platform development and to coach them in harvesting and visualising data. For this purpose, we are partnering with the Swedish Association of Investigative Journalism (FGJ), the Open Contracting Partnership, which is a not-for-profit working in over 50 countries to transform procurement for the public good, and Transparency International Ukraine, the creator of the acclaimed project ProZorro, which is the most impactful example of opening procurement data.
The 15-month project will hold regular stakeholder workshops and finalise a platform prototype by June 2021. Based on an assessment of the data published on the platform and on feedback from stakeholders, the project will produce guidelines and recommendations on how to improve the release of public procurement data in Sweden. The project will host a discussion around procurement data needs in June 2020. With this project we, together with our partners CivicTech Sweden and DIGG, hope to further the use and utility of public sector data, and to catalyze new initiatives across sectors in Sweden, with the aim of generating fresh information flows around procurement data between public officials and civic actors.
Please get in touch if you would like to join our initiative!
Contact:
Toni Mickiewicz, co-chair of Open Knowledge Sweden: tonimickiewicz@gmail.com
Tel. +46 760 073 321
Open Knowledge Sweden website: http://openknowledge.online/
