Hackathon on Public Contracting (Public Procurement) in Nepal: How did Open Contracting Data Standards (OCDS) contribute?

Kathmandu saw an overwhelming crowd of data enthusiasts mainly comprising up of the young students and change makers coming forward to participate in the Open Data Day Hackathon on February 25, 2017. Participants divided themselves into 10 different groups with interesting names as well as energy.

Public procurement was one of the themes that the challenges were framed from. Public procurement (public contracting) constitutes the largest portion of government spending in Nepal as with any other country in the world. So, the participants were encouraged to pick this important issue to develop innovative tools making use of data that exists. Mr. Manish Bhattarai, IT Director of Public Procurement Monitoring Office spoke about the data that exist in Nepal in terms of public contracting.

It was an exciting but at the same time challenging for participants to work on the challenges related to public procurement. Public Procurement Monitoring Office has been currently using two different electronic government procurement portals i.e. e-GP I and e-GP II to coordinate the public contracting process through electronic systems. Efforts are being made to centralize all the procurements through the e-GP system. Public entities have been using these portals to publish the information related to public procurements. Also, individual e-procurement portal still exists for some public entities within Nepal.

The Challenges

The challenges were the products from exercising existing datasets that are available. The challenges varied from disclosing details of the awardee to tracking individual contracts/contractors to the very end. Above all, participants were encouraged to go beyond the framed challenges.

The data related to public contracting do not exist in a uniform structure that came as a serious challenge for the participants to take the challenges. However, thanks to PPMO that took an extra step to provide data in accordance with Open Contracting Data Standards. PPMO is carrying out a project with a support of Open Contracting Partnership to open procurement data as per Open Contracting Data Standards. Participants were provided with OCDS JSON data of both the electronic procurement systems of PPMO.

Open Contracting Data Standards: The Savior

The datasets that existed in different formats were brought into uniform standard following the OCDS. Not all but some key data were captured to fit into the standards that ultimately helped participants work with the challenges. Also, the list of use cases that open contracting envisages aided the participants to define what the intended use of such tools i.e. either enhance value for money, check corruption or ensure effective and timely delivery of services and who is going to get benefited.

Output

We witnessed some interesting outputs. They are as follows:

1. Track the contract progress: Participating youths seemed much concerned about the ongoing development projects that are being carried out in their localities. It was interesting to see the participants establishing a linkage between the development contracts e.g. roads, bridges, public buildings etc. with the statuses of their accomplishments.
2. Linkage with Real Problems and forward solutions: The participants worked to establish that procurement contracts have a direct link with problems like pollution and traffic congestion. They showed that simply opening such contracting data can be an antidote.

As this is the first time procurement data was being exercised as a challenge, we were skeptic about results. Amazingly, 5 groups of participants took procurement challenges and developed their products.

1. She Leads : Track ongoing contracting and allow government upvote good performing contractors

The team developed an android application which provides a smart way to track the ongoing government projects in different districts of Nepal. The application has 2 users; public and contractors.

The users can view the ongoing projects, details about the contractors that is carrying out the project and the progress of the project. Contractors can also log in to the application and view the available contracts/projects and bid the projects.

Upon completion of a project in the estimated time, the contractors gains an upvote(provided by admin i.e. government) and gains minus vote otherwise. The team believes that the app will help government evaluate the bidders according to their profile.

2. Team Tracker: Road Contracts Tracking and Crowdsourcing

The team also developed an android app combining visualization and crowd-sourcing limiting their work to road construction contracts. The construction contracts are visualized for their contract date, completion date, contract amount, etc. The app is also envisioned to crowdsource feedback as a data to close the loop. The app is able to redirect complain directly to ministry of roads so that they could get information about locals opinion. Also, people can upload their opinions on current construction issues in the forum.

The team believes to facilitate both the citizens and government bodies and lead to transparency and accountability among the citizens regarding road construction.

3. Team Python : Tracking the Progress of construction contracts

The team has developed a platform where general people can access and see visualized data of current development progress and also can report complaint for any project they feel that have not been working as per the schedule and process.

4. KU Guys: Tracking the Progresses of Public Constructions and use of Social Media

The team worked to create a web interface that shows the companies that participated in these public procurement projects and track their progress to visualize them on the basis of effectiveness.

Another part of this idea is to crowdsourcing which involves using tweets to view the status of different projects. People will us a certain keyword as hashtag to tweet photos of some project which would be updated in their web app.

5. Code-blooded: Enabling Awardee Search

The team worked to build a tool that can track the bidding frequency and complete details about the companies.

The tool visualizes:

1. General Info about the company using OCR data
2. Frequency of bidding and winning bids
3. Legal status
4. Authenticity

Finally, it was exciting to see participants working in procurement challenges despite the datasets were limited. Small groups of youths worked with small portion of contracting data and that resulted to the interesting tools to solve real problems. We can now believe that opening of larger sets of contracting data enables various actors use the data and come out with interesting solutions to many problems. Seen that efforts are being made to bring together contracting data at a place, their is a necessity to take extra efforts to manage such data in friendly structures that eases its users draw meaningful analyses.