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The little codes that hold our world together

Have you noticed that your email address is completely unique? Its obvious that this would be true, but it bears thinking about. In all the millions and millions of email addresses there isn’t another like yours, if there was another like yours there would be no way for your colleagues and friends to send a note ...
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Giving Away Data Makes Business Better

-Ian Makgill Giving away all your data for free sounds like a bad idea, especially when you're a business whose aim is to sell data. It sounds counter-intuitive, as if our principles have overridden our ambitions and we're doing something that will ultimately damage us. We sound like people whose hearts rule their heads. Nothing could be further from the ...
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UK Leading Procurement Transparency Alongside Columbia and Ukraine.

By Fiona Hunt. The recent report on global government spending by Open Contracting Partnership and Spend Network, brought to light for the first time, the extraordinary size of the global procurement market and, alarmingly, the lack of open contracting. Of the $13 trillion spent per annum by governments globally, only $362billion (2.8%), is published openly. Imagine the increased ...

What Needs To Happen to Open Public Procurement- Skills

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. Our last post on what needs to happen to open procurement covers the skills you need to maintain a procurement publication service. Governments often focus too much on the technology needed to publish procurement data, ignoring the need to maintain and run the service in the long term. Once set up, you will ...

What Needs To Happen To Open Public Procurement – Technology

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Another key element to open public procurement is technology. Getting data into the public sphere can often be over complicated, but it needn't be. If you already have a system for collecting data on tenders and contracts, you'll need to talk to your provider about making that data available openly. The main ...

What Needs To Happen to Open Public Procurement- Policy

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network There are three basic requirements for implementing a contracting transparency initiative, the first is policy. Creating new policies is easy, as long as you never have to implement them. Creating a policy that is designed to be implemented is much harder. Fortunately, the Open Contracting Partnership have, yet again, done all the heavy ...
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Quantifying Global Public Procurement: Our Methodology

The Open Contracting Report 'Global Procurement Spend', is to our knowledge, the most comprehensive study of global public procurement yet. We are proud to be the data partner for the project, analysing more than 7 million documents to quantify the $12.9trn size of public procurement, globally. So, you’re probably wondering how we put a number on it? Our ...
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How Transparency Benefits Suppliers

Why suppliers gain from better data on their markets. -Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. Better information creates better outcomes for those bidding into a market. Which is why incumbents have a significant advantage going into a tender: they have more information. This asymmetry of information is a particular problem in public sector markets, where the process for providing bidders ...

Understanding Global Procurement

Why are we looking at procurement globally, when collaboration between countries is so difficult? Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Analysing public procurement on a global scale is, in one sense, hiding to nothing. After all, how useful is it to directly compare contracting in Bejing with contracts let in Bourdeaux? The nature of public administration in both ...

$13 Trillion – The Global Value Of Public Procurement

Ian Makgill, Alex Yeung, Lindsey Marchessault  We often hear about the scale of public procurement. With vast sums of money at stake, it is important that the public procurement market is fair, efficient, and effective. However, it has been many years since anyone has actually quantified its annual global value. Thus far, there has been no attempt to ...
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Our Partnership With Open Contracting

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network We're passionate advocates for contracting transparency. Not just because it makes it harder for corrupt officials and their partners, but also because there's good evidence that it makes public markets more competitive and more efficient. That's why we work so closely with the Open Contracting Partnership, they're the ones doing the heavy lifting ...
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What Is The Right Price For PPE?

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network What's the right price for PPE gowns and masks? With every Government in the world yanking hard on the same supply chains, prices have increased significantly. The UK Government has made it clear that they're willing to do what they can to get the equipment they need to protect NHS staff. We've written ...

One Among Thousands – Creating a Dictionary of Public Sector Buyers.

Here are just three among thousands of public sector buyers: YPO, JISC, NOE CPC. Who are they? What do they do? Are they a private organisation or a public organisation? Every month, we get data for tens of thousands of unique buyer names just like these, from around the world. We answer the questions of who they are and what ...

Data Works: Ensuring Quality Through Validation

When is something right? We process over 150,000 records a month. Our database now has more than 150m rows in it. We can't view every record when we enter it. Instead, we validate it. We check that each record has what our users need; a deadline date, a description and a buyer. We also check that our key sources ...

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