Bidder eligibility criteria

[practicalparticipation]

Requirement generated from User Research process: R17

There is user demand for fields which would indicate the eligibility criteria in order to be able to bid for a tender.

This requirement was articulated in the context of anti-corruption use-cases, where those involved with contract scrutiny are interested in understanding the complexity of tender requirements as a means of assessing whether particular barriers to bidding are being put in place.

They suggest analysis may look at "Length of eligibility criteria: character length of text defining which bidders are eligible to bid;".

As yet, requirements from firms for structured data on this have not been identified.

[birdsarah]

I believe this could be handled by submissionDetails for now. I am marking this as a documentation issue for the 1.0 release, and then a more detailed proposal can be submitted by a working group if its insufficient moving forward.

[LindseyAM]

@practicalparticipation i think this was also brought up by mihaly today

[practicalparticipation]

Related to #139

[practicalparticipation]

I've also added an eligibilityCriteria document to the documentType list.

Re-opening this against post 1.0.

[timgdavies]

Version 1.0 of the standard has an eligibilityCriteria field which is a free text field for describing the eligibility of bidders. This meets the original use-case from the standard for checking the length of eligibility criteria descriptions.

I've been looking through issues, and thinking over cases we've encountered, to find any other requirements for structured eligibility criteria date.

The only two things I can think of are:

(1) Cases where only bidders on a given framework are eligible to bid;

(2) Cases where only national firms are eligible to bid (I seem to recall an issue on this from procurement analytics, but can't find this right now)

I suspect these are best handled as their own issues, so propose creating new issues for frameworks, and national-only eligibility issues, and closing this one.

[timgdavies]

Frameworks handling is addressed in #310.

The proposed features extension in #223 will also allow criteria of bidders, such as 'national bidder only' to be captured in a structured form.