Tweaks to enable compliance with local government transparency requirements for England

[AlCollier]

Hi

Have done a quick gap analysis against the new transparency requirements for local government in England (we are required by law to publish contract registers by 31 December 2014, and there is a list (somewhat poorly defined in places) of what must or should be published).

I found three fairly minor issues against the mandatory requirements (some may just be my inability to work out how to represent things under the new standard).

Add “Type” as property for "Organization"

• we have to state whether the supplier is a small or medium enterprise and whether it is a voluntary or community sector organisation (it could be both an SME and a VCS organization). Suspect there will be similar issues in other jurisdictions, eg minority-owned businesses in US.

Add “Department” as property for "Organization"

• we have to state which department is responsible for/the user of the contract - eg the highways department might be the user of the asphalt contract.

Add “ReviewDate” property to “Contract”

• we have to state when the contract will next be reviewed - this might be at a break point or at the start of a possible extension period, or just a certain period before expiry

Quite understand if none of this makes it into version 1.0!

[practicalparticipation]

@AlCollier Thanks for these - this is incredibly useful.

We would be really interested to work with some local authorities to put together a How To on how OCDS could help meet the Transparency Code Requirements. I suspect a simplified version of the flattened schema + some guidance could be really useful to help LAs. Are you aware of any other proposed standards for the publication deadline?

The three properties you highlight above are not currently in the standard, but:

(a) I will look on Monday at whether there are existing properties in the schemas we're using for organizations we could draw on for Type and Department, and whether adding Review Date would fit with other use cases we had to allow us to get it into the 1.o RC

and

(b) These could absolutely be added and documented as an extension for the December deadline, and proposed for formal merging into the standard in future.

[AlCollier]

@practicalparticipation the Transparency Code is now law but the Local Government Association is producing guidance which is still in draft (though with a very tight deadline for finalising - comments closed on Friday). I think we need an urgent conversation with Gesche Schmid who is the programme director for transparency there to see whether we can get the two aligned - at the very least making sure the template in the guidance is sufficiently unambiguous that it can be mapped to the OCDS. I can speak to her on Monday if you like?

I'd be happy to sit down with you (and LGA if they're willing) to look at mapping our data to the OCDS standard in a way which meets the code.

[practicalparticipation]

@AlCollier If you can speak to Gesche on Monday that would be great. Feel free to loop me in on e-mail: tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk

[practicalparticipation]

I've made the change to organization that supports these extensions. Ongoing work with UK to map to OCDS.