Digital Signature Legitimateness for Procurement in European Union

How to eSign a document: digital signature legitimateness for Procurement in European Union

okay so now we give the floor to DG grow and we have our colleague in Brussels yeah him sure sure and he will speak about open data in public procurement yeah him the floor is yours thanks for the introduction and sorry to not be able to be here in person but I thought it was a really interesting topic so I wanted to introduce it at least like a video message so my name is a commercial I work in the European Commission and I work on public procurement and specifically public procurement data and so public procurement does the purchases by any public bodies all around the EU it's the purchases of highways and train waste by ministry it's the purchases by schools by hospitals by villages with how public tax on taxpayers money gets spent and unsurprisingly it's a huge pile of money it's worth four hundred twenty billion per year which is more than the GDP of several EU Member States and the nice thing about public procurement is that it's quite transparent there is actually a lot of information online available for public procurement in structured data and I would like to present this information and to you guys everybody who's watching to see what you can do with it whether you get any ideas about how to work with this information what we are doing into the Commission is that we're trying to will make to find ways how to make public procurement more efficient how to make it better how to make sure that public citizens money gets spent in the end in the most efficient and so one of the centerpieces of public procurement in the EU is a website called Ted it's not the TED talks it's tenders electronic daily and this website contains including many types of information but two of them are the main ones it's information about what public authorities want to buy so when they say I want to buy 20 brain scanners I am a hospital in Bavaria which wants to that and it contains information about contract award notices so what were the results of competition so when a librarian Hospital says I want to buy something after several months it receives offers from private companies finally chooses a contractor and it's and above a certain value it's obliged to provide transparency this information online saying I have bought the brain scanners for this amount of money and I'm buying it from company XYZ and so this is what the website looks like and normally you could use a search interface to find some business opportunities it's not just that you also the European Economic Area and Switzerland as well you see there's really a lot of results and so you could go inside notices and you could read through them and I think it's a nice thing to do to explore in case any of you guys are supplying things that the government may be interested in go for it but what I would like to show today is the open data we have on the subject if you go down here there's a link to the EU open data portal and on the eosin data portal it's actually one of the most popular data sets is first of all a list of all the so-called notices all this information about I want to buy and I have bought that were published on ped and they are in XML format so for those of you who are friendly with this yep programming language or database type you can work with XML for those of you who are more economists or data and now it takes people there's also a version in CSV a comma separated value format right here where for every year in the last decade there is information about all the contracts which rewarded and all the demand which took place so now this is not all demand and contracting that you of course it's only those which are regulated by the European Union which are those roughly about above 130 thousand euro nevertheless is still I think 500,000 contracts per year so it's really a fairly nice pile of data each of these files has somewhere between 100 and 250 megabytes so it's a lot of information but the same time it's manageable it should be possible to download and yeah look for some kind of insight even on your so now what type of things can be done with this data yeah I won't go into the structure that much because that's described here in the documentation and there's a fairly long code list explaining the data but you have information about who wants to buy the way they want to buy so the type of procedures award criteria will they care about quality or will they care about price the procedure can be more or less open to competition then that information about who was the actual supplier what value the supplier offered the number of bids they received whether it's a framework agreement of this type of information if you go into it you can try to see whether somebody is more efficient in procuring and somebody specification to give an example one of the best websites in the EU is called that index is that it's kind of a academic slash NGO project in the Czech Republic and so what these people have done is that they have looked at best practice ing to the OECD the European Commission as practicing public procurement and they've said okay how can we translate this best practice into actual data can we look at the data and see who's procuring in a better way and who's procuring enough well less good way let's play that way and what they do is they publish every few years for ranking of similar buyers so they compare large cities they compare hospitals they compare the general government ministries and then you can click and you will get some kind of rating about who's who's the best eventually and best in the sense that they have for example attractive the highest number of days right because an point of competition is that you have 15 companies which compete to supply the government with something and that the government buys the best thing for the lowest price so more competition in distance is good it's the buyers who use the most transparent Sears for example it's the buyers to use progressive or a useful technique such as electronic auction for the first part not for the quality part and so forth and so you can click on one of these as well and what you will get is profile of the buyer which visualizes all of these different indicators based on the data about the procurement and so this can be done actually on the basis of the data it can be done for different countries it can be done for different regions it can be done for different sectors of the economy there's essentially no limit as long as you're happy and willing to play around with the data so that's one category of thing that that's the CSV or the title of the data can be used for second category is business intelligence that's not something which we do because it's not really our business but we often have different Altan seas and banks accessing the open data for this purpose what we ourselves do is that we do various studies on the procurement to see for example what is the access of small and medium enterprises to procurement what is the cross-border dimension of procurement so how much is it important whether you are a German company bidding in France and whether it's the distance in kilometres which matters or whether it's the fact that there's a border and there's some kind of regulatory barrier there over there is a linguistic barrier to this type of stuff which could be interesting for those of you who are academics for example there's quite a bit of academic potential in this data set yep thinking about academic potential actually recently there has been a nice paper which came out in the British term of political science which is a fairly prestigious worldwide journal and this article was based on the PSB data which I presented a while ago it talks about uncovering high-level corruption and so what they do is they use the data to look for things which look suspicious then when they talk about red flag red flag can be like for example I run ten different procurement procedures and if normally I get three or four companies interested in procedure that's pretty normal if I have once or twice just one company interested I guess what happens but if you have ten procedures coming from one town in a country somewhere and in eight cases there was only a single company interested in getting the contract then it's something suspicious yeah they have spent their time doing for Pureland but there was no competition actually it was really a waste of time and maybe they need some help maybe there's a need for better training of the people maybe they need more people to deal with the many procurement procedures they're running maybe they need a better guidance document or maybe there was something suspicious maybe they actually tried to exclude all the bidders and have only only one and so here he explains a nice methodology of different red flags of these different indicators and the result he gets four different you countries that's a pretty nice article based on today time oh one more thing I thought could be interesting for you to see is a project called you will it's called digital whistleblower it received you funding and it's the consortium of several York University including Cambridge University and what these people are doing is that they're taking art ed CSV data and they're combining it with data from individual European countries so as I said sound procurement falls under EU regulation and some falls under national regulation and they try to put these datasets together give it the same meaning to the same variable and then see what type of information incites red flags they can even think of that as a whole and so actually there's a whole everything will be open about it if the code will be open source the data will be freely available I think they're planning to publish this month so it should come yep keep and keep in touch with them or follow them I think there's actually a Twitter account so just follow their Twitter and fairly soon there should be a huge trove of never before team data on this on this side okay that's procurement data these are the different things you can do with it and the different kind of related projects I'm wondering whether there's something more I would go into but I wanted to motivate you I want you to tell you there's a big pile of data there are interesting things you can do with it and it's all very well documented down here and we're super happy to respond to any questions you might have at this email address or just at my address which will be I think available on where you found this this videocast so have a look at it try to investigate try to think whether you see some great hypotheses to test or some great insights to find and if you do we'll be really happy about it thanks a lot thank you very interesting and we have a question from time of year yeah thanks for the presentation I was wondering if I'm a participant and I want to use Ted data there's a lot of metadata and it's complicated to start do you have some tips for them where to start which meta data is important or so the easiest thing go here click a button on download CSV and you here you have a CSV file which you can load into well you could theoretically use Excel but it's generally too big for Excel but if you use our Python Stata SAS any of any statistical program you should be able to easily work with it and just open this file and start exploring very soon you'll see you need to know more about the individual columns in the data and then you download the test TSV data information which is right here and yeah just read through the document it's not long I can just roughly five pages of introduction and then there's a code list explaining the individual columns yeah yeah that's important that the people know this information exists yes that's exactly what yeah just for introduction and then there's a and there's a codebook and so this corresponds exactly with the data you have in Excel um I have another question I was really impressed about this index tool do you know or do you have any idea how you could make this tool better for for participants maybe how how to combine it with member states data for example or what are open questions which are not answered yet yeah so there's a fairly extensive documentation here I think it's in English at least yeah technically part of it so what I actually do is that they do connect it with other databases in the Czech Republic so I think they connected with some business registry they connected with accounting data they also connected with data on political finance of financing of political parties and whether if a company finances a political party is it more likely to win a procurement contract and regrettably the answer is yes at least for the Czech Republic so there's a lot to go into here now where I think there's a huge scope for improvement is the coverage this is just about the Czech Republic but I think it's super useful tool for citizens to know how their money is being spent and if this existed also in other kind it would be great what it means is taking the procurement data which you have which we discussed and either doing the analysis or on it or ideally connecting it with the databases which exist exist in Ireland Spain or wherever else because these are different country by country so you kind of enrich the data for your national context and then you make conclusions on the basis of that yeah that's a great idea because maybe they can even reuse some modules or some stuff from cindex and put it for their member states where they are the expert that's a great idea yeah that would be brilliant there's also a link with did you with as well so I think the U is also planning to visualize some parts of data and as I said everything is open-source o is I'm not sure published yet I think it's on github actually so you can definitely contribute or modify their code okay you were really into deep discussion so I'm sure people will find it very interesting and will find a lot of inspiration to develop this so I would like to thank you yeah him for your nice and interesting talk and we hope that your data set will be used and reused by our data zone participants thank you again yeah you