Making government procurement smarter is a data challenge. It is a challenge to fight corruption, to test ideas for improving the current system, or just to have some fun with a vast array of practical datasets. Is is also why DSP is holding the Smart Contracting Data Challenge.
Challenge Goals
- Explore new ways to improve government procurement processes and quality
- Transform the government procurement marketplace into economy stimulator.
Challenge Areas
- Procurement Chatbots
- To develop a chatbot to guide suppliers and buyers through the complicated layers of procurement regulations and procedures.
- If succeeded, the chatbot will act as a customer self-service, to reduce repetitive workloads in the Public Construction Commission.
- Datasets: more than 3000 well-organized FAQs and related laws/regulations
- Open Innovation
- To help buyers find quality suppliers, and vice versa.
- Explore innovation ideas in government procurement
- Dataset: Historical award records, compiled in Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)-compatible schema.
Last month we held a pre-event seminar. Two speakers shared their experience in analyzing government procurement data, from the perspective of auditing, and from the perspective of business research. We also had a speaker telling his sweet-and-bitter story in developing chatbots.
This data challenge is unique in several ways:
- Multi-stakeholder partnership
- Official supports from both the central government (the Public Construction Commission) and the local government (the Department of Information Technology in Taipei City Government).
- Collaboration with the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
- Co-organized by D4SG, a “data for social good” community with an impressive track record in using data analysis to solve societal problems.
- Kudos to the fantastic Open Contracting Partnership. Without their help, it will take us a lot more time to design a concise data schema.
- Domain expertise
- We are lucky to have several domain experts acting as consultants to help contestants who are fluent in the languages of data and programming, but not government contracting.
- Focus on sharing and learning, not competing
- Although the event is called a challenge, we do not implement any rules to judge performance of participating teams.
- Instead, we offer co-working sessions and a group chatting solution (Slack) to facilitate communications and collaboration.
The Smart Contracting Data Challenge is now in progress, and we are expecting results in January.