Open Contracting Data Standard 1.1.5: New guidance, tools, and extension improvements

We’ve been hard at work to get the Open Contracting Data Standard 1.1.5 ready and available for preview. OCDS 1.1.5 includes clarifications to the normative reference section, a brand new implementation guidance section, and improvements to extensions. 

How to implement the OCDS in 4 steps

We’ve prepared a new guidance section that takes users on a four-step implementation journey comprising of a Design, Map, Build, and Publish stage. Each stage features links to useful tools and templates, including assessment templates, mapping templates, and the OCDS flatten tool. We have also added about a dozen worked examples to the guidance, including:

• Amendments
• Awards, contracts, buyers and suppliers
  • Award notices and decisions
  • Awards and contracts
  • Consortia suppliers
  • Purchases from electronic catalogs
  • Framework agreements
  • Purchase orders
• Organization classifications
• Organization identifiers
• Organization references
• Organizational Units
• Pre-qualification and pre-selection
• Frameworks and related processes
• Unsuccessful tenders

Based on the feedback by the community, we have added new guidance on assessing data quality that describes basic criteria, continuous improvement, and advanced criteria (replacing the previous Basic-Intermediate-Advanced and Star-level framework).

In all, we addressed and closed 14 issues to improve the OCDS implementation guidance.

Adding more detail to OCDS Extensions 

OCDS 1.1.5 introduces several improvements to core extensions. 

To improve the Bids extension, a BidsStatistic.currency field was added for monetary statistics and codes for ‘lowestValidBidValue’ and ‘highestValidBidValue’ were added to bidStatistics.csv.

To improve the Lots extension, tender.lotDetails.awardCriteriaDetails, Lot.contractPeriod, Finance.relatedLots fields were added.

To improve the participation fees extension, methodOfPayment.csv for ParticipationFee.methodOfPayment field was added. 

In all, 24 issues related to extensions were closed.

Normative clarifications & user experience improvements to the reference Section

The notable changes to the reference section are:

• “x-” prefixes are no longer suggested for user-assigned codes.
• New codes were added to open codelists.
• Some instructions were clarified in field descriptions.
• The release schema can now be browsed as a CSV spreadsheet.

In all, 18 issues were closed.

Improved navigation

You may notice some improved organization of the content in OCDS 1.1.5 and, hopefully, you will find it even easier to find what you are looking for. 

The search tools within the standard documentation have been improved using ElasticSearch to return more relevant search results than in the past.

The governance page is also now included in the reference section — keeping all normative content together. The revised ‘history’ section includes the changelog, development, and appreciation pages.

Get involved in OCDS 1.2!

As always, we invite your feedback on the 1.1.5 updates and your ideas on how the OCDS can be further improved in version 1.2.0 (and beyond).

To get involved, you can raise or contribute to issues on the OCDS github page, you can exchange views on the OCDS discussion mailing list, or you can write to us directly at data@open-contracting.org
Complete 1.1.5 changelog.