Open contracting in Taiwan: the journey so far

Government procurement in Taiwan is a big business. In 2014, the total annual value of contract awards exceeded US$26 billion, or the equivalent of 5% of Taiwan’s GDP.

During the same year, 18,000 contracts were awarded. More than 6,000 government agencies purchased goods or services from a centralized government procurement marketplace. Over 56,000 companies competed to get some a piece of the pie.

Here at DSP, a data think tank, we have used government procurement data as course materials for our data science training program and hosted a dedicated hackathon.

During that hackathon, we noticed the great pioneering work on the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).

Last year, with the collaboration from the National Development Council (the government arm in charge of all things related to open data) and the Industrial Technology Research Institute, we started an ambitious project to re-construct the data schema of Taiwan’s government procurement database, in compliance with the OCDS.

We now have completed the data transformation process. Sample datasets are available here, and more updates will be released soon. A big thanks to the energetic OCDS help desk.

Look out for an Open Contracting Data Challenge that we’ll launch on our data challenge platform later this year.

Stay tuned.

Image source: The Social Network of Government Procurement. Originally published here.