Transforming government contracting: Two-day global meeting Open Contracting 2017 to kick off in Amsterdam on 28 November

Over 200 top innovators, activists, and leaders from government, business and civil society will meet in Amsterdam from 28-29th November for the first global open contracting gathering celebrating how radical transparency can transform public procurement – the government sector most prone to corruption and mismanagement.

Open Contracting 2017: ‘Transforming Government Contracting Together’ marks major progress in opening up the trillion dollar world of public contracting. Merging innovative technology with a systematic engagement of  business and citizens to level the playing field for contracts not only reduces fraud and corruption but also tracks how governments spend vital public money.

Organized by the Open Contracting Partnership, Hivos, The B Team, the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), and Article 19, the event will set out an ambitious strategy to make open contracting the new normal for government business over the next five years.

Highlights at #OCGlobal17:

• The Contracting 5, a network to share knowledge and innovations in open contracting across Colombia, France, Mexico, the UK and Ukraine will welcome Argentina as its newest member.
• The OCP will be launching a new report busting the 10 most common myths around commercial confidentiality in public contracts and the benefits of greater transparency and disclosure. The report is based on 70 interviews and new comparative legal research and analysis of public procurement documents in 15 countries.
• Open Contracting Innovation Challenge grand prize winner, the Sinar Project, will also be in Amsterdam. The Malaysian civic tech organisation will be recognised for their groundbreaking data-driven web app Telus, which links contract data to other open databases to expose business interests of politicians and public officials and hold them to account. The Bureau for Public Procurement in Nigeria, winner of the Government Innovation Award, will also be present.
• More than 30 countries around the world are pursuing open contracting reforms. From Colombia to Ukraine, Nepal to Uganda, open contracting is at the heart of making sure that public spending results in real benefits to ordinary citizens. Inertia, vested interests, and corruption threaten these gains: we will be discussing strategies weaving data and political change to overcome these.
• Participants at #OCGlobal17 will also share their transformative stories, celebrating our successes for far, from uncovering price-fixing in Bogota’s school meals, better and cheaper access to essential medicines in Ukraine, providing unprecedented access and open data of Nepal’s public contracts, to an unlikely alliance in Uganda between civil society and government to build a new, open public procurement system.

Gavin Hayman, Executive Director of the Open Contracting Partnership is available for interview.

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To welcome Mexico to Contracting 5 – an evening reception, open to the press, will be hosted on 28th November by the Government of Mexico, the current chair.

For further information please contact Georg Neumann on gneumann@open-contracting.org, +1-202-714-4460

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About the Open Contracting Partnership

The Open Contracting Partnership connects governments, civil society and business to open up and monitor public contracting. We support the global open contracting community and work with partners across sectors and along the whole process of government contracting. We run a global helpdesk at data@open-contracting.org to support the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard, a global schema describing what information to publish at each stage of the contracting cycle. More information at www.open-contracting.org.