A new strategy and a bold new look. How we plan to power up public contracting everywhere

Open contracting is a collective with thousands of amazing reformers working to open up public contracts and improve public services around the world. Our new strategy belongs as much to our global community as it does to the OCP: our ambitious new plan to change the world is a product of all the great feedback we’ve had over the last few years and ideas on how we can get to even more impact, more consistently.

You pushed us to focus more on politics, to build deeper connections across government, business and civil society and a stronger ecosystems of users, to bring in new allies such as journalists and academics, to focus (even) more on the use and quality of the data, and to make sure user feedback and collaboration is baked into all stages of the contracting process. These issues are now central to our new strategy.

In my previous life, as a corruption hunter with the awesome organization Global Witness, it was inevitable that my work would take me into the murky, closed world of government contracting. It’s government’s number one corruption risk, where the money, power and discretion is concentrated.

The core of our first strategy, then, was to open up the black box of government contracting, to digitize and standardize the contracting process and publish it as open data so government, business, and citizens could use the information to better analyze and monitor public procurement.

Transparency is a great place to start but it’s the wrong place to stop. Prying open that box should definitely help stop public money being looted in the many scams and dodges connected to contracting. But we also do it to make the money go further. Opening up contracting should help to save a fortune in public funds, bust cartels, increase competition and improve trust with citizens. It should help to make our communities more liveable and our lives better. It should help us set and deliver social objectives, include women- and minority-owned businesses. It should help us respond better to citizens‘ needs and to procure innovative solutions to public challenges.

In countries like Ukraine, Colombia and Paraguay, many of these things are beginning to happen. Early adopters have made the most remarkable difference when the data, culture and politics align to create systemic change.