Join us on Wednesday 22 April 2020, 5pm CEST / 11am EDT, at uberconference.com/theengineroom, to discuss tool re-use in open contracting. As with last year’s community call on this topic, the call is audio only and you’re welcome to listen in or bring your questions!
Topic: What conditions support the re-use of open contracting tools?
In this community call we’ll be hearing from guest speakers Andidiong Okon, Community and Capacity Building Manager at the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), who will be talking about knowledge sharing, and Martín Szyszlican of Poder, who will be joining us to discuss what’s been done to make their tool Tower Builder accessible to a broader set of users.
We’ll also share more on the findings from our recent research–conducted in collaboration with the OCP and World Bank Procurement Global team–into what conditions support (and frustrate!) efforts to re-use open contracting tools.
The call will offer an opportunity to dig into the topic of open contracting tool re-use, cover questions you might have, and listen to and share experiences. We look forward to seeing many of you there!
Context
There are an increasing number of open source tools available to publish, analyse, visualise and work with government procurement data. But attempts to re-use these tools across contexts are not always successful.
In 2019, in collaboration with the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) and the World Bank Procurement Global team, The Engine Room conducted research into what conditions support (and frustrate!) efforts to re-use open contracting tools. To kick this off, we held our first community call on the subject in July 2019, with over 40 participants.
In the course of our research, we spoke to a cross-section of open contracting and civic tech practitioners around the world, including civil society organisations who had re-used tools successfully, and those who had tried but not been successful, as well as tool authors and support providers.
In interviews, certain factors came up again and again as key predictors of success, such as direct implementation support from tool authors and support providers, clear and thorough tool documentation and knowledge sharing (in a variety of forms).
Other issues that surfaced were a need for ‘lower tech’ tools and the opportunities for community-building that tool re-use can offer.
You can more about our findings and explore related resources here: Successful Tool Re-use in Open Contracting.
Details on joining the call
We will be using an online conferencing service called UberConference. This service allows us to connect up to 100 participants using VOIP or phone. This is not a video conferencing system, so the call will be audio-only.
To join the discussion on UberConference, just follow these steps at the time of the meeting:
- Using Firefox or Chrome, go to https://www.uberconference.com/theengineroom
- If you have trouble using your computer for audio, you can connect using your phone. Just dial +1 607-821-7499 (you don’t need a PIN).
UberConference’s System requirements. For help, visit the UberConference FAQs, or the UberConference support portal.
If you can’t make the call…
…we’ll be using this shared pad to document notes for the call in a comprehensive and participatory way. The notes will stay live, so no worries if you’re unable to join the call but would like to read what we talked about.
Get in touch
Get in touch with us on research[at]theengineroom.org, or tweet @engnroom.
Photo credit: Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash