Telus (transparency)

Mapping PEPs to Contractors

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Sinar Project, Malaysia

Status

• Scraping official procurement announcements from different sources and convert to standard OCDS release format
• Convert beneficial ownership of 217,898 registered construction contractors in openownership data format
• Match PEPs names to contracts
• Proof of Concept Web service + API for public to view PEPs, Agencies and Problematic Contracts
• Search functions ()
• Add large sets of senior public officials at procuring agencies into PEPs database for matching
• Import data and match against relatives and associates of PEPs feature of Popit
• Merging different releases of partial contract info into combined records

Exposing Corruption & Interests in Contracts

Corruption is defined as: “Abuse of Power for Personal Gain”

OCDS only has organization data and can only uncover problems in the process, but not expose conflicts of interest or corruption by politically exposed persons

We try to solve this through use of joined up data of database of beneficial owners against contractors and buyers against a list of politically exposed persons

PEPs

Agencies

Popolo

Beneficial

Ownership

Registry

CSOs

Government

Open Ownership + Popolo

Person

Org (Company)

Org (Supplier)

Person

Person

Org (Agency)

Org (Agency)

Person (Post)

Org (Agency)

Org (Agency)

Org (Supplier)

Person

Org (Company)

INTERESTS OF PEPS�Joined up data of beneficial owner of supplier to PEPs allows us to display and expose interests & assets

ACCOUNTABILITY�Joined up data of agency to agency + person (public official) provides details of accountable persons

CSOs

Government

CSOs

Government

CONFLICT OF INTEREST�Joined up data of agency to agency + public official + beneficial owner (or their relatives) allows us to expose conflicts of interests and possible corruption

Telus: Online transparency tool using joined up data from open data standards data sources

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Innovations

Joined up data based on international open data standards of openownership, OCDS and Popolo

PEPs built database based on our own Popolo spec API/DB (Popit) that can store not just legislative data, but also government agencies, committees, posts & memberships, including provenance and historical data. Reuses database for legislative data and elections, also for transparency.

Using OCDS to work with multiple sources and pieces of contract info in different formats. Common for opaque contracts and governments where corruption likely to happen.

Built on Open Data Standards

Database of PEPs and Government using Popolo-spec Open Data API/Database to store government agencies, committees, PEPs

Using OpenOwnership standard to be able to contribute and be compatible with global beneficial ownership data

Using OCDS data to standardise and merge different scraped sources of procurement info, to reuse and piece together info opaque info. Also shows quality gaps in government procurement data transparency such as missing or conflicting data.

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Build initial web service with views that matches PEPs to Contracts from imported OCDS data, and linked to live Popit API api.popit.sinarproject.org and currently internal openownership spec data of beneficial ownership.

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Data from different sources can be continuously added, joined up automatically.

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Pieces of contract info through leaks and disclosures eventually start showing problems.

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Reused by other local sites to show interests of representatives and election candidates, to hopefully make parties avoid putting up tainted candidates put up for elections

Replicable globally, due to use of open standards and global repositories of open standards data on contracts & beneficial ownership and PEPs

Leads to exposure and pressure to resign or arrests

Very early stages, but we are already convincing others that our methods for using open data standards for transparency & anti corruption can work, even in opaque countries where corruption is high and data hard to come by.

Sustainability

Uses open data standards and global/country data sources. Once openownership.org API is ready, no need to have local database of beneficial ownership. Local implementations scales globally, encourages upstream contribution of open standards based data.

Open sourced Telus implementation can be reused for any country, encouraging code/funding contribution from large international audience. Also very lightweight, doesn’t require much funding to run/deploy/maintain. Concept can easily be reimplemented by others with more funding. We can then use the better implementation since it uses same standards.

Popit API/DB for PEPs stable & mature, ready to deploy. Little maintenance. Already in use in 2 countries in 3 languages.

MALAYSIA, Sinar Project, http://sinarproject.org, @sinarproject

Open Databases/API Popolo/OCDS international open data specifications

In constrained environments valuable information is hard to get, not shared & often lost

Get organizations to share info and stored as structured open data accessible via public API

Parliamentarian Website

MP Statistics (Age/Gender)

Influence Networks

Reusable, continuously updated,

increasingly complete

Construction Contracts

Legislative Proceedings

Link PEPs to other datasets for

transparency & accountability

ocds release

ocds release

ocds release

ocds release

ocds release

versioned

release

compiled

release

ocds

record

Different data sources for procurement converted into standard OCDS release format

Compilation not straightforward exposes variations

Release versions used as “sources”

OCDS releases compiled into OCDS record (contract)

No contract id to join, incomplete data such as dates.

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Different rules to try merge.

Open Contracting Data Standard to compile limited & decentralized data