Adopting a Global Standard for Open Contracting

Mexico City, Mexico

The Action

Mexico City has committed to publishing information related to the government’s procurement processes, from planning through implementation, using the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). With support from Bloomberg Associates, the Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, (IMCO, Open Contracting Partnership and the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness), the city launched an online interactive platform Contrataciones Abiertas in 2016 to publish contract information. To encourage residents to use this information, civil society organizations with support from Mexico City government launched Tu Ciudad, Tus Datos (Your City, Your Data), a competition to develop creative uses for this data. 

Democracy Challenge

City purchasing contracts often provide lucrative vehicles for cronyism and corruption, which wastes resources but also destroys public trust in government. This is a universal problem, but Mexican civil society leaders interviewed for this project expressed deep cynicism and resignation regarding weak rule of law, at each level of government. There is a widespread perception that elites act in their self-interest and face no real accountability, while ordinary people encounter bureaucratic nightmares at every turn—and the only way out is through a bribe. This creates a feeling that democracy, in practice, does not work; despite rules and institutions that are supposed to guarantee fair and transparent decision making, the system still runs on patronage. Accordingly, in the 2017 Transparency International Corruptions Perception Index, Mexico fell to 135th place, tied with nondemocratic states such as Russia and Lao.

How It Works & How They Did It

Mexico City’s open contracting story represents the kind of big change that can happen when the interests and incentives of powerful, diverse stakeholders come into alignment. These included: 

(1) Political will in the mayor’s office. The mayor who presided over the project, former mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, came into office with a prosecutor’s persona and a clear platform of innovation, transparency, and anticorruption. According to people who worked on the project, Mancera’s strong push for open contracting helped create momentum and minimize backlash; with the order coming from the leader of government, agencies got on board. Also helpful: the transparency was not applied retroactively—only new contract information would be published, from the launch date forward. 

(2) Support from international partners. Bloomberg Associates—a philanthropic consulting firm founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—had its eye out for opportunities to increase government transparency while reducing bureaucracy. Its research indicated that global firms were avoiding public sector bidding opportunities in Mexico City because of opacity around how contracts were awarded and to whom. So, Bloomberg Associates recommended an initiative to increase and standardize the amount of contract information being published for Mexico City. Concurrently, the Open Contracting Partnership was looking for a city partner to pilot the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). The Mexican civil society community helped connect these two organizations and a collaboration was born. 

(3) Productive engagement from civil society. Mexican civil society is very robust, with diverse and trusted organizations working on the full range of social, economic, and business issues. Key groups allied themselves with the open contracting effort and served as independent advisors, implementers, and evaluators. For example, the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO) provided valuable input on the public data portal’s content and design to ensure that it worked for end users outside of government. Transparencía Mexicana (the Mexican chapter of Transparency International) led efforts to ensure that the data being provided was interesting and useful to service organizations and watchdogs, and also led online and off-line strategies for data engagement, including the Your City, Your Data Challenge.

(4) Political competition. Mexico City’s adoption of open contracting was concurrent with a transparency push by the national government (Mexico served as global chair of the Open Government Partnership from 2014 to 2015). Mayor Mancera convinced President Enrique Pena Nieto that construction of the new Mexico City airport should be subject to open contracting using the OCDS, which touched off rounds of beneficial competition over which government could pass major milestones first or publish more open data. 

(5) Empowered and skilled staff. The portal project was implemented between the Directorate General of Media and New Technologies and an Information and Communications Technology Services unit. The former sits outside the traditional bureaucratic structure and is tasked with building relationships with civil society and communicating directly with the public. The latter has the power to set the management of internal policies for the city and was responsible for developing guidelines to make the open data standard mandatory and embed it across government. 

From political will to administrative reality 
The collaboration between these diverse stakeholders allowed Mexico City to go beyond just sharing public information. Most notably, they became the first city in the world to publish comprehensive procurement data using the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). The Data Standard is a global, nonproprietary standard developed by civil society actors, which is structured to include every stage of the procurement process: planning, bid/tender, award, contract, and implementation. Data produced according to the standard is shareable, reusable, and machine readable. The more entities that use the standard, the more useful it will become, as programmers build open-source tools for analyzing or sharing contract data. 

Robust training for city staff was key, given the reasonable trepidation associated with being the first government to adopt the OCDS. On a tactical level, implementers worked very closely with the early adopting agencies. There were guided practice trainings, using real contracts being administered by the agency, and trainers stayed onsite for an additional two months following the transition. Strategically, there was a conscious effort toward bringing civil servants toward a “yes, we can!” mindset of striving for and celebrating milestones while also committing to transparency in the project itself. Civil servants could see that new processes were being executed regularly, every quarter, and that they represented a whole new approach rather than a new layer of bureaucracy and “double work.” 

From administrative reality to social utility 
Mexico City also worked thoughtfully with partners, throughout project design and implementation, to help real people use the data. This meant publishing high-value data (as defined by end users), hiring Gobierno Fácil (Easy Government), a social enterprise to build appealing visualizations, and providing incentives to developers.

The Your City, Your Data challenge was a key mechanism for seeding engagement with the data portal’s API. The competition ran for two months in 2017 and was open to the public. Participants were tasked with pitching innovative ideas to improve the integrity of government contracting. Ideas were judged on their use of the open contracting data, viability, level of innovation, and team quality. Two winners received MXN 150,000 ($8,000) to develop their ideas: Cívica Digital and Spaceship Labs, both of which created products to increase the accessibility of the city’s contracting data. Cívica Digital simplified the data and reformatted it to be searchable by citizens, while Spaceship Labs adapted a program it had already created, Contractobook, to allow citizens to search multiple databases simultaneously for information about contractors employed by the government. 

How’s It Going?

The project’s first success came in June 2016, when the Secretary of Finance published 45 contracts. By July 2017, information about 800 contracts had been uploaded from six agencies representing 700 million pesos worth of public spending. As of September 2018, the portal had over 1,200 contracting procedures representing more than MXN 2 billion worth of public spending from 19 agencies. 

However, the new city administration has identified several shortcomings that prevent the project from. These include: 

• Most data has come from just three agencies: Finance, the Mayor’s Office and Public Works, 
• There is no guarantee that all purchases are reflected in the data; rather, it is likely that each department chose which information to publish, and 
• Many items have incomplete information. 

Considerations

The legal framework for data publication was established by mayoral decree, which could be overturned by future administrations. But proponents said that it’s likely to stick around because it aligns with a national strategy toward more transparency, and because it’s often bad optics to officially roll back transparency reforms. 

Trends and groupthink in NGO funding and programming can present challenges around sustainability (for example  when interest in a particular topic fades) or impact (when interest in a new technology leads to solutionism, for example). But trends can also present opportunities for government reformers seeking outside partners. According to one interviewee, mapping projects were popular a decade ago, followed by a visualization craze about five years ago, and the current appetite for working with “technical data.” Aligning with such a trend can sometimes attract grants to support innovations. 

Point of Contact

Eduardo Bohorquez
Executive Director of Transparencia Mexicana 
[email protected]

Ana Zuniga Alanis
Director General of Mensaje y Nuevas Tecnologias 
[email protected] 

Who Else Is Trying This?

• Seoul, South Korea: Seoul launched a new construction management system in 2011 to address opacity, inefficiency, wage theft, and corruption in the construction industry. From design to testing and implementation, the city spent 16 months standing up the new system, which has four components: a common database used by contractors, Seoul officials, and supervisors for contract details, reporting, record management, and safety management; a public-facing portal that automatically draws real-time information from the internal database, making about 90 percent of construction information public by default; an automatic subcontractor payment system; and an electronic human resources management system. Under supplementary regulations, large-scale construction sites must include at least two web cameras to transmit images to the city’s database, and faulty construction or “significantly incorrect estimations of demands” trigger penalty points reflected in future bids. Read more 
• Ukraine: Ukraine’s story is a good example of harnessing the creativity and flexibility of civil society to jumpstart and pilot a reform. Widespread cronyism and corruption in Ukraine’s public procurement sector was siphoning off an estimated UAH 50 billion ($2 billion) each year. In 2014, following the “Revolution of Dignity,” a group of volunteer anticorruption activists consulted with Georgian experts to design an e-procurement system for public agencies in Ukraine. They built ProZorro (“transparently”) in early 2015, and the government hired some of the project leaders to implement a pilot. The pilot avoided red tape by keeping the platform hosted with Transparency International Ukraine and focusing on small, unregulated contracts. That allowed data from nearly 4,000 governmental organizations to be fed into the system quickly, before legal procurement reforms were in place. In mid-2016, with new laws enacted, the system was transferred to state control and became the central platform for mandatory e-procurement. It’s a hybrid system—all the data relating to procurement contracts is stored in a central database, but there are several interfaces where users can access the data, depending on their needs. Support tools include a risk-management system to generate “red flags,” an online course for officials, and an e-library of commonly used specifications. Read more 
• Paraguay: The evolution of Paraguay’s open contracting movement is a good example of how raw open data doesn’t necessarily lead to accountability. Public contracts have been open by law since 2003, and available via an online data portal since 2004. But the information was long accessed largely by a niche audience of affected businesses, economists, and computer scientists. Then in 2014, three factors came into alignment, spurring a broader open government and accountability movement: a new government was focused on improving the country’s investment climate, it had a mandate to produce a second Open Government Partnership action plan, and a new access to information law was passed. A new open-contracting portal, using the emerging Open Contracting Data Standard, became one of several reform projects. In 2016, public procurement reform went viral when a journalist noticed a $35,000 Ministry of Education purchase on the open contracting portal. This princely sum was for catering a meeting with international evaluators, and this was a tipping point for students and families fed up with mismanaged schools. Students went on strike and secured the resignation of the country’s education minister. Read more, or access data storytelling resources here. 

Additional Reading 
Making Contracts Accessible to Mexico City’s 8.8 Million Citizens (Open Contracting Partnership) 
#ContratosAbiertosCDMX (Open Contracting Partnership) 
Open Contracting: Lessons from Mexico City (France's ETA Lab) 
Deserving Cities: Mexico City 

This action was originally developed for Big Bold Cities, an initiative of Living Cities and the National Democratic Institute (NDI); republished here with the permission of Living Cities.