Goal
The goal of Open Public Procurement or tender.sme.sk is to increase the transparency of public procurement in Slovakia by cleaning, aggregating and processing available procurement data. Those are currently published in the Public Procurement Bulletin (Slovak only) of the Office for Public Procurement, solely on an individual basis. Our portal provides aggregate data and thus a complex overview of the procurement processes allowing users to compare data and watch for trends.
Use and Recognition
A case study on tender.sme.sk and the research based on it was recognized in the Procurement Innovation Challenge in 2012. We also shared our experience with building and managing our procurement portal in Citizens and Markets (publication in pdf).
The following analyses of public procurement in Slovakia could not have been carried out without the site-rendered data:
(titles translated, studies in pdf and Slovak only):
- Analysis of Hospital Procurement in 2009-2012: Competition in Tenders is Low
- Symptoms of Cartel Agreements in Public Procurement
- Quality of Slovak Public Procurement: 2009-2011
- Impact of the Electronic Auction on Efficiency of Slovak Public Procurement: First Results
Data and limited functionality
The portal contains data on procurement “above the limit”, “below the limit” and “below the threshold” (since 1.4.2011). Generally, these are combinations of the expected price and the object of procurement. For more details, please consult Act on Public Procurement (2006).
The results of the tenders within already existing framework agreement are not displayed on the site, but still included in the data dump.
Raw data is available as CSV, allowing users to use the data for their own purposes such as analyses or visualizations.
Daily data dumps are located at: http://tender.sme.sk/data/.
Archival data from the previous version of the portal (2005 – autumn 2012) are available at: http://download.transparency.sk/dump_backup/.
Data prior to 2009 are of very poor quality. .
Reservations and Warnings
All data, graphs and tables presented are derived from information automatically collected from the Public Procurement Bulletin (Slovak only). Any discrepancies could be caused by data incompleteness, incorrectness (on the side of the reporting procurer) or substandard formatting of the published notices.
Should you encounter any wrong or inaccurate information, please drop us an email at vestnik@transparency.sk.
Legal Information
We kindly request this portal to be cited when using, reproducing and deriving any product from it. Any actions of technical or substantive character to the portal functionality are forbidden.
Acknowledgments
Open Contracts Portal was kindly supported by our partners Open Society Foundations, the Embassy of the United States in Slovakia and the Siemens Integrity Initiative. We kindly thank to the daily Sme.sk as well.
The application was programmed by datlab.cz (data) and buckle up (web and graphics). The content management system was programmed and integrated by MJCH.
Previous version of the site used data collected and processed by knowerce.sk.
Contact
Transparency International Slovensko
Bajkalská 25
827 18 Bratislava
Slovakia
tel./fax: +421 2 5341 7207
e-mail: vestnik@transparency.sk
web: www.transparency.sk
(Last update – May 14, 2013)