Open Contracting Data#

Note

Even though most of this manual’s information can be used to analyze any data set, our efforts concentrate on analyzing Open Contracting Data published by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit.

Open Contracting Data has existed for many years in Mexico. Our records are available at the CompraNet web page, which has an Excel file with information since 2002. This data has been analyzed thoroughly throughout time, and is available in a variety of civic tech that makes it simpler to evaluate. These are some that are currently accessible:

OCDS Mexican Data#

Since 2015 different Mexican Public administration projects have emerged in order to publish data in OCDS. The first one available was Mexico City website. The federal source for OCDS data is published by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, and this is the data used in the current manual.

Furthermore, it is worth noting the effort made by Open Contracting Partnership in Mexico to translate OCDS into Spanish; other organizations that publish in OCDS are National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection, Mexico City Airport Group that publishes contracts to build the New Airport, the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation publishes contracts related to Shared Network project. At a subnational level, we can find Secretariat of Planning, Administration and Finance of the Government of Jalisco.

OCDS Data in Latin America and the rest of the world#

Along with Mexico, several more countries in Latin America and the rest of the world have OCDS datasets, the Open Contracting Partnership mantains a full list of OCDS Publishers.

Also, OCDS Kingfisher Collect allows for downloading them and importing them into a database.

Data for this manual#

As we have mentioned in the previous section, we will be using data published by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit’s Budget Transparency area, which is available over here: https://www.gob.mx/contratacionesabiertas

More specifically, we will be working with the Open Contract section of the Federal Public Administration in JSON format, available at: https://datos.gob.mx/busca/dataset/concentrado-de-contrataciones-abiertas-de-la-apf/resource/0252e19f-bdd6-43de-af7b-106d4c7a82c8

This dataset includes contracting data conducted by each federal government department, autonomous organizations, State-owned companies and all those state and citywide contracts with a contribution from the federal government. Data in this format is available since 2017 and is regularly updated. Even though the file update frequency is not indicated in the data portal, and the last version is from 2018, you can find more recent data with the API described in this document: http://transparenciapresupuestaria.gob.mx/work/models/PTP/programas/OpenDataDay/Resultados/Guia%20_uso_API_contrataciones%20_abiertas.pdf

In addition to that, we could get a full data dump in OCDS, by requiring directly to the responsible area.

In the following chapter, we will explore in depth the tools needed to analyze this data and import it.