The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Government Data.
I would like to announce new open data project on Russian government spending…
Background
Russian Federal Law – 94-FZ of 21.07.2005 declared that Russian Federal Treasury and Russian regional procurement agencies should publish online limited but valuable information about government contracts.
So since 1 January 2006 all government procurement systems were reconstructed to be online and to publish online contracts registries. These registries are just tables, DOC, XLS and PDF files and so on. Nothing visualized, no analytics at all, but lot’s of unstructured raw material.
So there is quite a bit of material available for anyone interested. But so far nobody seems to have converted this data into a public service!
The Project
This project named RosGosZatraty (Russian Government Spending) can be found at:
- This project dedicated to all Russian government spending by government contracts and president grants. It’s completely public, it contains all raw data and provides details of any contract and any grant, it includes lots of reports and other analytics, as well as a quick and simple search function.
It was initiated and launched by Institute of Contemporary Development, which is a non-profit fund which Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is on the board of.
For now we have information 2007-2009 years that includes:
- 137 high level government agencies (including dissolved)
- 26 654 government bodies
- 266 032 government suppliers
- 1 390 704 individual contracts
- 1306 grants
And lots of reports:
- major industry suppliers
- contracts with too short timeframe
- list of suppliers that depends “too much” on major customers and who gets most money from sole source
- major IT contracts
What next?
Sure, not everything is yet complete. We currently don’t have:
- API
- Better visualization
- Data export
- … and so on.
We will keep working on and improving the site.
For now it’s just non-profit mashup project based on existing open data. But I hope that later we will be able to make it more semantic web ready.
I am personally represent small software development company behind this project and as e-Gov expert and public spending specialist I am project manager of it. So it you have any questions – feel free to get in touch.
P.S. We don’t yet have any English pages on the site, so if you don’t know Russian then Google Translate can help you to find out more.
This post is by a guest poster. If you would like to write something for the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, please see the submissions page.
@Ivan: do you know about the OKFN’s Where Does My Money Go? project? It sounds like there is some definite shared aims, approach and infrastucture — maybe there are ways to collaborate :)