TEDective at FOSDEM 2023
This is just a quick update: TEDective is present at this year's FOSDEM hoping to attract the attention of everyone who already is or will become interested in opening up public procurement data.
Watch the talk
You can use this link (opens in a new tab) to watch Linus' presentation.
About TEDective
TEDective is a free software (open-source) solution that makes European public procurement data explorable for non-experts. Let's say you are a curious citizen who wants to find out how much taxpayer money your municipality spends each year on unfree software. To date, there is no free software-backed, community-developed application out there that helps you answer this question.
TEDective changes that by bringing light into the public procurement data published by the EU’s Tenders European Daily (TED) project. It transforms the XML files provided by TED into the interoperable Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) and then visualizes the data as a graph of relationships between companies and the public bodies they supply. Currently, neo4j is used to store the TEDective graph. Finally, the data will be enriched by other complementary data sources such as OpenCorporates and OpenSanctions.
Why is public procurement important?
Every year, public institutions in the EU spend more than €2 trillion on various goods and services. While the EU publishes a lot of data about public procurement in the form of TED (https://ted.europa.eu (opens in a new tab)), somebody interested in European public procurement still faces a lot of difficulties: TED data is overly complex, doesn't follow the international and interoperable Open Contracting Data Standard and is hard to explore as the UI provided by TED is limited to basic filtering and search.
Why TEDective?
This situation was the starting point for TEDective – an initiative by the Free Software Foundation Europe to make European public procurement data both accessible and explorable - for everybody. We believe that the transparency needed by such a solution to function in the interest of its users can only be provided by a community-led free software project. TEDective is such a project. The project already won the first prize at this year’s EU Datathon. With this initial funding, we are now keen to spread the word and build a community of data science, procurement and usability experts who can help us in our quest to open up and democratise European public procurement data.