In line with the Open Contracting Initiative, Layertech conducted a free training session on Data Analysis for CSOs (members of the LGBT Community of Bicol Region) on May 22, 2019.
Participants were introduced to basic Data Analysis concepts, and how they can use it to improve their advocacy activities, and monitor quality of goods and service delivery that they receive from government agencies.
Layertech also gave a crash course on how to properly interpret graphs and tables presented in public, to prevent audience from being misled and confused by news and reports that use data and graphs to exaggerate or manipulate perception of research results.
Finally, Layertech gave a hands-on demonstration of the OCDEx.tech portal features, including a sample use-case, on how to monitor government HIV/AIDS-related procurement to ensure that they receive quality goods and services which they will, in turn, give out to grassroots communities.
Layertech also took note of the participants’ feedback, comments, and suggestions on how to improve OCDex.tech, which will be integrated in the next release of the portal.
Please watch our Layertech VLOG post on this event:
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Supported by Hivos, Layertech lead a data scraping session using R and R Studio, using official Philippine Procurement Datasets found in Philgeps.gov.ph’s Open Data Portal.
The session attendees were faculty members of Bicol University College of Science IT Department, and faculty and graduating students of Southern Luzon Technological College Foundation, Inc.
While procurement datasets are available in open data formats, the large PhilGEPS datasets still need to be pre-processed, filtered, visualized and analyzed. Only then can researchers, advocates, and concerned citizens draw useful insights to aid them in their advocacy and decision making.
What’s the objective?
Layertech and partners advocate for #DataDrivenGovernance. We aim to encourage researchers to study and innovate on government procurement. For them to do that, they must be equipped with the necessary skills and tools to draw insights from procurement information that is available.
For this first session, the academe was specifically invited because the team also needs to get their insights, comments and suggestions about the training design, in order to improve the next tech training sessions to come.
The team and partners will soon be deploying training sessions for young researchers, students, innovators, and faculty, on various topics such as:
Data Science Data Analytics Data Visualization Python Programming Machine Learning Cybersecurity Data Privacy
What are the results?
For the first training session with R, the participants were able to publish a total of 13 datasets (downloadable HERE, in our Open Data Portal) under various categories such as Health, Local Government, and Education.
The participants also actively presented their outputs and how these cleaned datasets can help increase transparency and efficiency in public procurement in the Philippines.
Want to know more about HOW to filter Philgeps datasets? Here’s a quick, general guide HERE.
Keep on visiting our “References” section for more procurement and data scraping, visualization, and analytics guides!
PRE-REQUISITE: You must have R and R Studio BOTH installed in your computer. If you don’t, download the installers on the following links and install them to your computer!
R - https://cran.stat.upd.edu.ph R Studio - https://www.rstudio.com/
Once your have R and R Studio both up and running, we can now proceed to the filtering!
STEP 1 – Go to www.PHILGEPS.GOV.PH and go to the “Open Data” Section. Try downloading the excel files they have over there. We often use the datasets of the Invitations to Bid and Notices of Award.
STEP 2 – The files are in XLSX format. We prefer to export them to CSV because its easier to ingest and because csv is #OPENData format. So yeah. ALSO! Make sure that the rows do not have blanks on the top. The top row will automatically become the ‘header’ once it is ingested in R Studio so make sure the top row is the row that contains the column labels (except if you you key in more lines of course, so let’s keep it simple).
STEP 3 – Ingest the CSV file in RStudio as a dataframe. Normally, we do the following:
DATA_FRAME_NAME = read.csv("PATH/TO/FILE.csv")
STEP 4 – Now that you have a dataframe in R, you can now perform basic operations on it. For example, we normally filter the name of the agency that we are interested in. For example we do something like:
JUL_SEP_2018_sub <- subset(JUL_SEP_2018, Organization.Name=="DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH - REGIONAL OFFICE V")
We now have a NEW Dataframe, with only the data from Department of Health Regional Office 5. 🙂 But remember! The stings are case sensitive so you have to make sure that you are inputting the correct name. You can do a quick search in the raw table and copy-paste the parameter just to be sure 🙂
You can perform several other operations on the dataframe! You can remove columns, count occurrences, join two or more dataframes, and more. To find out more operations, you can google for “R Cheatsheets” for commands and examples.
STEP 5 – If you are satisfied with your final dataframe, we request that you save it as a CSV file through the following commands:
This is because, chances are, some other researcher, or concerned citizen (who isn’t familiar with R) would need the dataset you just made. Sharing is Caring! 🙂
STEP 6 – Finally, you can share your cleaned datasets in our repository! We will make sure to credit you with your preferred name/nickname. Send us your dataset and we will upload it for you (for now. We are working on a way so that you can upload by yourself :) )
All data uploaded will be available as open datasets. They are free for all, so that we can encourage more and more researchers, advocates, to use data and be data-driven in their decision making.
Thank you very much! For more information, kindly email support@layertechlab.com. From time to time, we conduct hands-on trainings! Please let us know if you are interested!
Held at The Oriental Hotel on May 22, 2018, Layertech Software Labs and Hivos conducted the first stakeholder meeting to officially kickstart the Open Contracting and OCDex project in Legazpi city, Albay.
The objective of the meeting is to present the Open Contracting project objectives, proposed activities, and solicit stakeholder feedback and support in order to understand the current issues and difficulties they encounter in public procurement.
Furthermore, in order to create a user-friendly, functional, and relevant procurement portal, stakeholders need to be a constant part of the development process, making them co-creators of the OCDex portal.
Meeting attendees include civil society organizations, local businessmen, members of the academe, and representatives of the Local Government Unit (LGU) of Legazpi.
OCDex team presenting OCDS and potential benefits to stakeholders
The meeting aims to ensure that the OCDex portal, its features, and contents will benefit target stakeholders and assist them in their future procurement planning and decision making activities.
The IT industry has come a long way to its existing shape where it is playing a very dominant role in our sphere of life. It has made revolutionary changes in information gathering and dissemination as well as in global communication. The advancement in the field of information technology helped many people in terms of storing, retrieving, transmitting information, and in communicating. Today, people are still looking for ways and inventing things that will benefit those in the future generation.
At present, the figures being presented at Philippine Government Electronic Procurement System (PhilGEPS) is too technical that the public is having difficulties in understanding its contents.
With such findings, the researchers believed that a well-managed, web-based, Open Contracting Data Standard(OCDS)-based, Monitoring System that uses data visualization can improve the current state on how the taxpaying public understand the procurement process of the Philippines.
Sample Screenshot of SeeLog POC Version
The proposed SeeLog: OCDS Based Procurement Portal will provide the compliance checking of the documents of the tendered items/services. A module will also be provided by the researchers that will mark low-rated procurement transactions for future investigation. The public, on the other hand, will be provided by a Freedom wall where they can show their thoughts and comments. The module will also track the complaints sent by the general public and send it to the concerned parties as feedback mechanisms.
Sample Screenshot of SeeLog POC Version Sample Screenshot of SeeLog POC Version
Note: SeeLog is developed by graduating Bicol University IT Students, as interns, under Layertech Software Labs and Bicol University partnership for the OCDEx Project.
The next step would be a pilot phase, integration to live OCDEx portal.
Open Contracting Portal
Test
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