News

First Stakeholder Meeting – Open Contracting Data Standards Stakeholder Meeting 2018

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.

SeeLog: Open Contracting Data Standard-Based Procurement Portal

By: Alan John Maristela Alilano

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.