Open State Foundation attended the first edition of the Paris Peace Forum (11-13 November). Governments, multilateral organisations, NGOs, companies, journalists and more gathered during the event to tackle worldwide problems through international collaboration. A hackathon was hosted at the same time with the goal of making the finances of multilateral organisations more transparent. Open State Foundation was one of the four organisations that proposed a challenge for the hackathon participants to work on, namely: “How can data from the Open Multilaterals project be used to increase the financial transparency of multilateral organizations?”
More than 70 participants en mentors from all over the world attended the hackathon. 5 teams worked on our challenge using data from the Open Multilaterals project that we released last October together with Hivos and Cordaid. The data contains nearly 400.000 tender contracts from the United Nations, NATO and World Bank. The results are listed below:
Winner: Contract Fit
The winning team created the Contract Fit tool. It allows organisations to easily analyse the trends of UN tenders of the past years per country and sector in order to get an idea on which tenders of the 42 UN organisations you might want to keep an eye. According to the jury, this application showed the most progress during the hackathon and also scored well on innovativity, feasibility and impact.
Other results
Another team analysed if there is a correlation between the tenders of the World Bank and the Social Progress Index.
The third team used the opencorporates.com/reconcile API to enrich the company names from the tender data with their company numbers. This makes it possible to find more information about the companies and to combine it with other datasets.
Finally, there were two teams that ended up making less use of the Open Multilaterals data, but they are definitely worth mentioning. The first made a website where the costs of events hosted by the African Union could be made transparent through crowdsourcing. The other team was involved with the creation of the French data portal, but they want future data portals to be more community involved. That is why they made a wiki data portal.
Want to use the Open Multilaterals data?
Check out the data on openmultilaterals.org or use our data portal.