Our vision
Fair and effective public contracting provides everyone, everywhere with the public goods, works and services that they need.
The Open Contracting Partnership is an independent non-profit public charity 501(c)(3) working in over 50 countries.
We are a silo-busting collaboration across governments, businesses, civil society, and technologists to open up and transform government contracting worldwide. Bringing open data and open government together, we make sure public money is spent openly, fairly and effectively on public contracts, the single biggest item of spending by most governments. They are a government’s number one corruption risk and they are vital to make sure citizens get the services that they deserve.
Through open contracting, we drive massively improved value for money, public integrity and service delivery by shifting public contracting from closed processes and masses of paperwork to digital services that are fair, efficient and ‘open-by-design’.
We support reformers from government, business and civil society to make reforms stick, help their innovations jump scale, and foster a culture of openness around the policies, teams, tools, data, and results needed to deliver impact.
We aren’t after a bit more transparency: we want a transformational shift in how business is done. We want to bridge fundamental gaps in data creation, disclosure and use.
A modern economy needs a smart, data-driven government contracting ecosystem. Our mission is to bring governments, businesses, citizens and open data together to build one.
Our governance
We are a global team of about 30 people, with a small executive team based in Washington, DC. We are governed by a Governing Board made up of a mix of renowned individuals from government, the private sector, civil society, the technology sector and development organizations. The Governing Board appoints and oversees our Executive Director and signs off on our strategy and our budget. It also contributes to fundraising and champions open contracting publicly.
Our team
Our values
Open
What we expect from government, we apply to ourselves too. We openly and honestly share what we are doing, from our contracts and our finances to our programmatic progress and challenges. We are also open to new ideas and collaborations. Our events and organizational processes should be inclusive and everyone should feel invited to participate. We recognize that this involves going the extra mile and taking a longer road to impact than just working with governments, but it also makes the results more robust and sustainable.
Bold
To reach our ambitious goals for transforming the world’s largest marketplace, we have to be bold. We push for transformational change (open-by-design) rather than being content with incremental or superficial improvements. We aren’t after just a bit more transparency, we want a fundamental improvement in how business is done. Public contracts seem boring so we have to make them interesting and uncover the vital issues at stake. We have to call out the myths and be steadfast without being insensitive or inflexible.
Curious
To overcome vested interests and to change the status quo, we have to be creative. We take chances on new approaches and new ideas. We explore new ways to solve problems and build new collaborations and alliances. We create space for testing, failure and adaptation. We run with our winners, fess up and learn from our mistakes, and report on what we learned on the way.
And we hope to do all this in a fun way. We celebrate our successes and those of our awesome partners.
We are passionate about our work and caring about the people making all of this happen.
