Agenda | Presenter | Time | Notes |
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Review Agenda Items | @Sainabou Jallow (Unlicensed) | | |
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Product Updates | Sarah Farooqi | 15 min | Presentation deck Overview Scheduled quarterly releases that provide Catalog/marketplace product updates will be published on Confluence: The Catalog roadmap is streamlined to operationalize the marketplace features over the coming months - the comparison tool, the RFP radar and the storefronts: A staging site for the new changes is already being worked on. A directory of service providers and listing of relevant opportunities will be incorporated soon. The maturity rubric, which will be the basis of the comparison tool, has been updated (see Catalog - Odk example). Information on how the calculation and scores can be found on Confluence. The incorporation of the marketplace type features and functionalities into the Catalog will be reflected through a branding and name change that will be released soon. The new name of the platform - The Digital Impact Exchange.
The Digital Impact Exchange is a digital public good, where the code is open source. There will be the opportunity for all to use and benefit from the platform: An organization or a country can request their own white labeled instance of it - it can be customized and made private for their use. They can keep their data private, and sync whatever relevant information they want to directly on the platform (i.e., publish their tenders, etc).
Key priorities in the coming months: |
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Communications and Rebrand Updates | Arielle Diamond, Senior Communications Manager at Digital Impact Alliance | 5 min | Presentation deck Overview |
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Member Spotlight - Warren Smith | Warren Smith, current Director at CURSHAW, and former Program Director of the UK’s Global Digital Marketplace | 30 min | Presentation deck Overview See PPT deck linked above where Warren provided an overview on the UK's domestic visual marketplace and the work he led while working for the UK government - to set up the UK’s Global Digital Marketplace. Core point and principle prioritized in the process of setting up the UK Marketplace was ensuring a user centered approach and and thinking about procurement reform as a digital translation program. UK’s story - dating back to 2009/2010, the UK’s National Audit Office report highlighted the UK’s supply chain and internal buyers frustration with the procurement process of digital and technology services, and its domination by a small number of large multi-national suppliers. Fast forward to today, through the UK’s domestic marketplace - billions of pounds have been saved, and there are now thousands of technology products and service providers with access to the UK’s public sector market. The UK’s Global Digital Marketplace was launched to help governments in emerging economies set up a digital Marketplace (Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, Malaysia and Indonesia). Lessons learnt/core elements that were really fundamental to help create a more open, diverse, transparent and competitive market: Thinking holistically about the components needed in a good decision making process of the whole commercial lifecycle - not only pertaining to digital technology, but other products and services as well. Before putting out a tender, a government should first look to see what technology solutions are available to reuse and build on top of. Bringing together lawyers, service designers and commercial policy experts to participate in a hack day and collaboratively discuss how to improve government procurement contracts. Addressing corruption and ensuing that there is a procurement systems in place to tackle it. A process to ensure service delivery once contract has been awarded - making sure the money is being spent in the right way and on the right things. Building digital skills capability to help both commercial and procurement stakeholders.
Questions: How were legal consultations on the regulatory environment conducted in the emerging economies? Has anybody in the public sector seen the implementation of AI based contracting negotiation solutions to facilitate deal making?
Additional resources shared in chat during session: |
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Member Spotlight - Reilly Martin | Reilly Martin, Senior Program Director at Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) | 30 min | Presentation deck Overview Open Contracting Partnership partners with nonprofits, governments, and for profit actors that are looking to support are more open and fair procurement process. The session started with an activity where everyone was asked to take 3-5 minutes to find an RFP on their local or national government’s procurement website, without using google. Everyone was asked to track the number of clicks it took to find and download an RFP bid opportunity and note down any barriers of entry or discovery they experienced. Reference group members, all based in various countries - responses ranged from 5 - 10 clicks. Challenges mentioned included not knowing where to start to find local bids without using google, language barrier - i.e, in the case of Estonia, if you don't speak Estonia, it will take more clicks to find the RFP bids.
Presentation focused on electronic government procurement (e-GP) systems and a report about 5 African countries that received funding to redo their e-procurement systems and the lessons learnt. All 5 countries incorporated having a e-GP system into their wider communications technology strategies and roadmap, using a variety of different implementations - from SAS to custom solutions. Only 3 out of the 5 countries outlined a plan on how to implement improvements after the pilot phase.
Key challenges highlighted in the report: Some of the solutions chosen to implement the e-procurement system were influenced by funding deadlines, rather than actual context. The needs of users - ensuring a user first centric design process - wasn’t prioritized, and the lack of vendor presence and ability to set local contextual requirements from the beginning, created complications later on. Change management did not take place within the governments, to adapt to the new requirements of the e-GP procurement system.
Recommendations to apply to future e-GP or technology projects: Design systems with users in mind by consulting them first. Important to articulate goals through a strategy and have a strong governance structure: Planning for sustainability - align this plan with policy and legal frameworks to ensure project needs are met and that efforts are not duplicated. Making sure there is enough flexibility to have a collaborative relationship with the selected vendor - in all phases of the project implementation process.
OCP’s 5 principles for e-GP projects: 1. have clear and prioritized use cases, 2. collect useful data, 3. publish open data, 4. design useful portal, and 5. follow an iterative process.
Questions: How does OCP select partners to work with? Response: partners approach OCP for support needs with a specific reform and/or project they have in mind. OCP has an accelerator incubator program that plans to provide hands-on technical assistance, and funding (minimum 30K US) to about ~ 10 to 15 teams over the next two years. The call for application will open up in March. Link to the opportunity will be updated on here Open Contracting Lift - Reforming public procurement
Is OCP using the findings from the report and others to try to influence the way that the donors and banks think about how they're directing investment towards implementation of e-GP? Has OCP done a study looking across the board - on a global context - what the key interest areas are in e-GP systems?
Additional resources shared in chat during session: |
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Next Steps - Agenda Items | Sainabou Jallow | 5 min | Overview 2 or 3 additional Reference Group meetings to be held this year. Beyond providing updates on the Digital Impact Exchange platform, the Reference Group meetings will be an opportunity to build a connected community where best practices and lessons learnt are exchanged. To select the agenda items and member spotlight sessions for future meetings, all members are asked to use this link to input suggested topics and themes - Agenda Items.
Proposed agenda items shared in the chat: |
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