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ODIHQ@ODILeeds Free Friday Lunchtime Lecture: How to change the world with some data scrapers and a plan

Location: Open Innovations - 3rd Floor - Munro House - Duke Street - LS9 8AG Leeds

Date: -

Public procurement matters: it accounts for 30% of government spending worldwide, or nearly $10trn USD per annum, and we know that large amounts of this money are lost to corruption. We also know that better data and better analysis are the keys to countering corruption in public procurement. Ian and the team behind Spend Network have built https://openopps.com, an open global platform for procurement and tender data and already the largest publisher of the Open Contracting Data Standard in the world. During this talk Ian will explain how open data can be used to counter corruption in public contracting, and how linking the data in openopps.com could lead to a genuinely different approach to public procurement in the future. Ian has worked in public procurement for over 20 years and has been running his own businesses for over 12 years. As well as OpenOpps he runs Spend Network, a service analysing UK government spending data; OpenOpps was a part of the ODI Startup programme in 2013-14. Prior to his career as an entrepreneur, Ian worked as a Management Consultant with a focus on government procurement.