Application of Crowdsourcing to Generate Datasets of Public Procurement Processes

Andrés Rey,Luis Gomez,Angel Lozada,N Mastorakis,A Bulucea,V Mladenov

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201821004050

Andrés Rey, Luis Gomez + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201821004050

Copy DOI

Abstract

In order to fight against Corruption, there are currently laws of free access to public information that favor transparency in many countries. In this opening scenario, information and communication technologies play an important role in facilitating the delivery of information that is made available to citizens seeking to enable greater control over the actions of government and civil servants. Nevertheless, in many cases, the information provided is aimed at human reading and interpretation and it is not published in machine-processable formats, a condition that hinders automatic processing using state-of-the-art computational techniques. This article presents a new method of data collection based on Crowdsourcing that allows generating data sets of public procurement processes from the unstructured information published on the Web. The results obtained show that our method allows the generation of reliable public procurement data sets in a scalable way whose scope is limited by the availability of data and the transparency of the country.

Highlights

The World Bank defines corruption as the abuse of public power for private benefit, pointing out that this problem is the greatest obstacle to the economic and social development of the countries [1]
In many countries in the framework of what is known as Electronic Government (e-Government) and thanks to the laws of free access to public information (Freedom of Information, FOL), the information made available to the public has increased in order to improve qualitatively and quantitatively the possibilities of control over the actions of the government [3]
The corruption that occurs in public procurement is focused, where currently one of the difficulties in knowing or extracting knowledge about what happens in the procurement processes does not occur mainly due to lack of information, but rather because of large volumes of information on public procurement processes [5] that are provided in many cases in non-processable formats by machine, a situation that makes it difficult to process them automatically with state-of-art computational techniques

Summary

Introduction

The World Bank defines corruption as the abuse of public power for private benefit, pointing out that this problem is the greatest obstacle to the economic and social development of the countries [1]. The Transparency International defines corruption as the misuse of the public power entrusted to obtain private benefits This definition is very general, it gives a little direction to the meaning of this concept, but in order to have a framework for analyzing the problem and explaining the relationship between governments and citizens, the agency theory that applies to any situation in where one or more people have delegated authority, at the time of making decisions, to another/other person/s [8]. The agency theory illustrates the relationship between two important actors: the principal, which represents those who delegate authority, which for this case will be citizens; and the agent that represents those who receive the delegated authority, that is, the elected civil servants In this relationship, citizens are the directors and, in contrast, governments are agents that work for citizens. By delegating certain decision-making power to the agent, the principal expects the agent to defend the interests and maximize the profits, appropriately managing the discretionary capacity of action that has been delivered to this one [8]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion