When we talk about municipal spending, one of the biggest areas of contention and debate is the procurement process. It's often so complex that it restricts new possible bidders. It's often so opaque that many cities require approval to be a vendor before you can actually view the city's RFPs. The ultime goal of OpenProcure is twofold:
- To develop a recommended set of thresholds for the competitive bidding process
- To develop and promote a common schema for the publication of procurement data online in a machine-readable format so as to make it easier to share and compare procurement policies between different municipalities.
Continue the process of gathering discretional and formal purchasing thresholds for competitive bidding from at least the top 150 most populous U.S. cities. That work has begun already.