Open Contracting Partnership

The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) is the steward of the global open contracting movement. It sits at the centre of the network connecting governments that publish procurement data, civil society organisations that analyse it, and technology providers that build tools on top of it. For anyone working with OCDS data in Europe, the OCP is the authoritative source for the standard itself, publisher guidance, and quality assessment frameworks.

What is the Open Contracting Partnership?

The OCP is an independent non-profit hosted under the auspices of the governments of the UK and USA when it was founded, and now operating as a standalone international organisation. Its principal activities include:

• Maintaining the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS): publishing the schema, managing the release cycle, reviewing and registering extensions, and providing implementation guidance.
• Supporting government publishers: the OCP works directly with national and local governments to implement OCDS, improve data quality, and expand coverage across the procurement lifecycle.
• Maintaining the publisher registry: a global list of known OCDS publishers, including their publisher prefixes (which form the namespace for contracting process identifiers), their publication feeds, and their data coverage.
• Producing the Open Contracting Data Explorer and other analytical tools that make OCDS data accessible to non-technical users.
• Running the Lift programme and similar initiatives to help lower-capacity countries and sub-national governments adopt open contracting practices.
• Advocating for policy changes that mandate or incentivise procurement transparency at national and international levels.

In Europe, the OCP has worked with multiple EU member states and EU candidate countries, most notably Ukraine through its support for the Prozorro platform, which is widely regarded as the most comprehensive OCDS implementation globally. The OCP also engages with the European Commission on alignment between EU procurement directives, eForms data standards, and OCDS.

Why the Open Contracting Partnership matters for bidders

The OCP's work directly shapes the quality and availability of the data that procurement intelligence platforms depend on. When the OCP successfully supports a government in improving its OCDS publication, the downstream effect is better data for suppliers: more complete tender records, more timely award notifications, more granular implementation data. Understanding which countries have strong OCP engagement helps suppliers assess how reliable the data is for markets they are considering entering.

The OCP's publisher registry is also practically useful: it lists the technical endpoints (API URLs and data download links) for every known OCDS publisher, making it straightforward to locate primary data sources for a given country or region.

Example

A consortium of European development finance institutions uses OCP tools and data to track whether infrastructure contracts funded by their loans are being awarded competitively and implemented without significant cost overruns. The OCP's OCDS framework makes it possible to compare procurement outcomes across ten countries using a single analytical methodology, rather than ten different manual processes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Open Contracting Partnership a regulatory body?

No. The OCP has no legal authority over governments or publishers. It develops standards, provides technical assistance, and advocates for transparency, but compliance with OCDS is voluntary unless a national government or donor condition requires it. The OCP's influence operates through partnership and persuasion rather than regulation.

How does the OCP relate to the EU procurement framework?

The OCP is not an EU institution. It operates globally and works with EU member states, EU candidate countries (particularly Ukraine), and the European Commission as partners in the broader open data ecosystem. EU procurement directives set legal requirements; the OCP provides a complementary data standard that makes the resulting publications machine-readable. The two frameworks are aligned but distinct.

Where can I find the OCDS publisher registry?

The publisher registry is publicly available on the OCP's website. It lists all publishers that have registered a prefix for generating OCIDs, their data publication feeds, and their coverage metadata. It is the starting point for locating primary OCDS data for any specific country or procurement authority.