Insights

Writing on open data, government transparency, procurement disclosure, and building accountability systems that survive real constraints.

Featured Technical Guidance

Wrong Fields Corrupt Your Data. Five Rules for OC4IDS Mapping.

A technical guide for implementers converting government infrastructure data to OC4IDS. Covers the five most common mapping errors: parties array, identifiers, budget vs contract value, date periods, and status codelists.

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Sector Analysis

Why Transparency Portals Die

The most successful infrastructure disclosure system I helped build stopped updating eighteen months after launch. Technology worked. Data standard was correct. Two years later, the portal loads. Nobody maintains it. After a decade building these systems across Africa and Southeast Asia, here's why disclosure portals die - and what survival requires.

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Implementation

Perfect data kills projects

Seven hard lessons from launching infrastructure transparency portals across four continents. The shortest path to impact isn't perfect planning - it's imperfect launching, listening hard, and sustaining longer than anyone expects.

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Sector Analysis

Five Ways Portals Die

I can point to procurement disclosure portals across three continents that launched to press releases and ministerial speeches, then went dark within three years. The graveyard is bigger than the survivors. After a decade building these systems, here are the five ways they die—and what survivors share.

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Technical Guidance

OC4IDS Implementation Checklist

Five implementations across Uganda, Mozambique, and Malawi. Every one taught me something the documentation missed. The schema is thorough, the codelists comprehensive. What you won't find: which decisions will haunt you eighteen months in. This is the checklist I wish someone had handed me before my first implementation.

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Implementation

Patterns Aren't Proof

The database query finished at 2:47 AM. I was watching 100,000 contracts load into Uganda's Government Procurement Portal. After three years running this system, here's what the data taught me: disclosure is not transparency, patterns are not proof, and availability is not use.

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