About this project

This project was launched in early 2017 as an Ottawa Civic Tech volunteer project. It began with a goal of analyzing Canadian federal government IT spending (inspired by the UK’s Digital Marketplace program, which aims to reach a more diverse set of suppliers). Over time and based on data that was publicly available from federal government departments, it became a community research project on government-wide contract spending.

Over the course of two years, volunteers scraped and parsed data from departmental Proactive Disclosure websites and combined it with published open data from the Open Government website. You can read more about the source data and methodology here.

The combined dataset that resulted from this work is publicly available, and the source code for the various scraping and analysis functions is available on GitHub.

Many people contributed time, advice, ideas, and code to this project. Special thanks to Denis, Thomas, Jason, Eric, Oliver, Lucas, Matthew, Mike, Nick, Roy, Vanessa, Stephen, Ryan, Luisa, Zach, Emilio, Xander, and Sean for their contributions.

This data is provided as-is, and no guarantees are made for the accuracy of the data or the processes used to aggregate and analyze it. Trends and total values should be considered estimates rather than precise values. See the Limitations section for more details.

Get in touch

If you have questions or feedback on this data, or if you’ve conducted your own analyses, we’d love to hear from you. You can post a public issue on GitHub, or reach out by email at gocspendinganalysis@gmail.com.