Elvis maps your tenders
Open data is everywhere, but not every journalist is a skilled data analyst. By creating Elvis (map me tender), we want help newsrooms find leads and support for stories in the data. Our focus lies on public spending, specifically tender awards data.
Public procurement (or tendering) is the process of acquiring goods and services for the government. Think of building a municipal road, cozy office chairs for the ministry of health, or catering for public schools. It is therefore the most prominent flow of public money into the private sector. However, structured journalistic research into tender data is limited. Tendering is quite a technical process, highly sector and country specific and the data sets are usually too big and in our opinion not very suitable for spreadsheet analysis.
What can I do with Elvis?
You can use Elvis to visualize public spending in a specific country, sector, and year range as graphs or networks of financial relations. You can visualize parts of the public sector of a country — such as IT or health-care — or draw an entity network — that would be (cross border) company network or government institution network. It so allows you to see relationships between government and companies and answer questions like ‘Who is dominating the IT market in Hungary?’ or ‘Which companies earn most money from building highways?’.



The network visualization is accompanied by a sidebar and a detailed view. Here you can find a list of all the companies and governments in the network, sort them by value, search for a specific entity, or click through to other platforms such as TED (Tenders Electronic daily) and the opentender.eu dashboard.

But wait ... there is more!
Given the data is filled in manually by public officials, all tender data is very inconsistent. Bulk analysis of the data can be therefore quite challenging. It so often happens that the same company shows up with different spelling leading to multiple dots instead of one. We have therefore implemented a simple tool to merge these into one.

Our aim is to make Elvis is very straightforward. We primarily focus on the network view and a simple sidebar. We don’t want the tool to become an overwhelming dashboard. There are also pictures of fruit (when data is missing).

Why only Eastern Europe?
Despite we have data from the whole of the EU, Elvis only offers data from the countries of the former Eastern block. One of the reasons for this is the data quality. The picture above comes from tender data in The Netherlands, where very often the price of the winning bid is not published because of ‘business sensitivity’. This is a common practice in the western part of Europe. Tenders in the eastern part of Europe are often more transparent.
Value of the winning bid much more often present in tenders from the countries of the former Eastern block

Another important reason are resources. The data (7 million tenders) is at the moment much bigger than the database in this form can handle. We are looking for means to develop it further.
Do you like Elvis?
Feel free to contact us at tech [at] tenders.exposed !
