Links/ showcase of case studies of councils doing good procurement

[JenMysoc]

We were considering having some sort of showcase or links at the bottom of a contract page to show case studies of councils doing good procurement as this could be something that helps to give a framework for best practice. We are not expecting to write these all ourselves, but source them from places like Ashden and similar.

We need to figure out:

• [ ] What kinds of case studies we want
• [ ] Where we will source them
• [ ] If we need any permissions to repost/link them
• [ ] how we keep case studies relevant (eg manually, api or feed of some kind)
• [ ] How do we display them on the page
• [ ] How do we make sure the case studies are relevant to the contract (eg areas nearby? same type of service procured?)
• [ ] do we also have a separate page or library of case studies too

[MyfanwyNixon]

Calling @sequencefree to see if you have any good ideas for places to look.

Sion has already shared this with me: https://shaselmayer.medium.com/public-procurement-matters-four-ways-of-buying-led-streetlights-ccf32b0f9cba It deals with the US and (especially) Netherlands but is an inspiring story about the kind of transformation that can be achieved if you disrupt procurement early enough in the process.

Eindhoven used procurement not simply to purchase a lot of lamps, but to orchestrate a long-term partnership between the city, the technical university, citizens and corporate partners that opened up the spending normally used for maintenance to allow continuous innovation. Anchored in citizen participation, the city and its partners can now continually explore new ideas to benefit the community, at a hyper-local level. Eindhoven’s annual GLOW festival showcases new ideas, local design talent and innovations in technology, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and inspiring citizens with new ideas for their own neighborhoods.

[MyfanwyNixon]

Looks like the blog that is from regularly posts about great procurement ideas.

[MyfanwyNixon]

I'm just going to use this as a notepad which we can whittle down later.

• OECD has a bunch of case studies from around the world here.
• LGA has a guide to innovative procurement
• GDS ran the Catalyst project and blogged it.
• There is a whole website on sustainable procurement with a case studies section.
• Some case studies here but behind a log-in

Longevity is a good question - I don't think any of these sources are reliable enough to automate updates.

[sequencefree]

Nice one Myf!

Another one via Sascha Haselmayer that may overlap a bit with your link above: https://medium.com/citymartinsights

My personal fave and maybe one we could surface when people are looking at very rural authorities (according to the patented @ajparsons similarity typology perhaps) if we want to incorporate that level of sophistication: https://medium.com/citymartinsights/rural-public-transport-procurement-putting-communities-firmly-in-the-driving-seat-d090150ae09d + Call notes from a meeting with Helen maybe also be of interest.

These seem to be the usual go-to places for council officers to find case studies, although I suspect a little bit of curation could go a long way:

1. https://ashden.org/news/uk-learning-out-loud/
2. https://www.local.gov.uk/case-studies

There are also these, which annoyingly don't seem to be searchable: https://takeclimateaction.uk/resources/councils-tackling-climate-chaos

I'm revisiting the Enable climate action via procurement Trello card that I used to dump thoughts in advance of the prototyping week so might be some nuggets there and will try to share if I stumble on any.

Hope that helps!

[MyfanwyNixon]

Thanks Sion, really great!

[MyfanwyNixon]

Random idea and perhaps impractical - but to overcome the issue of non-searchable/non-filterable pages where case studies are mixed in with blog posts etc, could we approach the orgs and either ask them to add tagging, or offer them some sort of incentive for doing so?

[sequencefree]

Could ask, if we think it's worth it. I don't have a sense of how many case studies we need but was assuming a fairly small number so figured a manual trawl might suffice. Could maybe build in "Know of a good case/better case study about XYZ? Tell us about it!" links so that we're passively alerted to alternative content.

[JenMysoc]

We've marked this as done - but I'm not sure if we've moved the practicalities of displaying etc to another ticket?

[MyfanwyNixon]

Ah no you're right Jen - still the practicalities to look at.