This repository contains the R code to analyze Government of Canada procurement data published through the Proactive Disclosure of Contracts.
It uses the Tidyverse collection of packages as well as janitor, purrr and several others. See _libraries.R for the full set.
Inflation adjustments are done using Statistics Canada data via the cansim package, in inflation_adjustments.R.
This analysis uses the R programming language and R Studio, although it could be run with other R environments.
Running this analysis in R Studio typically requires about 20 GB of RAM; we’d recommend running it on a computer with at least 32 GB. A typical run-through takes between 5 and 6 hours to complete.
The main analysis takes place in load.R. This does the following steps:
- Downloads the latest copy of the source data from open.canada.ca
- Retrieves the latest inflation index data from Statistics Canada using cansim
- Conducts the analysis described on the Methodology page
- Exports a variety of summary CSV files to the
data/outfolder - Updates the run log with metadata from the completed analysis run
Summary CSV files are produced each time the analysis runs in the data/out folder. This includes:
- overall trends across core federal public service departments, the Department of National Defence, and all public sector departments and agencies included in the source dataset
- trends by department or agency
- trends by category
- trends by IT subcategory
- trends by vendor
A number of other analysis outputs are included in the overall trends folders, produced by research_findings.R which is run automatically by load.R.
Charts for specific presentations and other artefacts are produced by additional_research_findings.R and presentation_findings.R, which need to be run separately after contract data has already loaded in the environment.
You can see the resulting summary CSVs and other trend information in a user-friendly way at govcanadacontracts.ca. This website is produced from the CSVs generated by this repository, via the Blogdown code in contracts-data-web.
You can get in touch with the research team via the About the project page, or use the feedback form to send in your suggestions.
This repository is licensed under the MIT license. Source data from the Government of Canada is available under the Open Government License – Canada. Please see the license details for specific R packages that are used for more information.
A Carleton SPPA Research Project