Lots: Award value of a lot group (e.g. all or subset of lots in a framework agreement)

[jpmckinney]

Needed by UK and related to an open issue in the eForms profile: open-contracting/european-union-support#197

Some related issues that describe lot groups are #183 and #125, as mentioned in open-contracting/european-union-support#196 (comment) (linked from the above issue).

[jpmckinney]

Non-options

If awards are divided by lot, then OCDS has few places for "aggregate" data about awards. The bids extension allows tracking aggregate statistics, like highest bid value, total SME bids, etc. – but this is the wrong place for something like the framework's maximum value (which is not statistical).

The tender section deals with pre-award information, and so it is inappropriate to update it with award information.

Special cases/compromises

If there is no difference between awarded lots, then one option is to throw them all together in one single award, and list all the lots in awards.relatedLots. In that case, the maximum value of an entire framework is just awards.maximumValue (from OCDS 1.2).

That said, it's preferred to divide awards by lot, so avoid remodelling if in future different details become available for each awarded lot. For example, different suppliers might participate in the framework agreement for different lots; in call-offs, only the suppliers for a given lot are invited to bid (or automatically awarded by some criteria for direct call-offs).

Options

1. Add some new section to the schema to describe lot groups. This option might be preferred if we find other information we want to share about lot groups (e.g. by reviewing the two other issues in this issue's description).
2. Use awards.maximumValue for the maximum value of the framework agreement in which the lot participates (or awards.estimatedValue for its estimated value). This is what eForms does with BT-709 and BT-660. These were added to OCDS in Clarify Contract description standard#896

Unless we find use cases for 1 (or unless publishers want to describe a lot group that isn't all lots in a framework agreement), then we should just do 2 (requiring no change).

Closing this issue to document the discussion, as there is no action.