This page has general information about this site, including how it works, where it comes from and where it's going. For more information about open data and OpenNWT's other initiatives please take a look at the OpenNWT homepage.

Contracting accounts for a significant part of the GNWT's budget and with the existing reports it can be very difficult to see how the money is being spent.

This tool brings together a variety of Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) data sources into one easy to use portal. The purpose of this site is to add clarity to the GNWT's contracting information, make the information that is published today more accessible, and readily available to businesses and the public.

The GNWT's Contract Registry Reporting System is meant to enhancing transparency in government contracting - we've just taken it one step further.

To develop this tool all of the previously published Contracts Over $5,000 Reports that are publically available were imported into a database, then overlayed that information with data from the GNWT's public Contract Registry Reporting System. Once we had all of the data stored in one place, we had to do a lot of work to clean up the data accounting for things like typos between the two different systems.

Finally, with a relatively clean set of information we developed this interface to access the contract information. It's not a perfect interface and we will be improving it as things progress.

There are a number of future enhancements we plan to make to this tool, including e-mail alerts for new or closed contracts, search functionality, custom user-generated reports, a data access API for direct access to information from other programs, and more.

There's no timeline for when these features will be added as resources are limited. If you would like to contribute please let us know!

The Government of the Northwest Territories doesn't have an open data policy yet, however, many other jurisdictions do. The Federal Government has an ever growing Data Portal. At the same time some provinces and cities have made open data a priority. Some great examples are DataBC, and the Ontario Open Data Catalogue. There are also a some non-profits and advocates working to make a difference. These include Open North which is a non-profit group doing some great work on open data.

I encourage you to take a look and see what kinds of information governments are publishing.

The contracts information used to make this site is published by the Government of the Northwest Territories. As this site is not an official GNWT website, we've compiled the data from freely available sources. If you need an official copy please use the GNWT's Contract Opportunities website, or view the Contracts Over $5,000 Reports available as Tabled Documents on the Legislative Assembly website.

This site holds no copyright on the contracts data accessible here.

However, the rest of the site, including the OpenNWT logo are copyright.