A volunteer-led, public, historical analysis of Canadian federal government contract spending at a whole-of-government level, based on scraping work to unify data from numerous departmental websites.

In early 2017, volunteers at Ottawa Civic Tech wanted to better understand contracts awarded by the Canadian federal government. To do this, they built scrapers to consolidate data from numerous departmental websites – data published in HTML, across thousands of pages, instead of as a well-structured dataset. They then cleaned this data, combining it with newer proactively disclosed datasets, and performed their analysis.