We collect, clean, and publish government procurement records so journalists, vendors, researchers, and advocates can hold institutions accountable without spending weeks on public records requests.
Massachusetts spends billions of dollars each year through the COMMBUYS procurement portal — covering everything from housing construction contracts to office supplies. That data is technically public, but extracting it requires navigating a complex, session-based government website that was not designed for bulk access.
The Civic Data Collective automates that extraction. We run scrapers daily, standardize the output, and publish structured datasets that anyone can download and analyze — no programming skills required.
Our long-term goal is to cover all 1,200+ Massachusetts government organizations on COMMBUYS, building a comprehensive archive of public procurement activity dating back to when records become available.
COMMBUYS is the primary procurement platform for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It handles bid solicitations, vendor quotes, and contract awards for state agencies, municipalities, and quasi-public bodies — representing tens of thousands of transactions per year.
Investigative journalists tracking contract patterns. Small vendors who want to compete but can't monitor hundreds of bid postings. Nonprofits and advocates documenting how housing and infrastructure dollars are spent. Budget analysts and researchers studying procurement trends.
A fully automated pipeline collects procurement data daily and makes it available in formats designed for analysis.
Daily: our discovery script queries the COMMBUYS public API for newly posted open bids. New bid IDs are queued for scraping.
For each new bid: the scraper fetches 25+ structured fields from the bid detail page, downloads all attached documents, and captures any vendor quotes already submitted.
Processed data is exported to CSV and JSON, published here as free downloads, and archived for longitudinal analysis.
Open bids are checked multiple times per week for updates — new addenda, deadline changes, and new vendor submissions — so the dataset stays current throughout the bid lifecycle.
Coming soon: opt-in email notifications when bids matching your keywords or commodity codes are posted, updated, or awarded.
Every version of every bid is preserved. When a bid closes or is awarded, we capture the final state and keep it in the archive alongside all downloaded attachments.
We launched our pilot with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing & Livable Communities (EOHLC, Org ID 1076) — a high-profile agency overseeing housing production, community development, and livable communities programs across the Commonwealth.
EOHLC posts roughly one new bid per week and maintains about 10 open bids at any time. Their procurement covers major construction projects, professional services, and technical assistance contracts — contracts that matter to communities across Massachusetts.
The pilot is running daily. Data for all currently-open EOHLC bids is available on the Data page. Expansion to additional agencies is planned for Q3 2026.
Massachusetts state agency responsible for housing production, community development, and livable communities programs.
We're building incrementally, guided by what's most useful to the people who rely on government procurement data.
All open EOHLC bids with 25+ fields, vendor quotes, and linked attachments. Updated daily.
Audit log of every change detected on open bids: new addenda, deadline extensions, status transitions, new vendor quotes.
Subscribe to keyword- or commodity-code-based alerts for new and updated bids. Free for individuals and nonprofits.
Who won what, and for how much. Contract award data linked back to the original bid solicitation and submitted quotes.
Expand beyond EOHLC to cover additional Massachusetts state agencies and municipalities with high bid volume.
All 1,200+ Massachusetts organizations on COMMBUYS. Bulk downloads, historical archive, and cross-agency analytics.
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