Procurement: the framework has the slot and it is empty

Added public procurement as a third category to probe/category_gaps.py, expecting the elections result again — no indicator, lots of city data. The first run said exactly that: zero of 519 named indicators, 150 datasets across 28 cities.

It was wrong, and finding out why produced a better result.

The method was searching names, and a quarter of the framework has none

SG_SCP_PROCN sits in the SDG goal tree. It is the 12.7.1 series — sustainable public procurement — and it carries no name, so a search over indicator names cannot see it. Neither can it see SG_SCP_PROCN_HS or SG_SCP_PROCN_LS.

We have known since Wednesday that 170 of the 689 base indicators return no name. What we had not done is account for them when claiming a concept is absent. The category search now looks at DCID mnemonics too, and reports them as candidates for a human to read rather than counting them — mnemonics are noisy, and SE_ACS_ELECT is schools with access to electricity, not elections.

What the slots actually contain

All three procurement DCIDs exist. All three hold zero observations for zero countries.

The one adjacent indicator that does carry data is SG_SCP_CNTRY — countries with sustainable consumption and production national action plans — and its value is 1 for all 75 countries that report it. Nobody reports a 0. It is a list of countries that have a plan, recorded as a number.

So the framework does not lack a procurement indicator. It has three, and they are empty; and the thing next to them that works counts whether a country has written a policy down.

Against that, 28 cities publish 150 procurement datasets — tenders, awards, vendors, purchase orders. New York City alone registers 55,806 contracts worth $147 billion, every one with an agency, a vendor, a value and a status.

The pattern, now three for three

Category What the framework measures What cities publish
Records access 16.10.2 — whether a country has adopted guarantees 8 cities: requests filed, answered, how long they took
Procurement 12.7.1 — three empty slots; the neighbour counts action plans 28 cities: 150 datasets of actual transactions
Elections nothing at all 23 cities: 469 datasets of results by polling station

Twice the framework asks has a policy been adopted and the cities answer here is what happened. Once it does not ask.

Procurement is the sturdiest of the three

By this project's own evidence rule — count cities, not datasets — procurement is the best of them:

One honest wrinkle: procurement datasets are not unusually far from the framework in embedding space — mean affinity 0.393 against 0.407 for municipal data generally, and only 32% fall in the bottom quartile of their own catalog, against 64% for elections. The reason is that a procurement dataset is about something — road contracts, health contracts, water contracts — and those subjects do have indicators. The data gets absorbed by its topic rather than recognised as procurement. The lexical search is what makes the gap visible; the embedding would have missed it.

Also true of the other two

Every unnamed DCID the mnemonic search surfaced across all three categories — 19 of them, including the democratic-institutions and judiciary series SG_DMK_JDC* and SG_DMK_PARLCC_* — holds zero observations. Unnamed and empty are the same set. That is consistent with Wednesday's --all sweep, where 207 of the 247 indicators outside the usable set returned no country data at all, and it is worth stating plainly: the framework's governance slots are largely unfilled, not merely unnamed.

Procurement is now a third block on the demo, and mcp/smoke.py (32 checks) asserts the empty-slot claim against the artifact, so it cannot quietly become false if the platform fills them in.