BT-633-Organization: Organisation Natural Person

[duncandewhurst]

This field is a boolean to indicate whether an organization is a natural person, for example in the case of an award to a sole-trader.

In open-contracting/standard#883 (comment), Colin proposed to discard this field. However, I can't see how else a user could determine whether an organization is a natural person or a legal person so it seems like that would result in information loss.

@jpmckinney is there a reason that we shouldn't add a parties/details/naturalPerson field to the European Union extension?

[jpmckinney]

partyScale has a code for 'selfEmployed': "This is a self-employed natural person, also known as a sole trader."

https://extensions.open-contracting.org/en/extensions/partyScale/master/codelists/

[duncandewhurst]

Ah, great. I didn't know about that code.

I checked the SDK documentation to determine whether the field can be used in a context other than a sole trader. It can be used in the context of 'non-tenderer, non-buyer' organizations, which are described as:

...organizations active during the Public Procurement Procedure neither being a buyer nor a tenderer.

According to Table 22. Mapping: Organization BTs — Schema components, it is:

Only for economic operators (tenderer, winner, service provider …​)

However, according to Table 23. Information requirement per role, it is an optional field for all roles, which seems contradictory. The field is conditionally mandatory for the following roles, which I think we can take as the only places it is intended to be used.

• Winner (#)
• Subcontractor
• Mediation organization
• Review organization (#)
• Procurement service provider

For any of the above roles, I think the mapping to 'selfEmployed' is appropriate so I've updated guidance.yaml.