Data-Driven Journalism Workshop on EU Spending: Tools & Techniques. Utrecht, 8th-9th September.

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lucy Chambers

The following post is by Liliana Bonegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The post announces a joint workshop between the EJC and OKF, focusing on how to get started with data-driven reporting on spending data. This workshop will focus particularly on EU spending data.

Interested in data-driven journalism and EU spending?

The European Journalism Centre together with the Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting a one and a half day data-driven journalism workshop on EU spending in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 8th-9th September.

Why EU spending?

EU spending is an important topic of investigation. The two most substantial data-driven investigations into EU spending in the recent years have been the investigation into payments and recipients of farm subsidies in the EU, and the investigation into the beneficiaries of EU structural funds (the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) in collaboration with the Financial Times). By bringing EU spending to public scrutiny, journalists helped enrich the public debate around this topic.

In this workshop participants will learn from data journalists who worked as part of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) structural funds investigation team and spending data experts how to get started with data-driven reporting on EU spending.

What will the workshop cover?

The participants will learn how to find and explore EU spending data from different sources, analyze it and find answers to their questions in order to produce stories.

How did the BIJ get the data? Can it be applied to other countries? What other stories can we get from the data if we compare it with other databases? Which Dutch companies and which public bodies receive funding? (How) can spending data be connected with lobbying interests? Do EU structural funds beneficiaries get funding under other programmes as well? These are a few of the questions that we aim to explore (participants are encouraged to contribute their own questions).

Workshop leaders?

How do I sign up?

The workshop is aimed at aspiring data journalists, journalists, open data specialists, developers and others who have an interest in EU spending.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop please email Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) to request an invitation. Please include in the email your affiliation (if any) and a sentence or two on your motivation to join this workshop.

There is no participation fee but attendees are expected to arrange and cover their own transportation and accommodation.

Do you know of any relevant databases that we can use during the workshop? Do you have any ideas of questions and stories that we can explore?

If so please get in touch with us (bounegru [at] ejc.net).

If you’re interested in keeping in touch with developments in this area, you may wish to join the EJC’s Data-Driven Journalism group, the joint EJC/OKF mailing list on data-driven-journalism, and follow data-driven journalism on Twitter.

The official page for the event can be found here.

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Public Data Consultations: Making Open Data a Reality

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lucy Chambers

This post is from Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Earlier this month, the UK Government published the ‘Open Data Consultation Paper’. Its aim is to establish a “culture of openness and transparency in public services” and the Government is turning to the general public for their preferences on how this should be achieved.

From the Cabinet Office’s Website

“We want to hear from everyone – citizens, businesses, public services themselves, and other interest groups – on how we can best embed a culture of openness and transparency in our public services.”

 

Francis Maude, quoted from the paper

Our proposed approach is, fundamentally, about creating both „pull‟ (a right to data) and „push‟ (a presumption of publication). With these forces, we will begin to embed openness and transparency in how we run government. This consultation seeks your views on these ideas.

 

 Participants from the general public are invited to voice their opinions on the following topics:

  • how we might enhance a ‘right to data’, establishing stronger rights for individuals, businesses and other actors to obtain data from public service providers
  • how to set transparency standards that enforce this right to data
  • how public service providers might be held to account for delivering open data
  • how we might ensure collection and publication of the most useful data
  • how we might make the internal workings of government and the public sector more open
  • how far there is a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of open data.

More details on how to respond can be found below:

Send a written response to:

Open Data Consultation,
Transparency Team,
Efficiency and Reform Group,
Cabinet Office,
1 Horse Guards Road,
London SW1A 2HQ

Closing date for submissions is 27th October 2011

See also

Posted in Government, Legal, News, Open Government Data, Open Knowledge Definition, Policy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Montevideo: proud of our data

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lucy Chambers

The following post is by Guillermo Moncecchi of Intendencia de Montevideo in Uruguay.

Here, in Montevideo, we are proud of our data. The Intendencia de Montevideo drives the economic, social and cultural life of the city, producing data. Lots of data. The government has spent years developing its information services, almost all government processes produce digital data. High quality data: we need it to accomplish our government tasks. As we said, we are proud of them: we have high precision cartography, including every street and every address; we have birth, death and marriage data in the city; we have digitized the placement of libraries, polyclinics, city landmarks, light points… we need them for our work. And, as we do a good work, all these data are accurate and are continuously updated.

As we are proud of our data, a day came when we ask ourselves: why not let others use them? We discussed the idea and decided to embrace the open data principles, removing barriers to information access: we decided that our data should be on the public domain. The city Mayor approved the idea and wrote a resolution stating the open data approach: if it is public, it is open. We then started an open data portal and published the first data sets. From then, we have been continuously working on updating the portal. We listen to people asking for data. We try to satisfy them. Moreover, we are trying to include an open data version of our information as a mandatory product of every software we develop, including the open data idea in the software development cycle.

Yes, we lost some money: before open data, we charged individuals and institutions for the access to our cartography base. Today, an application using OpenStreetMap uses the same cartography we use for our daily work. That is: the best cartography available for Montevideo. For free. That means better services for people in Montevideo. We have eased data exchange with other public institutions: want some data? Just go to the site and get it. Not available? Ok, wait a couple of days and look again… you’ll get the data, and everybody will. It’s public, it’s open. We are about to publish our accounting data: where does my money come from, where does my money go. Digitally, in open formats. For everybody. That is how we think about transparency.

We want to build community. We want our data to be used, because we are responsible for them. People have started using our data: in our portal, we have linked applications buil using our data. People have found mistakes within our data: we corrected them. We are not afraid of errors: we want to solve them.

Going to http://datos.gub.uy we are working with Agesic (the Electronic Government and Information Society Agency of the Uruguayan government), trying to aid in the development of the Uruguayan open data portal. The Uruguayan state has information access laws, but wants more: if it is public is open. We want to help with our data and our experience.

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The Public Domain Review has a new website!

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Jonathan Gray

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

As part of our work to open up the wealth of cultural works which have entered the public domain, earlier this year we launched the Public Domain Review.

Adam Green, the Public Domain Review‘s wonderful Editor, has been hard at work over the past few weeks and the project now has a beautiful new website which you can find here:

In addition to weekly articles about interesting or obscure public domain works, there are now curated collections of texts, images, audio and film material – hand-picked from various online sources.

If you’re interested in receiving the Public Domain Review you can sign up to receive it in your inbox. If you like the project, you can also become a supporter.

Posted in Bibliographic, Free Culture, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, Texts, WG Public Domain, Working Groups | Leave a comment

Update: Text Camp: 13th August 2011

Posted on August 8, 2011 by James Harriman-Smith

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s first ever Text Camp will be taking place this Saturday 13th August, thanks to JISC offering us the use of their meeting rooms in London.

Details

  • Where? Brettenham House, 9 Savoy Street, WC2E 7EG, London. – Meet outside ‘The Savoy Tup’ Pub, Savoy Street, at 10am to be guided to the venue.
  • When? Saturday 13th August, 10am – 6pm
  • What?A gathering for all those interested in the relation between technology and literature, with a specal focus on the creation of open knowledge.
  • More details: http://wiki.openliterature.net/Text_Camp_2011
  • Order (free) tickets: http://textcamp2011.eventbrite.com/
  • Twitter: #tcamp11

Hope you can make it!

Posted in Bibliographic, Events, OKF Projects, Open Shakespeare, Texts, Workshop | Leave a comment

DataPatterns.org: let’s collect some tricks for data wrangling!

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Rufus Pollock

[Friedrich Lindenberg], data wrangler and member of OKF Germany, advocates for the creation of Data Patterns book to complement the existing Open Data Manual.

How do you scrape a massive online archive? How do you fix a broken CSV file? How do you normalize entity names in a large collection of records?

There is a lot of practical skill in handling newly opened data, and the implicit promise of the open data movement is that we will help more people to access and re-use data. And while it would be desirable to be able to offer simple web-based tools for data wrangling, the truth is that what’s required is often a wild mix of web tools, desktop and command-line tools and programming skills.

So what we need is the other half of the Open Data Manual.

datapatterns.org will be a collaborative attempt to collect specific tips on how to code, wrangle and hack your way through messy data. The site will not be end-all of data literacy, but rather adopt a focussed point of view:

  • We try to provide methods that are immediately useful for coders, data journalists, researchers etc. If it doesn’t solve a data acquisition, cleanup or use problem, it can probably wait a bit.
  • Assume basic knowledge of python programming and web technologies. There are many ways to learn this, and we’d probably have a hard time trumping Zed Shaw.
  • Provide opinionated advice: it’s impossible to give a comprehensive overview of all tools, concerns or strategies relating to data and knowledge management. While its certainly interesting to discuss pros and cons of various technologies, its not always useful in practice. datapatterns.org will pick sides, and follow them through.
  • Link out. There’s no reason not to provide contextualized links instead of explaining things ourselves whereever possible.

So how will we create this? Luckily, we have at least two sources of information about data wrangling: the excellent questions on getthedata.org and our own attempts at making sense of data, e.g. in the OpenSpending project. Using these two sources of both questions and answers will probably mean we’ll start off with a slightly odd set of issues, but as with all OKF projects the answer is: bring your own! Either post questions to getthedata.org or write a chapter and commit it to the datapatterns repository on github.

Posted in Ideas, OKF Projects, Open Data Manual | 1 Comment

Introducing a new list just for open data on companies

Posted on August 1, 2011 by countculture

The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data

One of the key types of data that affects all our lives in a multitude of ways is that on companies and corporate entities. As companies have changed from being single entities to multifaceted, multi-jurisdiction webs understood by few people even within the company, open data is the only way we can map these entities and their relationships with the rest of the world.

And yet, despite it being mostly collected by governments for a statutory purpose, until recently there’s been very little open company data about. That’s rapidly changing thanks in part to OpenSpending and OpenCorporates, and other open data projects such as FarmSubsidy.org.

OpenCorporates [disclosure: I'm the co-founder and CEO] is quickly creating one of those key building blocks necessary to understand the place of companies in our lives – a URL/URI for every company in the world, with now over 20 million companies and nearly 30 jurisdictions.

OKF’s OpenSpending too has made great progress in mapping payments by governments to companies, building a platform that extends the original Where Does My Money Go, and now can include government spending of pretty much any type.

But still there’s a long way to go, and a lot of battles to be won, and a lot of knowledge that’s incomplete or missing, from finding the company registry for a given country to understanding company structures. Hence, the launch of a mailing list just about open company data: open-companies.

So if you’ve got questions about open data of companies, want to access it, or have expertise in understanding the structure, rules and accounts of companies, we’d love you to join this mailing list. So get on over to http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-companies, sign up, and let’s get chatting about how to solve the main problems around open company data.

Chris

Posted in News, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Spending | 1 Comment

OpenSpending seeks Spending Cartographers: Register Now!

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Lucy Chambers

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending at the Open Knowledge Foundation

The OpenSpending team is currently looking for volunteers for a crack-team of ‘spending cartographers’ to guide people with datasets through the OpenSpending loading process and to help them make the most of their data once it is loaded.

Interested in data-wrangling with spending data? Are you a journalist, researcher, involved with an NGO or an active member of civil society and would like to be one of the first to get hands-on with newly released spending data and dig down into its depths to unearth where the money goes?

Qualifications

No prior experience of the system required – we will provide the training and the loading process is really easy!

Time Commitment

  • Initial training – less than one hour.
  • Then you can volunteer to help out as many or as few people as you wish (Approx – 1hr per dataset, doable in bitesize chunks)

How it works

People who are interested in getting their data into OpenSpending usually contact us via the mailing-list. As the OpenSpending development team is quite small, it can sometimes take us quite a while to get back to people and help them through the process, so we need people who can seize the opportunity to get hands-on with the data as soon as it is presented to maximise all that OpenSpending has to offer!

This will involve:

  • Proactively responding to simple requests for help from people from your chosen area on the wdmmg-mailing list
  • Becoming the ‘point person’ for your area

Register

We are ideally looking for at least one cartographer for each of the areas Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East, North America, South America (and Antarctica – if someone can get the data!).

To apply, simply fill in your details on the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

(Initial training sessions will start at the end of the week, so please register your interest as soon as possible!)

Further info

For any questions at all about what the position will involve, please don’t hesitate to contact lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org.

Posted in Open Spending | Leave a comment

OpenCorporates hits 20 million companies, an open data milestone

Posted on August 1, 2011 by countculture

The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data

Less than eight months ago, OpenCorporates : The Open Database Of The Corporate World launched with the rather ambitious goal of creating a URL for every company in the world. Five months later, it had already reached 10 million companies. And now, barely 3 months after that, it has doubled that to over 20 million companies.

In that time, OpenCorporates has:

OpenSpending is already using OpenCorporates‘s Google Refine reconciliation service, and using the resultant open URIs OpenCorporates to identify the recipients of UK government spending, and we expect this collaboration to get even closer as OpenCorporates and OpenSpending add more data, and more countries.

Not made for a self-funded micro-startup (and, of course, the open data community, without which it wouldn’t have been possible).

So join us in celebrating this milestone, and help us make sure the biggest and best database of company information in the world is an openly licensed one by tweeting about OpenCorporates, +1′ing us, liking us on Facebook, and above all linking to us.

Posted in Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Spending | Leave a comment

FragDenStaat.de: OKF Deutschland launches new German FOI portal

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Friedrich Lindenberg

The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg and Stefan Wehrmeyer from OKF Deutschland.

Today the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland is launching a new Freedom of Information (FOI) portal called “Frag den Staat”. The new site enables citizens, journalists and researchers to request information from over 830 federal agencies and institutions across Germany. Requests can be tracked on the site, creating a public archive of official documents.

Like many other European countries, Germany has had FOI legislation in place on a federal level since 2006, but many states are still missing such laws. The use of requests is not wide-spread even amongst journalists, however, and when it is attempted information is often withheld through bureaucratic tricks.

The new site is part of an ongoing discussion involving many civil society organisations, officials and the data privay and freedom of information commissioners of both Bund and Länder on how to promote the use of this useful legislation and to make its outcome more transparent.

Germany’s FOI laws are also up for a review, with exciting proposals already published by Greenpeace Germany and the Green Party. Another interesting development is Germany’s smallest state, Bremen, in which FOI legislation now mandates the preemptive publication of many official documents on the web.

With a broad alliance of organisations, including Access Info Europe, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informationsfreiheit e.V., Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union, Deutscher Journalisten-Verband e.V., Digitale Gesellschaft e.V., Legal Leaks, Mehr Demokratie e.V., netzwerk recherche e.V., n-ost Netzwerk für Osteuropa-Berichterstattung e.V., Open Data Network e.V. and Transparency International Deutschland e.V supporting the platform, we hope that FragDenStaat.de, too, may set some signs in this debate.

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