This post is by Liliana Bounegru, of the European Journalism Centre, Lucy Chambers of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Nicolas Kayser-Bril, data journalist.
Together, they are organising a data journalism pre-conference workshop and competition in Warsaw, 19 October, at the Open Government Data Camp This is the second in the series of EJC/OKF data-journalism workshops and you can read more about the first here
The workshop will have two streams:
- EuroHack – the competition: What would you do with EU data if you had a data team for one day?
- EuroHack – the workshop: tips, tools & tricks from experts, journalists and developers, helping to tackle EU spending
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What is EuroHack – the competition?
What would you do with EU data if you had a data team for one day? For one day in a Open Government Data camp pre-conference event in Warsaw, Poland, journalists, programmers and designers will work together in teams of three to four to produce applications and investigations involving EU data and visualizations.
How it works
We provide you with a set of resources, databases and tools, on EU spending and related issues such as lobbing, to which you are free to add your own.
We then ask teams of hacks and hackers to produce the best projects including stories, applications, and visualisations from EU data (e.g. lobbying, spending) in one day.
The projects could approach questions such as: Which local companies and which national public bodies receive EU funding? (How) can spending data be connected with lobbying interests?
Who can participate?
If you are a journalist, programmer or designer you are welcome to register as a team or as an individual. If you register as an individual we will help you find the right team. If you feel like taking part in this hackathon but don’t have journalistic or coding skills, don’t worry! We’ll make sure to match you with the right people.
The winners
Three awards will be given: ‘Best Visualization/Application’, ‘Best Story’ and ‘The Public’s Choice’. The winners of ‘Best Visualization/Application’ and ‘Best Story’ will be selected by a jury of data journalism experts including Alan McLean (New York Times), Caelainn Barr, EU data journalist and Marie Coussin (OWNI). For ‘The Public’s Choice’ category we will look at how loud the crowd cheered on Twitter and Facebook. The three winning teams will present their projects in the afternoon session of day two at the Open Government Data camp. The winning projects will be featured on datadrivenjournalism.net, the hub for data journalism resources on the web and on OWNI.eu, an innovative digital journalism website which won the world-famous Online Journalism Award in 2010.
What is EuroHack – the workshop?
In this workshop participants will learn from data journalists and data experts how to get started with data journalism and specifically with data-driven reporting on EU spending. More specifically you’ll learn how to find a story buried deep into the data and how to present it to your readers in an interactive and exciting format.
Some of planned sessions include:
Introduction to data journalism and numeracy with data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril,
Introduction to scraping with Friedrich Lindenberg (OKF)
Introduction to Google Refine with Chris Taggart of Open Corporates.
How to register
If you’re up for an exciting day of learning new skills and digging into investigations to uncover hidden stories, fill in this registration form. Please specify which of the two streams you would like to participate in: EuroHack – the workshop or EuroHack – the competition.
There are a limited number of seats. To secure one please register before 12 October.
In the coming weeks we will finalise the details of the event so keep an eye on future posts on this topic.
The hashtag for this event will be: #EuroHack
Lucy is a free range "tech-translator", blogging about her work at http://techtohuman.com/.
Formerly, Lucy worked for Open Knowledge leading School of Data, co-editing the Data Journalism Handbook and coordinating the OpenSpending community.
