[okfn-discuss] Event Reminder: Open Interests Europe: 24-25 November in London

Fri Nov 23 23:43:52 UTC 2012

Dear all,

Please join us for the Open Interests Europe Hackathon starting tomorrow:

*Where*: Google Campus Cafe, 4-5 Bonhill Street, London
*When*: November, 24 & 25 2012, 10am - 7pm

The event is sold out (80 attendees), but due to last minute cancellations
we are able to offer a couple of more places. Please drop me a short email
if you plan to attend, but have not managed to obtain a ticket yet.

Check details  and links on the event page:
http://okfnlabs.org/events/hackdays/lobbying.html

*Challenge 1: Lobby Transparency*

Within any political process there are many interests wanting to be heard -
companies, trade unions, NGOs - and Brussels is no exception. Corporate
Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe and LobbyControl have begun
to data-mine the lobby registers of the European Commission and of the
Parliament to find out who the lobbyists are, what they want and how much
they are investing. You will have the exclusive opportunity to work with
this data before it is made public in their upcoming portal. What can you
do with this data?

*Group leader: *Erik Wesselius is one of the co-founders of Corporate
Europe Observatory. In the past few years, Erik has focused on issues
related to lobbying transparency and regulation as well as EU economic
governance. In 2005, Erik was active in the Dutch campaign for a "No"
against the EU Constitution.

*Challenge 2: Fish Subsidies*

Subsidies paid to owners of fishing vessels and others working in the
fishing industry under the European Union’s common fisheries policy amount
to approximately €1 billion a year. EU Transparency gathered data relating
to payments and recipients of fisheries subsidies in every EU member state
from multiple sources, from European Commission databases to member state
government databases and inter-governmental fishery organizations such as
ICCAT. What can you do with this data?

*Group leader: *Jack Thurston is policy analyst, activist, writer and
broadcaster. He is co-founder of FarmSubsidy.org, winner of a Freedom of
Information Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

*Challenge 3: Tender Information and Procurement*

Each year governments of EU member states spend between 9 and 26 per cent
of GDP on private contracting. Private contracts on public services such as
infrastructure or health care are recorded in the European tender register.
Opented.org has scraped, parsed and released procurement data on 700,000
contracts from 2006 to 2011. Join us for a deep dig into this bulk of
procurement data. We expect investigative stories on no-bid contracts,
government outsourcing trends and what companies benefitted from the Greek
public construction boom before the crisis.

*Group leader:* Anders Pedersen, is a data journalist and co-founder of
OpenTED.org. He is the winner of the Nordic Newshacker and a Robert Bosch
Stiftung Journalism Fellow.

We would be serving tea, fruits and lunch over the weekend. Winning teams
will get their hands of the Data Journalism Handbook, Amazon vouchers and
T-Shirts.

Looking forward to your participation!

-- 
Velichka Dimitrova
Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org | http://openeconomics.net
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