[open-government] Data-Driven Journalism Workshop on EU Spending

[Pennisi Aline]

Hi

I saw that a Data-Driven Journalism Workshop on EU Spending: Tools & Techniques was held in Utrecht, 8th-9th September. 
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/08/09/data-driven-journalism-workshop-on-eu-spending-tools-techniques-utrecht-8th-9th-september/#sthash.fyRjr45Y.dpuf 

I was wondering whether someone in this list participated and can give me some feedback on how it work out and what was produced.

The reason is I'm thinking of organizing something similar in Italy, where a large chunk of data on single projects financed by EU structural funds and specific national funds is available thanks to the open data initiative Open Coesione: http://www.opencoesione.gov.it/ .

OpenCoesione actually refers both to open data catalogues produced by the administrations with a role in coordinating development policies in Italy and a specific application built on those catalogues, by mashing-up various data sources. The web portal www.opencoesione.gov.it is the application. It presents a subset of the data available in the open data catalogues to citizens facilitating their access to basic information of which investment projects are being financed, which are completed, how much money they cost, who is involved and receives the resources, where the projects intervene. By learning what EU Regional Policy and Italian development funds are doing in your home town, we hope you can boost implementation, by providing feedback on the actual state-of-affairs on site or on how the project is useful (or not) within your local community. You can get a full description of the project and the data in English here: http://www.opencoesione.gov.it/progetto/en/  and http://www.opencoesione.gov.it/faq/en/  .

The debate on how EU structural funds are been used by Member countries seems rich mainly abroad: in Italy to present data I think there has not been much interest and exploration on the contents of this huge open data operation and the connected civic monitoring initiative Monithon http://www.monithon.it/ , where people can report on what they see and learn about the projects that have been financed. There has been news coverage on the OpenCoesione portal but mainly commenting on the transparency aspects (and not so much actually looking into the data or using it). There also are a number of researchers and other administrations using the data for their own internal purposes, but little in linking information on the projects to other data and little on investigating the use of the money or who it goes to.

 Among the reasons for this I think we are facing:
- little demand for this kind of detailed data and lack of a civil society mobilized on the specific themes of EU regional policies (most people we have meet in different context don't really have a specific question to "ask" to this data)
- little knowledge in general on public finance and how governments work
- little capacity in analyzing the large amounts of data among journalists or other parties who could use the data for their professional purposes
- the general idea that the data in itself should be telling you a story instead of you using the data (and other information sources to tell a story)
- little incentive to face these issues on the demand side (because if you do it it's only on a voluntary basis, so you have to be strongly motivated)

This situation may be specific to Italy. Since there has been some effort put forth by the administration opening the data to promote its use, I'm interested in general in learning about workshops or other kinds of initiatives on EU structural funds that are being successful in having people used the data.

Thanks!

Aline