Utrecht, 19 September 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

On 8 and 9 September the EJC organized a workshop for journalists on data driven journalism, focussing on EU budget and spending data in Utrecht, Netherlands. With general introductions on the first day, both in terms of the available data, as well as the available tools, the second day was dedicated to actually working with the data by the participants themselves.

As a kick-off Ron Korver, press officer at the EU Parliament explained the way the EU budget is structured and what type of questions you could answer with the budget. He also brought the data along (as shown in the picture).

Friedrich Lindenberg (OpenSpending.org / Open Knowledge Foundation), Chris Taggart (OpenCorporates.com) and EU datajournalist Caelainn Barr then went on to explain the various sources of EU spending and budget data, and the way various tools (such as Google Refine, Needlebase, and Scraperwiki) can be used.

After that it was time for the journalists present to try using the tools themselves on the available data, and get a feeling for how you can find possible stories in the data.

A full report of the workshop can be found on the Data Driven Journalism recently relaunched website.