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Ergebnisse des ersten FamilienLabores

- July 31, 2017 in Uncategorized

Gemeinsam mit dem FEZ-Berlin ludt die Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V. am 16. Juli 2017 zum ersten FamilienLabor Deutschlands ein. Familienmitglieder jeden Alters, technisch Interessierte und weitere Teilnehmende kamen zusammen, um einen Tag lang gemeinsam über die bessere Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf nachzudenken und prototypische Lösungen mit Papier, Apps, Comics, Fotos und kleinen Robotern zu entwickeln. Vorkenntnisse waren nicht erforderlich. Auch Kinder und Jugendliche konnten sich aktiv beteiligen. Nach einem gemeinsamen Frühstück und einer kurzen Begrüßung durch die Bundesfamilienministerin Katarina Barley, führte Dr. Nana Schön in die Thematik ein und berichtete vom vom Coder Dojo Berlin. Anschließend rauchten die Köpfe beim Forscherheft, in dem jede Familie mit vielen Skizzen, Folien und Stickern ihren Alltag überprüfte und Verbesserungspotentiale ausfindig machte. Kleinere Teilnehmer konnten in der Zeit mit kleinen Robotern erforschen, wie diese funktionieren. Nach dem Mittag im Dachrestaurant wurde es aktiv: Die Familien stellten ihre Ideen vor und begannen diese in Form von Papp-Objekten, Papier- und Klickprototypen, Lego-Fotostories und Comics umzusetzen. Die Kids konnten sich derweil weiter mit den Robotern beschäftigten und fingen nun an zusammen ihre Traum-Stadt zu basteln, die von den Robotern bevölkert wurde. Zur Präsentation mit dem FEZ-Leiter Bernd Grospitz konnten die Teilnehmenden nicht nur die fertige Stadt bewundern, sondern unter anderem eine Lego-Fotogeschichte zum Zeitmanagement, ein Display-Würfel als Entscheidungshilfe für gemeinsame Aktivitäten und Apps für lokale Veranstaltungen. Auch dabei war eine App, die mithilfe eines sozialen Netzwerks zur besseren Motivation, das Katzenklo zu säubern verhilft. Wenn das nicht kreativ ist! Alle entstandenen Ideen ansehen.. Alle Fotos ansehen..
Das Projekt entstand in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Design Research Lab und dem Bundesministerium für Familien, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend. Die Workshopmaterialien und -Abläufe werden demnächst öffentlich zur Verfügung gestellt.

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In eigener Sache: Wechsel der Geschäftsführung bei der Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland

- July 30, 2017 in Uncategorized

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Έξι τρόποι για τους πολίτες να διεκδικήσουν την εξουσία πέρα από την κάλπη

- July 29, 2017 in Featured, Featured @en, News, ανοικτή διακυβέρνηση, κοινωνία πολιτών, Νέα

Οι εκλογές είναι βασικά ορόσημα για τη δημοκρατική δέσμευση, και τα δημοψηφίσματα όπως η βρετανική δημοσκόπηση για το Brexit αποτελούν καινοτόμους τρόπους για την άμεση συμμετοχή των πολιτών στη διαδικασία λήψης αποφάσεων. Αλλά η ψήφος παρέχει μόνο μια περιορισμένη γεύση από την ποικιλία των τρόπων με τους οποίους ο πολίτης μπορεί να συμμετέχει στην κυβέρνηση. […]

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Παρουσίαση των εφαρμογών του OpenBudgets.eu στον Δήμο Θεσσαλονίκης

- July 29, 2017 in Featured, Εφαρμογές, Νέα

Την προηγούμενη Τετάρτη, 19 Ιουλίου, πραγματοποιήθηκε στην Αίθουσα Συσκέψεων του Δήμου Θεσσαλονίκης παρουσίαση του έργου OpenBudgets.eu και των εφαρμογών που αναπτύχθηκαν στο πλαίσιο αυτού, ως μέρος χρηματοδοτούμενου προγράμματος του Horizon2020, από το Ίδρυμα Ανοικτής Γνώσης Ελλάδος (OK Greece) και την εταιρεία Intelspace, σε στελέχη του Δήμου από το Γραφείο Ανθεκτικότητας, το Τμήμα Ηλ. Διακυβέρνησης, παρόντος […]

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Data is a Team Sport: One on One with Friedhelm Weinberg

- July 28, 2017 in Capacity Building, Data Blog, documentation, Event report, Fabriders, human rights, research, software development, Team Sport

Data is a Team Sport is our open-research project exploring the data literacy eco-system and how it is evolving in the wake of post-fact, fake news and data-driven confusion.  We are producing a series of videos, blog posts and podcasts based on a series of online conversations we are having with data literacy practitioners. To subscribe to the podcast series, cut and paste the following link into your podcast manager : http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:311573348/sounds.rss or find us in the iTunes Store and Stitcher. Friedhelm Weinberg is the Executive Director of Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), an NGO that supports organisations and individuals to gather, analyse and harness information to promote and protect human rights.  In this conversation we take a look at what it takes to be both a tool developer and a capacity builder, and how the two disciplines can inform and build upon each other.  Some of the main points:
  • The capacity building work needs to come first and inform the tool development.
  • It’s critical that human rights defenders have a clear understanding of what they want to do with the data before they start collecting it.
  • It’s critical for human rights defenders to have their facts straight as this counts the most in international courts of law, and cuts through ‘fake news.’
  • Machine learning has enormous potential in documenting human rights abuses in being able to process large amount of case work.
  • They have been successful in bringing developers in-house by making efforts to get them to better understand how the capacity builders work and also vice-versa.

Specific projects within Huridocs he talked about:

  • Uwazi is an open-source solution for building and sharing document collections
  • The Collaboratory is their knowledge sharing network for practitioners focusing on information management and human rights documentation.

Readings/Resources that are inspiring his work:

View the full online conversation:

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Data is a Team Sport: One on One with Friedhelm Weinberg

- July 28, 2017 in Capacity Building, Data Blog, documentation, Event report, Fabriders, human rights, research, software development, Team Sport

Data is a Team Sport is our open-research project exploring the data literacy eco-system and how it is evolving in the wake of post-fact, fake news and data-driven confusion.  We are producing a series of videos, blog posts and podcasts based on a series of online conversations we are having with data literacy practitioners. To subscribe to the podcast series, cut and paste the following link into your podcast manager : http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:311573348/sounds.rss or find us in the iTunes Store and Stitcher. Friedhelm Weinberg is the Executive Director of Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), an NGO that supports organisations and individuals to gather, analyse and harness information to promote and protect human rights.  In this conversation we take a look at what it takes to be both a tool developer and a capacity builder, and how the two disciplines can inform and build upon each other.  Some of the main points:
  • The capacity building work needs to come first and inform the tool development.
  • It’s critical that human rights defenders have a clear understanding of what they want to do with the data before they start collecting it.
  • It’s critical for human rights defenders to have their facts straight as this counts the most in international courts of law, and cuts through ‘fake news.’
  • Machine learning has enormous potential in documenting human rights abuses in being able to process large amount of case work.
  • They have been successful in bringing developers in-house by making efforts to get them to better understand how the capacity builders work and also vice-versa.

Specific projects within Huridocs he talked about:

  • Uwazi is an open-source solution for building and sharing document collections
  • The Collaboratory is their knowledge sharing network for practitioners focusing on information management and human rights documentation.

Readings/Resources that are inspiring his work:

View the full online conversation:

Flattr this!

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Wikidata Workshop on September 14 in Zurich!

- July 28, 2017 in Allgemein, Daten, event, Zürich

  Are you interested in Wikidata? On September 14, Lea Lacroix, Cristina Sarasua and Rama will run a Wikidata workshop the day before HackZurich starts, at the University of Zurich. They’re going to explain what Wikidata is, and have hands-on sessions to learn how to code for and with Wikidata. Register now or get more information about the event.

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Gastos Abertos divulga relatório do primeiro ciclo do game com líderes regionais

- July 28, 2017 in Dados Abertos, Destaque, Gastos Abertos, orçamento aberto, poder público

Após seis meses de jornada, o Gastos Abertos fechou o primeiro ciclo do game com líderes regionais. Com objetivo de documentar o que foi construído e a experiência de desenvolver uma tecnologia social nova, a iniciativa lançou o relatório “Primeiro Ciclo do Gastos Abertos 2016-2017”. “Assim, registramos os aprendizados e fortalecemos o propósito da OKBR em relação ao conhecimento aberto”, disse Thiago Rondon, um dos coordenadores do Gastos Abertos. Ao todo, pessoas de 60 cidades brasileiras participaram do processo. O documento conta detalhes sobre o primeiro ciclo, como os desafios enfrentados, apresenta a metodologia aberta, os resultados e aprendizados. Um dos pontos positivos apontado pelo relatório foi o interesse e o compromisso de muitos cidadãos em mudar a realidade de suas cidades com o uso de dados e que a tecnologia precisa estar acessível a eles. Segundo Thiago, o primeiro ciclo foi de muito aprendizado. “Focamos na metodologia e escutamos muito os líderes para buscar uma maneira de construir um ciclo de atividades que possa ter mais impacto como dinâmica, e que ela possa ser recorrente. Agora, nosso foco é usar essa experiência no próximo ciclo para implementar um chatbot no Facebook que possa acompanhar e dar apoio aos líderes nas missões”, contou. Abaixo, escolha o melhor formato para você visualizar o relatório “Primeiro Ciclo do Gastos Abertos 2016-2017”: 

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< p>Para Márcia Aparecida Reis, líder regional do Gastos Abertos e moradora da cidade de Três Corações (MG), a jornada foi de grande aprendizado. “O projeto é fantástico e extremamente importante para o controle social. Uma sociedade informada deixa de ser formada apenas por eleitores. Eles se tornam, além de eleitores, fiscais do seu próprio imposto. Espero poder contribuir em outros projetos do Gastos Abertos”, disse. Um dos grandes destaques da iniciativa aconteceu em maio deste ano. O Prefeito de Balneário Camboriú (SC), Fabrício Oliveira, assinou a Carta Compromisso de Transparência do Gastos Abertos. O responsável pela articulação da iniciativa foi Gabriel Pimentel, líder local voluntário da Open Knowledge Brasil. A ação faz parte da terceira missão do ciclo 1 do Gastos Abertos. “Não imaginei que iria aprender tanto. O Projeto me mostrou que combinar a tecnologia com o serviço público é um dos caminhos que podemos apostar na melhoria da qualidade de vida da sociedade. Dados abertos mais do que informarem quanto e para onde os recursos estão indo, eles são ótima fonte de indicadores e diagnóstico da situação do município. Foi muito gratificante para mim, saber que estou contribuindo para a melhora das estruturas cívicas da cidade”, conta Gabriel.

Depoimento

Confira, abaixo, o relato completo da Márcia Aparecida Reis, líder regional do Gastos Abertos, moradora da cidade de Três Corações (MG). Conheci o Gastos Abertos via Facebook. Logo em seguida, fiz a minha inscrição com muita facilidade. Iniciamos a primeira missão informando como era o portal da transparência em nosso município. Já na segunda missão, naveguei pelo Portal da Transparência da Prefeitura de Três Corações e detectei o que não estava sendo lançado nele. Assim, foi gerado um pedido de informação juntamente com a Prefeitura. Foi muito fácil gerar o pedido. Porém, não foi possível efetuá-lo pelo Portal. Por isso, fui ao Gabinete do Prefeito e protocolei o pedido. Recebemos retorno após 19 dias. Infelizmente, já na terceira missão, não tive sucesso. Era para que o Prefeito assinasse a Carta Compromisso – mesmo esclarecendo todo o trabalho realizado e a importância da Carta Compromisso, o mesmo me disse que não queria saber de transparência. Fato que me frustrou bastante. Porém, não podemos desistir. Finalizando a quarta missão, pontuei os servidores do Controle Interno que cooperaram com o nosso trabalho e colocaram o portal da transparência para funcionar – apesar disso, há cerca de 15 dias todos foram exonerados! Lamentável! Dessa experiência, consegui apresentar o projeto ao Centro de Apoio Operacional das Promotorias de Justiça de Defesa do Patrimônio Público de Minas Gerais (CAOPP), que está analisando a possibilidade de desenvolvermos uma campanha com o Ministério Público de Minas Gerais (MPMG). Também apresentei o Projeto ao Ministro do Tribunal de Contas da União João Augusto Ribeiro Nardes. Agora aguardo a data de disponibilidade do mesmo para que venha a Três Corações para um evento sobre Governança e Fiscalização. Além disso, fui convidada pela Sra. Patrícia Coordenadora da Ouvidoria do Tribunal de Contas de Minas Gerais a apresentar o trabalho que nós realizamos. É possível que o TCE-MG abrace a nossa causa. A reunião está agendada para o início de agosto/2017 na sede deles. Como líder regional do Gastos Abertos, espero captar mais voluntários para nossa próxima fase. O Projeto é fantástico e extremamente importante para o controle social. Uma sociedade informada deixa de ser formada apenas por eleitores. Eles se tornam, além de eleitores, fiscais do seu próprio imposto. Espero poder contribuir em outros projetos do Gastos Abertos. Agradeço a agilidade, seriedade, transparência, comprometimento e dedicação por parte dos diretores Ariel, Lucas e Thiago. Quanto aos webinários, eles foram fundamentais para interagirmos com outros líderes do Brasil. A criação do grupo no WhatsApp também foi muito bom. Assim, nós pudemos trocar experiências uns com os outros quando havia alguma dúvida. Em relação à Carta Compromisso, informo que não desisti. Vou insistir até que o Prefeito e os vereadores assinem. Obrigada! Márcia Aparecida Reis Líder Regional – Gastos Abertos Flattr this!

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Out From Behind This Mask

- July 27, 2017 in Art & Illustrations, Culture & History, death, death masks, Featured Articles, laurence hutton, laurence hutton collection, masks, memorial, Philosophy, plaster, punctum, roland barthes, walt whitman

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids — D. Graham Burnett on meditations conjured by a visit to the death masks of the Laurence Hutton Collection.

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Open Data for Tax Justice design sprint: building a pilot database of public country-by-country reporting

- July 27, 2017 in Open Knowledge

Tax justice advocates, global campaigners and open data specialists came together this week from across the world to work with Open Knowledge International on the first stages of creating a pilot country-by-country reporting database. Such a database may enable to understand the activities of multinational corporations and uncover potential tax avoidance schemes.  This design sprint event was part of our Open Data for Tax Justice project to create a global network of people and organisations using open data to improve advocacy, journalism and public policy around tax justice in line with our mission to empower civil society organisations to use open data to improve people’s lives. In this post my colleague Serah Rono and I share our experiences and learnings from the sprint.    What is country-by-country reporting?

Image: Financial Transparency Coalition

Country-by-country reporting (CBCR) is a transparency mechanism which requires multinational corporations to publish information about their economic activities in all of the countries where they operate. This includes information on the taxes they pay, the number of people they employ and the profits they report. in order  Publishing this information canto bring to light structures or techniques multinational corporationsthey might be using to avoid paying tax in certain jurisdictions by shifting their profits or activities elsewhere.

In February 2017, Open Knowledge International published a white paper co-authored by Alex Cobham, Jonathan Gray and Richard Murphy which examined the prospects for creating a global public database on the tax contributions and economic activities of multinational companies as measured by CBCR. The authors found that such a public database was possible and concluded that a pilot database could be created by bringing together the best existing source of public CBCR information – disclosures made by European Union banking institutions in line with the Capital Requirements Directive IV (CRD IV) passed in 2013.  The aim of our design sprint was to take the first steps towards the creation of this pilot database.   What did we achieve?

From left to right: Tim Davies (Open Data Services), Jonathan Gray (University of Bath/Public Data Lab), Tommaso Faccio (University of Nottingham/BEPS Monitoring Group), Oliver Pearce (Oxfam GB), Elena Gaita (Transparency International EU), Dorcas Mensah (University of Edinburgh/Tax Justice Network – Africa) and Serah Rono (Open Knowledge International). Photo: Stephen Abbott Pugh

A design sprint is intended to be a short and sharp process bringing together a multidisciplinary team in order to quickly prototype and iterate on a technical product.

On Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th July 2017, Open Knowledge International convened a team of tax justice, advocacy, research and open data experts at Friends House in London to work alongside developers and a developer advocate from our product team. This followed three days of pre-sprint planning and work on the part of our developers. All the outputs of this event are public on Google Drive, Github and hackmd.io. To understand more from those who had knowledge of trying to find and understand CRD IV data, we heard expert presentations from George Turner of Tax Justice Network on the scale of international tax avoidance, Jason Braganza of Tax Justice Network – Africa and Financial Transparency Coalition on why developing countries need public CBCR (see report for more details) and Oliver Pearce of Oxfam Great Britain on the lessons learned from using CRD IV data for the Opening the vaults and Following the money reports. These were followed by a presentation from Adam Kariv and Vitor Baptista of Open Knowledge International on how they would be reusing open-source tech products developed for our Open Spending and OpenTrials projects to help with Open Data for Tax Justice. Next we discussed the problems and challenges the attendees had experienced when trying to access or use public CBCR information before proposing solutions to these issues. This lead into a conversation about the precise questions and hypotheses which attendees would like to be able to answer using either CRD IV data or public CBCR data more generally.

From left to right: Georgiana Bere (Open Knowledge International), Adam Kariv (Open Knowledge International), Vitor Baptista (Open Knowledge International).

As quickly as possible, the Open Knowledge International team wanted to give attendees the knowledge and tools they needed to be able to answer these questions. So our developers Georgiana Bere and Vitor Baptista demonstrated how anyone could take unstructured CRD IV information from tables published in the PDF version of banks’ annual reports and follow a process set out on the Github repo for the pilot database to contribute this data into a pipeline created by the Open Knowledge International team. Datapackage-pipelines is a framework – developed as part of the Frictionless Data toolchain – for defining data processing steps to generate self-describing Data Packages. Once attendees had contributed data into the pipeline via Github issues,  Vitor demonstrated how to write queries against this data using Redash in order to get answers to the questions they had posed earlier in the day.   Storytelling with CRD IV data Evidence-based, data-driven storytelling is an increasingly important mechanism used to inform and empower audiences, and encourage them to take action and push for positive change in the communities they live in. So our sprint focus on day two shifted to researching and drafting thematic stories using this data. Discussions around data quality are commonplace in working with open data. George Turner and Oliver Pearce noticed a recurring issue in the available data: the use of hyphens to denote both nil and unrecorded values. The two spent part of the day thinking about ways to highlight the issue and guidelines that can help overcome this challenge so as to avoid incorrect interpretations. Open data from a single source often has gaps so combining it with data from additional sources often helps with verification and to build a stronger narrative around it. In light of this, Elena Gaita, Dorcas Mensa and Jason Braganza narrowed their focus to examine a single organisation to see whether or not this bank changed its policy towards using tax havens following a 2012 investigative exposé by a British newspaper. They achieved this by comparing data from the investigation with the bank’s 2014 CRD IV disclosures. In the coming days, they hope to publish a blogpost detailing their findings on the extent to which the new transparency requirements have changed the bank’s tax behaviour.  

Visual network showing relation between top 50 banks and financial institutions who comply with Capital Requirements Directive IV (CRD IV) and countries in which they report profits. Image: Public Data Lab

To complement these story ideas, we explored visualisation tools which could help draw insights and revelations from the assembled CRD IV data. Visualisations often help to draw attention to aspects of the data that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Oliver Pearce and George Turner studied the exploratory visual network of CRD IV data for the EU’s top 50 banks created by our friends at Density Design and the Public Data Lab (see screengrab above) to learn where banks were recording most profits and losses. Pearce and Turner quickly realised that one bank in particular recorded losses in all but one of its jurisdictions. In just a few minutes, the finding from this visual network sparked their interest and encouraged them to ask more questions. Was the lone profit-recording jurisdiction a tax haven? How did other banks operating in the same jurisdiction fare on the profit/loss scale in the same period? We look forward to reading their findings as soon as they are published.   What happens next? The Open Data for Tax Justice network team are now exploring opportunities for collaborations to collect and process all available CRD IV data via the pipeline and tools developed during our sprint. We are also examining options to resolve some of the data challenges experienced during the sprint like the perceived lack of an established codelist of tax jurisdictions and are searching for a standard exchange rate source which could be used across all recorded payments data. In light of the European Union Parliament’s recent vote in favour of requiring all large multinational corporations to publish public CBCR information as open data, we will be working with advocacy partners to join the ongoing discussion about the “common template” and “open data format” for future public CBCR disclosures which will be mandated by the EU. Having identified extractives industry data as another potential source of public CBCR to connect to our future database, we are also heartened to see the ongoing project between the Natural Resource Governance Institute and Publish What You Pay Canada so will liaise further with the team working on extracting data from these new disclosures. Please email contact@datafortaxjustice.net if you’d like to be added to the project mailing list or want to join the Open Data for Tax Justice network. You can also follow the #OD4TJ hashtag on Twitter for updates.   Thanks to our partners at Open Data for Development, Tax Justice Network, Financial Transparency Coalition and Public Data Lab for the funding and support which made this design sprint possible.               

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