What is EuroHack?
EuroHack is a data journalism workshop and competition on EU spending. It is a satellite event of the biggest open government data conference to date, the Open Government Data Camp 2011. EuroHack is the second in a series of EJC/OKF data journalism workshops. You can read more about the first one here.

The event consists of two parts:

• EuroHack – the competition: What would you do with EU data if you had a data team for one day?
• EuroHack – the workshop: Tips, tools and tricks from experts, journalists and developers, helping to tackle EU spending.

Date
19 October 2011

Location
Soho Factory, Warsaw, Poland

Capacity
Max. 4 teams of 3-4 individuals for EuroHack – the competition and max. 20 participants for EuroHack – the workshop. Both the competition and the workshop are aimed at aspiring data journalists, journalists, open data specialists, developers, designers, students and others who have an interest in EU spending. There is no participation fee but the attendees are expected to arrange and cover their own transportation and accommodation.

For one day in Warsaw, Poland, journalists, programmers and designers will work together in teams of three or four to produce applications and investigations involving EU data and visualisations.

How it works
We provide you with a set of resources (databases and tools) on EU spending and related issues such as lobbying, which you are free to add on to.

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? Etc.

Who can participate?
If you are a journalist, programmer or designer, you are welcome to join. You may 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
A total of three awards will be given:

• Best Visualisation/Application
• Best Story
• The Public’s Choice

The winners of the ‘Best Visualisation/Application’ and ‘Best Story’ categories will be selected by a jury of data journalism experts including, Alan McLean (New York Times), EU data journalist Caelainn Barr,  and Marie Coussin (OWNI). For ‘The Public’s Choice’ category we will analyse the overall impact and amount of ‘noise’ that was made on Twitter and Facebook. The three winning teams will present their projects in the afternoon session of day two (21 October) 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.

In the workshop participants will learn from data journalists and data experts about how to get started with data journalism and specifically with data-driven reporting on EU spending. More specifically participants will learn how to find a story buried deep in the data and how to present it to their readers in an interactive and exciting format.

Workshop sessions:

• Introduction to data journalism and numeracy with data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril
• Introduction to scraping with Friedrich Lindenberg (the Open Knowledge Foundation) and Aidan McGuire (ScraperWiki)
• Introduction to Google Refine with Chris Taggart (Open Corporates)

If you’re up for an exciting day of learning new skills and digging into investigations to uncover hidden local stories in EU data, fill in this registration form. Please specify which of the two parts you would like to participate in: ‘EuroHack – the workshop’ or ‘EuroHack – the competition’. There is a limited number of seats. The extended registration deadline is 14 October.

The event hashtag is #EuroHack.

If you are interested in keeping in touch with developments in this area, you may wish to subscribe to the joint EJC/OKF mailing list on data-driven-journalism, and follow us on Twitter (hashtag #ddj) and Facebook.

Special thanks to data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril for his support in organising this event.