Idea Lab

The School of Data Journalism: Europe's Biggest Data Journalism Event

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The International Journalism Festival will take place April 24-27 in Perugia, Italy. We are excited to announce that the School of Data Journalism will be held for the second time at the festival. The workshop will be run by the School of Data team at the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre (EJC) with the support of the international journalism festival. The school is organized by DataDrivenJournalism.net at the European Journalism Centre. Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free. So what is there to look forward to? There will be a data journalism...

• March 22, 2013
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How to Embed Open Spending Visualizations In Your Own Website

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Spending platform is a hive of activity and packed full of colorful displays of spending and budgets from all over the world. Its aim is to help track government and corporate financial transactions across the world and present them in useful and engaging forms. For some time now, users have been able to upload any of their own spending to the platform and make a range of visualizations, but now you can embed any of the visualizations on your own website. This means you can have the full interactive display on your site. How to...

• March 20, 2013
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Spending Stories, Open Spending Are Moving Beyond Visualizations

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

2013 is going to be a big year for the spending stories project. In 2012, as we explained in more detail on our blog, we improved usability of our platform for spending data and developed stronger community ties around the world. Now we're primed to roll out some really empowering resources for the open spending community based on our experiences so far. Here's a look at what to expect in 2013. badge of approval To build on our reputation as a trusted source of financial data we will introduce badges that show for each dataset uploaded that it has been...

• March 4, 2013
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An Open Call for Ideas: How Would You Use OpenSpending's Data Calendar?

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the new year just a week away, it's the time of year when you might be thinking about the calenders you use and wondering how they could work better for you. Just over a month ago, the OpenSpending team floated the idea of an open spending calendar. The idea was to monitor some key open spending data sets -- the ones that require work to get the story and that show where government money is going. Journalists can select which data sets they're interested in, and the calender will alert them when the data is due be released. When...

• December 26, 2012
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Follow the Money: A Spending Stories Guide for Journalists

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

History is littered with awards and accolades for those tenacious journalists who have dutifully discovered money that was spent on something it shouldn't have been. Evidence of spending is often the ultimate proof of wrongdoing. These stories have ranged from presidential campaigns spending money on surveillance to Members of Parliament dipping into the public purse for their own benefit, with many variations in between. These days, governments are keen to be transparent with their spending. But is this enough to drive out the corruption that so frequently comes with power? By being smart about government spending data, journalists could answer...

• December 13, 2012
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How OpenSpending Is Getting the Story Out of the Data

by Lisa Evans
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At OpenSpending we really want to make it easy and fun for journalists to write great stories with data. But what can we do to help? There are already tons of ways for journalists to find newsworthy data. For example, in the U.K. there are daily email alerts for government data releases and even calendars pointing to upcoming releases months in advance, not to mention the maps that lead a journalist straight to data about a place. Clearly there's no reason for a journalist to be short of data or receive it too late -- when journalism is all about...

• November 9, 2012
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