Health has been a main global focus in the last months, and many journalists had to jump at warp speed into a complex field of investigative reporting. The corona crisis forced journalists worldwide to get on speed with medical jargon and a perfect storm of stats and models in a rather confusing news environment.

Dataharvest Digital is here to help! In the second week the theme is Public health, and with the support of experienced medical reporters and scientists we’ll give you the tools to understand how to independently assess the evidence, analyze government policies, spot inaccuracies thus avoid pitfalls, and dig deeper on tenders and procurements.

Training will be interlaced with what we know, based on the best available evidence, on Covid-19. And will provide hints for brand new investigations in the health sector. The week is organized and moderated by Italien-Swiss investigative and health reporter Serena Tinari.

See the program

Register for Dataharvest Digital

In April 2019 Dutch Platform Authentieke Journalistiek (PAJ) and Follow the Money started the “Shell Papers”: a joint research project into the ties between the Dutch government and Royal Dutch Shell.

At the start of the project PAJ filed a total of 17 FOI requests demanding copies of all Shell-related documents from nine ministries, three provinces and five municipalities. PAJ asked the governing bodies to disclose all their documents related to Shell—the country’s largest multinational—from the past fourteen years.

The journalists developed an innovative digital tool to engage the readers and put pressure on the government  during tough negotiations with the Dutch government. At Dataharvest Digital,  Bas van Beek and Roger Vleugels focus on the use of strategy within politically sensitive FOI procedures.

Bas van Beek, what’s the most interesting point of your presentation?

“Even the most seasoned FOI users are experiencing ever more elaborate legal obstructions from government institutions to stop them from gaining access to sensitive government documents. But instead of countering this on a purely legal basis, journalists can use public transparency as a strategic asset.”

What are you yourself looking forward to bring home from the conference?

“Learn new and exciting ways of how to engage and make the audience part of FOI procedures.”

Dataharvest Digital has 4 weeks of Investigative method sessions. The FOI theme week begins on September 22.

By Benedikt Hebeisen

When we decided to turn Dataharvest into an online conference, we had to face a lot of new questions. One of the these questions was which technical tools we would need, and after some time of research and a lot of discussions we decided to use BigBlueButton and edudip.

Many of us deal with sensitive topics, material and sources from day to day. WIth Dataharvest being a conference about investigative journalism it is important to use safe, secure and privacy-friendly tools whenever possible. When we were looking for software for our online conference we made it a priority to use open source software where possible and to have our own infrastructure with full control of the data.

Of course there might have been easier ways such as just putting streams on Youtube – which many of the online conferences do. But Dataharvest has always been a place of networking, discussions, meeting people so we need online formats that allow us to interact with each other.

Others do this by using Zoom. Nearly everyone has used Zoom in the past months, but there have also been also a lot of discussions about the data privacy of the software. In July, Berlin’s commissioner for data protection published an review of video conferencing services which covered the legal and technical aspects – most of the reviewed tools failed to be be GDPR compliant.

We started researching online conference tools, had a lot of discussions, learned from others (thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge!) and tested different tools. In the end, we decided to use the web conferencing system BigBlueButton for Dataharvest Digital. The software is widely used in schools and universities and has many features which meet our needs: It has interactive workshops rooms where we can have presentations and show videos, a digital whiteboard, and the possibility for participants to interact with each other via chat or video. BigBlueButton is open source software which runs on our own encrypted server (kindly hosted by ColloCall).

But BigBlueButton has limitations, sessions with more than 100, 150 participants should be avoided, so we decided to add the commercial tool edudip for the larger sessions. Edudip is run and hosted within the EU and complies with GDPR. The system was also used by Netzwerk Recherche for their annual conference which was also organised a an online conference.

Both, BigBlueButton and edudip run from the browser, it is not necessary to install additional software, and they work also on mobile devices. We’ll add more technical information on how to use the tools and best practices both for speakers and participants in the next days.

If you’re dealing with online conferences and you’re interested in hearing more from our research just drop us a mail – we’re happy to share our experiences.

More than half of the 2011 participants on the roof of the conference building. Most are still Dataharvest regulars. Among the faces are (front row) Stefan Wehrmeyer, Mar Cabra, Jan Gunnar Furuly, (middle row) Delphine Reuter, Nils Mulvad, Stanimir Vaglenov, Staffan Dahllöf, Miranda Patrucic, Margus Järv, (back row) Smári McCarthy, Friedrich Lindenberg, Anders Pedersen, Per Anders Johansen, Jack Thurston, Tommy Kaas, Brigitte Alfter, Lars-Marten Nagel and John Bones.

Dataharvest – isn’t that a strange name for a journalism conference? Why not the “Arena conference” or something equally obvious? Well, there is a reason – of course.

It all began in 2009 when a small group of journalists and data developers from around Europe got together in the project farmsubsidy.org, where they compiled and compared data about the beneficiaries of the EU’s generous farm subsidies. They formed a network that worked for better transparency of the EU farm subsidies – and met again the year after to harvest the new data.

By 2011, the meeting was opened to other investigative and data journalists and data developers, and the conference began to take its current form (at least when there is no COVID-19) moving from the Farmsubsidy.org project to the Fonds Pascal Decroos/Journalismfund.

35 journalists came to the first open conference – all in the field of European, cross-border collaborative, investigative and data journalism. The working atmosphere from the early years was maintained as the number of participants kept growing. In this atmosphere, many large and important investigations have been hatched over coffee at Dataharvest.

By 2018, there were almost 500 participants. And over the years, the team behind experimented with the fact that title event was becoming the biggest European Investigative Journalism Conference. So should it be Dataharvest & EIJC or any combination of the two or only the Dataharvest – or only the European Investigative Journalism Conference?

Now run by Arena and despite the fine abbreviation of EIJC, the Dataharvest name stuck. “Are you coming to Dataharvest?” or “See you at Dataharvest!” were the words everybody used to talk about the conference. So we embrace it. These are our roots: we came from cooperation across borders and a fight for transparency in Europe about farming, still a hot topic of European politics. Today our reach is much wider, and we dig down into new areas every year to create journalistic networks – from algorithms to climate. But Dataharvest it is. For the time being.