 Hi everyone. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Luisa and I work at accessing for Europe Which is an NGO dedicated to promoting and defending the right of access to information in Europe and today I'm going to talk about how a crowdsourced freedom of information campaign improved transparency in the European Union It all started here for those of you who are not familiar with these faces. These are the European Commissioners They're sort of the ministers of the European Union There's 28 of them one for each of the EU member states one for each area of work of the European Union and 2014 as part of the work access info was doing on transparency of public spending. We realized that The public could not know how much were they spending when they travel and we thought that this information was important because we're talking about public funds being spent by high-level public officials in the exercise of their public functions so Transparency for us was essential first for accountability, but also to be able to monitor and to scrutinize How the EU is spending its money? So at access info we set out on a mission to make the EU Commissioners travel expenses transparent Now I realized that the title of this presentation is sort of a spoiler alert meaning that yes we managed to achieve transparency and that yes the key to this achievement was a crowdsourced freedom of information campaign But what I'm going to talk about today is first how we got there So how we built on this campaign. I'm going to talk about the campaign itself and about what happened next so when we first realized at access info that The travel expenses of the Commissioners were not available our first instinct of course was to ask for them to request them We want to ask the u.org which is an online Portal to submit freedom of information requests to your institutions It uses the a laveteli software created by my society and the portal is run by by access info and by my society So in May 2014 we submitted the first freedom of information request asking for the expenses of EU Commissioners and we got this which is the total amount For each of the years for 2012 and 13 for all the Commissioners now for us This didn't really work because it's not a level of detail enough that would allow true scrutiny and true accountability so in 2015 In October we decided to ask again making it clear that we were interested in the mission expenses For each of the Commissioners for each of their missions and we got this Which again is the total per year although this time it is breaking down for each of the Commissioners But still this wasn't allowing true scrutiny because the numbers were too large So we tried a third time Making it really really clear that we wanted the information per mission per commissioner And this time we got this which is the mission expenses that Commissioners have to hand in one day Once they are done with their mission stating how much they spent But if we look closely we will realize that the key information That we're looking for which is the name of the Commissioner the dates in which they're traveling and the places to which they were traveling to are blanked out And this definitely didn't look like accountability to us nor scrutiny nor anything So we gave it a thought a taxes info and we said okay well if they're going to blank out the names and we really want to know who's spending how much money What we can do is to spread out requests among team members each one of them tackling a specific Commissioner and that way if they blank out the name at least we will know who the mission expense Corresponds to and I think the Commission knew or figured out the game we're playing at and finally released the information So everything that was previously blanked out was now available Meaning that we could now know which Commissioner was traveling where in which dates and spending how much and of course We were thrilled to get this Documents released that had took us three years of work And we were so happy that we thought well if we have managed to achieve transparency for a certain amount of missions Why not take it to another level and try to get transparency for a whole year of missions for all commissioners? And we thought we would do it by a freedom of information request campaign I'd like to explain a bit of what is actually a freedom of information request campaign The idea was born in Germany By our friends at the open knowledge Foundation Germany they thought of the system where they would make it really really easy for people to file requests and Therefore encourage them to file them massively to put pressure on the government or the institution to open up So they made this campaign where they would ask the German Parliament with the Bundestag For their scientific reports they make created a system where people could file Request in one click they invited everyone to file a lot of requests and through the system They managed to achieve disclosure of thousands of scientific reports the parliament was holding so we thought this was a great idea and also it fit quite well into the Situation we were in at the start of 2016 which was that first we had achieved the president of disclosure So we had once gained access to the mission expenses and second that what had really worked for us was teamwork So fragmenting the into various requests the whole of the information. We were interested in so we thought we would create freedom of information request campaign to obtain the mission expenses for all 28 commissioners for the whole of 2016 so we set out to work the first step was to write the requests We did so using the aleve telly pre-written request feature which allows you to write a request in a single link and So once you click on that link which contains the request it will take you to the request in us They you already written ready to file The way we thought we would organize the campaign was to break 2016 into two months period so January February 2016 March April and Per commissioner, so the way we would organize The requests would be like this. This is the actual Excel table that we use with the period that Could be requestable and with a list of the 28 commissioners and each of those would be the pre-written request in a single link The second step was of course to create a website from which the Public could take part in the campaign and could file the requests We thought of making it as simple as possible So we would have a little introduction explaining the details of the campaign and then Five easy steps in which you could take part in the campaign and file a request And then we replicated the table that we saw before with a list of all commissioners with Little photographs and then all the periods that could be requested and each of those buttons that say request We'll take you to the pre-written request that we formulated easy earlier Straight to us they use so that each could each request and each time period could be filed The third step was of course to acknowledge our limitations because sadly Technology could not do absolutely everything for us And the first obstacle that we became aware of is that we would I mean the request feature Wouldn't stop people from filing the same request twice and we wanted to avoid duplications So the system that we thought of is that we would have during the campaign one member of the team Monitoring all requests that were going to be filed during the campaign and that person would do so from inside of the Telesystem using the listing of FRI requests. So every time someone submitted a request it would appear there Then we use the most analogical way possible which is to duplicate the table in the website in a whiteboard and With the same kind of structure So every time the person monitoring the listing of FRI requests saw that a request had been filed That person would make a check in the whiteboard and in the meantime a second person was editing live the website So when the person at the website saw that a request had been filed They would look inside the HTML for that request They would take up the link and they will substitute the request button by requested So that the next person going into the campaign page would so that that request had been filed already And they would have to file a whole different request And then we also prepare to spread the word because of course this was to be a very public campaign So we created a whole lot of communications materials of graphics of Visualizations of gifts that would invite people to participate. So for example, we made This little gift of the president of the commission traveling around in his red yet So that you would see it on Twitter and you would like to know how much did he spent on his little travel Finally we thought of a very clear demand that would be at the core of our message So we had clear that transparency was key to accountability and that it was key to enable monetary monitoring of public spending So our ultimate ultimate goal and what we thought that should happen was that the commission should have this data proactively published so that True monitoring and scrutiny of public spending would be possible So after all these preparations that took in total two months of work We were we were ready to go and on the 26th of January of 2017. We launched the campaign Inviting everyone we knew Inviting friends family members people who had never filed a freedom of information request before Academics journalists activists everyone to file a request and to help us make you commissioners travel expenses Transparent now it took total of 48 hours to get all requests filed So it took 120 citizens from around the European Union to file 168 requests in a little less than two days Now as some of you might already imagine the European Commission did not take all that well our campaign They were not happy And they refused to register and process all of the requests that had been filed And by doing so they violated EU transparency rules which obliged them to process all these requests Their main argument was that going through all these requests and answering them all would take first too much time and Second at this proportionate amount of effort which of course we thought was not a legitimate argument and of course our answer was well instead of Going one by one. Why don't you just publish the data proactively in bulk, but they didn't want to do it So in our response to this reaction we went collective again we invited all the Requestors that had taken part in the campaign to submit with us a complaint to the European ombudsman About the Commission's reaction to our campaign and the Commission's violations of the EU transparency rule so in the summer of 2017 access info and more than 50 other Requestors that had taken part in the campaign presented this complaint Now the Commission in response to this came up with what they called a unilateral fair solution Which would be they wouldn't Still they wouldn't Process all the requests, but what they offered to do was to disclose a selected time period of all the 2016 requests Appeared that they would decide on of course we didn't think this was a fair solution We didn't think this was a solution at all. We wanted all requests processed, but they went ahead anyway and They disclosed the travel expenses for January and February of 2016 for all the commissioners now We were not happy with the solution But then we thought okay well now that we have a teeny tiny bit of the information requested Why don't we take this opportunity to make a point on why it's really important to have this information Transparent and how it helps for accountability and to scrutinize spending of public funds so we took these two months worth of expenses and we started working with an investigative journalist at news outlet knack, which is based in Belgium and This investigative journalist did a wonderful job of data crunching and in August 2018 He published his investigation on how the EU spends funds in travel about the types of mission the type of spending and about the campaign itself and I guess that it wasn't only us and knack seeing the public interest in having this data Transparent because in a matter of 48 hours since knack published this article This story was replicated and made the headlines of more than 20 media outlets all around Europe Which forced also the commission to Answer some uncomfortable questions in press briefing about not only how the EU was spending its money but also why they were trying so hard to keep the rest of the expenses secret and I guess the media pressure really got to them because in September of 2017 The European Commission announced that as part of the reforms they were doing to their code of code of conduct They would include the obligation to make transparent Sorry Almost There we go They would include for the sake of accountability and for the sake of transparency the obligation to start proactively Publishing the travel expenses of all commissioners and update them every two months This change became effective in February 2018 and from now on you can find in the European Commission's website the information about For each of the commissioners about their missions and how much they spent on travel accommodation daily allowances miscellaneous costs And even a bit of context on why there were in such mission Maybe some links to press coverage and PRs published by the Commission etc Of course, the system is not perfect It can't always be and one of the problems is that this information is a bit difficult to find inside the website of the Commission But please don't worry about it because at access info we produce that gift that guides you through the European Commission website until you find Where the travel expenses are hidden So this was a Very exciting campaign for access info and we had great fun. It was also a lot of work We had never done this kind of campaign before and we learned a lot and there are four key lessons that we would like to share to you That we would like to share with you today in case you would like to do a campaign like this or to Adapt it somehow and the first lesson would be to prepare and prepare and prepare as I said previously it took us Two months worth of preparation for a campaign that would last 48 hours You will need to test everything to try to anticipate everything to try to Figure out what will the technical limitations would be and the more you prepare the smoother It will run once you launch the campaign The second one would be to have a clear demand that keeps you going and that guides your campaign To just something that sums up what you're doing why it's important and What do you actually want to achieve so that you can build a solid narrative? The third recommendation would be to work collectively to try to bring in as many people as you can from the most diverse backgrounds as possible Bringing people from academia bringing people from journalists and people who have never worked with you before Also because if we're working on behalf of the public interest having the public as the core of our work makes our demands stronger and legitimizes our work and Fourth but not least be ready to think laterally because unfortunately Things will not always go as planned. You might face technical difficulties. You might may find nasty reactions from institutions And not everything can be solved via the campaign itself So be ready to explore other campaigning techniques such as litigation such as working with the media such as collecting Signatures anything that will keep your campaign going Until you achieve what you were said to achieve and That's about it. Thank you very much for your attention