 I work at the Open Knowledge Foundation, specifically at Hreddenstadt, which is the FOI specialized project within the Open Knowledge Foundation. We run the site Hreddenstadt, the DEA, which is a sister site of the Eleventh Halley ones. And we just to give you a bit of an idea of the kind of team we are, which might be relevant for what we're going to talk in terms of campaigning. We're a team at the moment of around 20 people, which is quite recent. We're at record at how big we are. But we are a multidisciplinary team, which means we are campaigners, we are lawyers, we're techies, we're researchers as well. So, and we have a team of investigative journalists and we all work with each other and all of these profiles fit into what we do in terms of campaigning and sort of the approaches that we have at collaboration with other organizations and how we campaign around the FOI and for FOI. So I'm gonna share my screen for presentation. Yes, here we are. Hope everyone can see it, but we did test it before. So it should be okay. And basically what I'm gonna talk about is just quickly basically some of the main principles or ideas that we have when we approach campaigning at Rectenstadt. And then I thought maybe the most useful thing would be to run through some of the examples of work, projects, collaborations we've had where we've used FOI in our campaigning. And then hopefully that can serve as ideas, as inspiration or can just trigger some questions for discussion later. But basically the way we approach our campaigning usually is seeing freedom of information as an instrument that can help advance the work of others, which means the work of other NGOs, the work of other groups, but also just in general to help advance movements and causes that we're keen on. So using freedom of information to help advance the movement for the climate or the movement for human rights or anti-corruption and so on. And this perspective basically means that our campaigning work is mostly to the extent that it's possible collaborative, which means that we always tend to work with a partner that is specialized in the area that we're working on. So a human rights organization, a climate group, a litigation group that takes cases around a particular area. And we always tend to partner up with these sort of actors for our campaigning work because they're experts basically in how they can use the information and how this information is most useful to them. And we just help them with the knowledge that we have around FYI and around how can this serve whatever work they're doing. This just to be clear is what we try and what we do for most of the cases, but it's not always possible. Today I will work, sorry, I will talk mainly about examples through collaboration, but just to be clear, sometimes it's just not possible to find a partner organization or there's no obvious partner that we can find around a certain topic. So sometimes we really do these sort of campaigning projects or campaigns ourselves and then eventually we might find someone to partner with, we might just have to do it alone. It really depends. But this is what we strive for in most cases and I think actually the most successful work that we've done and the most rewarding work that we've done is through collaboration and through cooperation. And so that's really important to us. And in this sense also we really try to enhance versatility in the sense of freedom of information is a tool that can serve multiple purposes. And I'm sure many of us do it in our work. You can use it for research, you can use it for campaigning, for litigation, for organizing and we try to, when we seek collaboration with other actors, we try to utilize it in all of these ways to just show the extent of versatility that freedom of information can offer. So basically what we achieve through this, I mean a basic part is relationship building with other organizations, but also usually just within a movement capacity building as well, meaning that we don't seek to create dependency on us as freedom of information actors, but usually part of the broader strategy as well is teaching other organizations, other actors to use FYI on themselves and make it theirs there. So that we don't have to be the actor that they always have to come to in order to incorporate freedom of information into their work. By working with us, we also build capacity within other organizations and other partners so that they can just incorporate this in an actual way into their work from then on and start using it on their own more and more. And then finally, this also means for us movement building not only within other movements, but within freedom of information as well. And this is just a concept for us that means that like there's usually this distinction between campaigning for freedom of information. So to advance freedom of information and then using freedom of information as a tool for campaigning. And for us, actually there's not really so much a distinction because when we use FYI as a tool for campaigning, we're also campaigning for freedom of information. We're showcasing the value at its most. We're showcasing how useful it is, how grand it is and basically how you can integrate it into your work and it can become a tool at your service. So for us, integrating FYI into other organizations campaigning means campaigning for FYI. So that's also how we see this sort of collaboration as movement building for freedom of information as well. So I'll go just through some examples very briefly because I also tend to speak a lot and I lose track of time, but I'll try to be brief. Maybe then you can like wave at me like this if I just go on too long. But basically I'll do this distinction between proactive approach when it comes to building an FYI-based campaign and then a reactive approach by proactive approach. What I just mean is that when we entering to contact with an organization or a group we build the FYI element in their work by design. So it's there from the very beginning and examples could be for instance, a request campaign where we provide the infrastructure where we have pre-written FYI requests that can be followed with just one click. And we've had a lot of collaborations with different organizations from a lot of different sort of civil society movements throughout the years. This one for instance happened with Food Watch which is an organization that works around food quality and also consumer rights regarding with food and access to food. And they were very interested in the food reports of restaurants in all of Germany. So these are health reports. Health authorities go to a restaurant, they evaluate the health conditions and they create a report. So these are requestable documents. So we collaborated with them so that they could get their base which is composed of tens of thousands of people to file requests just for any sort of food report from the restaurant that you usually eat at from something in your neighborhood, new restaurants, something like this. And that resulted in thousands of documents being released around this and Food Watch sort of incorporating this technique to involve their base and also of course to just have a database of food reports that are now available and very useful if you would just wanna pick a restaurant in your area to have lunch anyway. A different type of format of cooperation can be litigation of course. We are currently in a lawsuit with the Sea Rescue Organization, SeaWatch. And they, we've been working together for quite a long time and a lot of the work that they do is of course advocacy and campaigning around safe passage in the Central Mediterranean and trying to understand a bit what is preventing all of this. So we collaborated with them on a freedom of information lawsuit to gain more transparency around the situation in the Central Mediterranean. So this lawsuit, it's ongoing. SeaWatch filed it, we're a cooperation partner and that's a way also in which SeaWatch is incorporating freedom of information little by little in their work. And a lawsuit is also a great campaigning tool of course. So it helps also for them to emphasize how transparency is actually preventing compliance with human rights when it comes to migration and border control in the EU. Other types of corporations, journalistic work as well. We have ongoing corporations with TV show in Germany which is a political satire. I don't know if people are familiar with John Oliver in the US but it's the German John Oliver. So it's that sort of comedy but politics as well. It has a good couple million viewers in Germany and we always cooperate with them where we built investigations using freedom of information and then they make a show out of it and then usually they will publish a website where all of the documents are made available and then all of their viewers come investigate these documents. We've had campaigning stemmed from these documents being made public in some of our collaborations. So it's usually a very useful way for us to showcase the value of FY and then make public to a very large audience. A lot of documents that can be useful from then on. Another possible use for this is advocacy. Of course, there are many organizations doing advocacy at the EU level that struggle with transparency. One of the corporations that we've had quite recently is around, again, border human rights compliance and human rights watch and border forensics who were looking at how the European border and Coast Guard works with the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent boats from arriving to the EU. And a big question for them was whether they could obtain actually the information they need for their monitoring which is a big part of what human rights watch does. So we collaborated with them to file a lot of FY requests and this is a good example also because of course a lot of the information they were interested in was not released because it is quite sensitive but actually this served for them to make the point that actually transparency is part of first of all their demands but also one of the obstacles that we currently have to be able to monitor whether human rights are being complied with or not. So I like this example as well just because it goes to show that you don't always need disclosure in order to have a good corporation and a good campaign but actually prevention of disclosure is quite useful as well as a campaigning tool. And these two organizations have used all of these redacted documents quite a lot to showcase what is the obstacle here and how lack of transparency is actually preventing their work. And then, sorry, just a couple of examples of what the reactive approach would be which is instead of building the FY element by design it would rather be the sort of the opposite. So we obtain or we fail to obtain some documents just through our own investigations request and then we think, okay, so who could benefit from these documents or who could we partner up to make the most of this refusal and then we go to someone or yeah, it happens in a less structured way, let's say. But that can be quite successful as well. So another idea of how we've incorporated FY into a campaign there's, I mean, all around Europe you will have these petition sites. This is compact, which is in Germany but there's usually one for each member states and actually they're all coordinated between them. So if you're working on any European issue it could be the case that you can establish a corporation with one of them and then this becomes relevant for all of the national campaign sites as well. So here we were doing a campaign around Frontex and how different member states contribute resources to Frontex. And of course, this is relevant to all member states. So we're working with all of the different national sites and we're using FY also to map different negotiation stages within these contributions so that they can actually launch the petition coordinated within negotiation moments to have a greater impact. So that's a way in which we're incorporating the tool. Again, litigation is a good reactive way as well. In this case, it's a communication, sort of a case before the International Criminal Court around the EU's role in border policies and we had this big, big database of documents that we've obtained throughout the years and of course everything we obtain we make public and we just got in touch with the ECCHR which is a litigation organization doing litigation for human rights and we knew they were working on an ECCT case and they were looking for some evidence so we worked together with them to identify some relevant documents that could help their piece in the ICC case. So that's also sort of a way in which this has helped this important case. And then finally, the last example I wanted to give is around movement building and organizing and this is also, I think a very nice way into which maybe we just cooperate a bit less but in this case, for instance, we, our work around FOI and all of the research that we publish and the documents were useful and we ended up cooperating quite a bit into, for instance, a referendum that was organized in Switzerland for the first time around Switzerland's involvement within Frontex, so it was quite a groundbreaking experience and a lot of our research and documents served form up the information campaign and the campaigning and the organizing sort of communication strategy around this referendum. So that's also maybe a different collaboration that we can seek and just to quickly end on just some lessons learned that we've come so far just because also this is always sort of work in progress and we keep testing approaches and we keep learning also from our own experiences so this is what we've learned for the time being. Again, the importance of versatility there's many, many ways in which FOI can serve a movement and if we think of the composition of the movement it's just very broad and very diverse. You have, again, academia, journalists, grassroots organizations, established organizations and I think for us what's been really key in integrating freedom of information within a movement is just being able to be versatile and being able to work with all of the different components of a course and a movement and this has meant that FOI at the end of the day becomes a visible campaigning tool just because you're kind of everywhere in a way and you're serving many, many aspects. In that sense, I think it's important also to highlight that in our understanding of campaigning FOI doesn't always have to be the most visible side of the campaign and sometimes it will be for instance if you take a lawsuit around FOI so you litigate for access to information that will make FOI the center of the campaign but sometimes it's not and it's just a little element within a campaign or a little element within a piece of research and that's okay too actually and that is part of the versatility and I think for us what's important rather than to have FOI at the center of every single collaboration it's more about making multiple and different and constant contributions to different actors and about just being there and building it up little by little and sometimes FOI will shine as a solo actor and sometimes it will not and that's still valuable and then yes, about this reactive proactive approach just to say that it also means that sometimes the question when you have documents or you have a freedom of information request the question is how or whose work can this serve and sometimes it's about approaching actors proactively or letting people approach you and asking the question how can we advance your work but it's putting the instrumental nature of the right first and thinking of how can this help whoever is approaching you and just saying that I mean, I don't think this is a absolute requisite but I do think that at least in our experience building a profile around a certain topic or just working within a certain topic has been quite useful to come across more collaborations and more diverse collaborations. Again, I don't think this is a prerequisite but for instance, we do work a lot around certain specific topics that are important to us as an organization and as a team I work a lot around climate justice, around migration around far right extremism, around surveillance around topics that we just care about a lot and the more you operate in these areas the more your work is known the more people will see that you've worked with this organization and they will call you up the more contacts you can make so that you can approach these people and say how can our work serve you as well so it's just been very useful for us in this regard and it also means that you get to work with more people and it makes the movement stronger which is at the end of the day, what we want because us alone, we cannot hold the right so we need more people around us that use freedom of information, that care about it and that are ready to defend it. That's it from my side. Thank you so much, Louisa, that was super interesting and has given us a lot of food to thought. I know some people already have questions if you can hold them until after Dubo's presented then we will do a question and answer session altogether. Thank you, Dubo, I'll hand over to you. Thank you, Jan and thank you, Louisa, for an amazing presentation and nice inspirations. I hope you can see my screen. So everyone, hello, my name is Dubo. I am Projects Lead for Civic Tech and Community Building at Foreset which is a CSO based in Tbilisi, Georgia. We specialize in data communications and data storytelling. We also run ASCOG platform on Alawateli's infrastructure and I'm really happy to contribute to this community today by showing you methods that we used for bringing all this open data to real life and causing positive social impact with really, really small resources. So if you also run a platform on Alawateli's infrastructure, chances are high that we started just like you. We knew after working in the field for six years that Civic Tech platforms are not as easy to build as it looks when you scroll it and it's really complicated and we should never build it from scratch. So we discovered Alawateli platform. It was waiting for us to translate and localize it to Georgian language and we did it. As for today's, this is results that we have on the platform over 2,700 requests, 21,000 visitors, more than 700 community members and 177 data stories and investigations created using data from the portal. We consider these numbers success because Georgian population is relatively small and also Georgian democracy is fragile with low culture of civic participation. So how did we come to this? We came to this success by crowdsourcing in data visualizations or you can also call it data storytelling. Of course, the first thing that we wanted when we started doing this platform, as Codio platform was people to actually send requests using the platform and make platform sustainable. But the question was, would that be enough to cause impact having all this data on the platform? Is it enough to put so much effort? Probably no, because even before the project we kept hearing from open data communities that sometimes or most of the times open data is not really used much and it just stays on platforms and on different databases. So we thought, what is a better way to bring all this data to real life than using data storytelling and data journalism because those fields cannot exist without data. So we can give them data and also those fields, people who do this are the ones who reach wide audience with their data stories, articles and visualizations. So that's how we started organizing data visualization competitions. In total, we organized 10 competition and the whole point of our competitions is that participants need to use data from ASCOG platform and make compelling visualizations. If they request information using the platform, they receive bonus points, which means that we are boosting people to use ASCOG or it might be that they don't want to request information but they can use data from ASCOG platform and make visualization. Of course, in our competitions, participants can use other data, secondary data from other sources as well. We actually encourage them to do it but the primary data should come from the ASCOG platform. So 10 competitions in total, our target audience are usually students, designers, data activists, developers. So basically everyone who is passionate about open data and data activities. In total, for these 10 competitions we had 7,000 euros as a prize pool. In total, we had more than 500 participants, 25 winners, 25 published stories and data investigations in media and 137 data stories created. So basically what we did is that we collected hundreds of freedom of information requests by competitions on our platform and also brought these data to real life. So we put two balls in the basket at the same time if that makes sense in English language. Let me show you some of the examples, some of the stories that were developed in the competition, in our competitions. So in this example, one of our participants requested and received data showing that government is giving land for free to Georgian church. We are talking about half a million square meters, a huge numbers. And he received these pretty boring numbers which probably does not make sense until he visualized these numbers with this. He created a really simple interactive website showing all this data with beautiful diagrams and infographics. So if a person saw all this data without these visualizations, most likely it would hurt a person's eyes. But these visualizations were compelling. It sparked massive public discourse and political discourse. People started discussing what the hell is going on, why are they giving our land for free to the church? So it was success story for us. It is the same, okay. So what happened in this story is that participant discovered data on the portal showing that Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs is using Russian AI systems to investigate crime and collect personal data such as fingerprints, such as face recognition systems and these systems were connected to crime. So of course, what the participant did is that she developed data story using this portal with multimedia article which looked something like this. It also sparked massive political discourse. It was not the most peaceful week for us because political parties were having briefings. There were reports on TV channels, cybersecurity experts talking about this and discussing this. And unfortunately by the end of the week, Ministry said that this story that we published was fake. It was ordered and paid by someone which was said because according to their logic, we just published information that they sent to us. So according to their logic, they spread fake news. But well, this is how it's ended and yes, people are still discussing this and we did something really important. This is another example on vaccination of homeless animals and impact it can have in Georgia. This is another example on climate change and how it affects Georgia and our personal lives. After a while, once we collected enough data on the platform and made the portal sustainable, we decided to split competitions into four different directions. The first is student competitions for bringing newbies and new people into data activities and in those competitions, requirements are really low. So you can develop any type of visualizations that just need to use our data and send freedom of information requests. There's also general competitions in order to keep our general community active and engaged. We also developed fellowship programs for high level journalists who produce high quality investigative articles using data from ASCOG, publish these articles on their media outside platforms and which wide out is. And we also started merging data from ASCOG into some different hackathons organized by Borset. We also added community gathering active component to our activities because this data visualization competitions helped us a lot to build community of open data passionates in Tbilisi University. So how to do it in a nutshell, how to organize data visualization competitions. This is our streamlined process that we follow every time we plan a new competition. In the first week, we define format and ask ourselves, should participants request information from the platform or maybe not. It really depends on requirements that we have for competition. Also, you should ask yourself what type of visualizations participants should develop such as infographics, quizzes, multimedia articles, animations. We usually give participants free choice to select whatever format they want to develop. Second stage in the same week usually is to design concept note. Define your target audience what will be semantic challenge for your competition. Sometimes we organize competition around equality issues, sometimes about environment transparency, et cetera. We also define what is the price pool. If we have any, who will be mentors, who will be in the jury to assess visualizations and what will be assessment criteria to determine winners. I will be happy to send you all the templates about assessment criteria if you are interested in it and you can adapt it to your needs. In the second week, we develop outreach materials. We create visual identity which looks something like this that we use for social media outreach. Here you can see how Askogie helped us to partner with so many different organizations. Yeah, so we also develop a blog which describes format of the competition in detail so that people before they register can read this format. I will also send this to you if you are interested. And we also develop social media outreach messages and also registration form. In the second week, we also develop resources for competition participants which can include good examples of data visualizations tools that they can use to create data visualizations, lists of online workshops. This looks like this. I can also send this to you. It includes good examples of visualizations, workshops in English language about data analysis, visualization, design, copywriting and some user friendly tools for data visualization. What happens after that is that we start outreach to recruit as many participants as possible. It can include one-to-one approach. It can include social media posts, sharing this post to different groups, sending newsletter to your communities, press releases to media outlets, invitations to universities. And once you have newly registered participants, it's good to send them these resources that I just showed you so that they don't lose time and they watch workshops and get known with visualization tools. If it's possible, if you have resources for it, you can provide mentorship to competition participants, mentorship in data analysis, design, copywriting, or just give them general advices. And in probably 10th week, you might have present, you will have presentations where participants present their visualizations briefly for five or 10 minutes and the jury determines winners. Competitions do not end here because there's also incubation period. In the next maybe two or three weeks, participants receive winners receive feedback from the jury, from mentors, so that they make their visualizations perfect before it gets published in online media and social media. Competitions will help you a lot to transfer data from portal to real life with multimedia stories, articles, quizzes, animations. It can also help you nudge citizens to use your portal and eventually they will start using your portal without data visualization competitions. And it will also help you build community of open data passionates. You really don't have to be expert in data visualization to make this happen because there are tons of organizations and people. You can partner with them if they have expertise in let's say design or visualization or if you don't want to do it, then you can organize competition in other formats such as analytical articles competition based on data from your portal. If you don't have resources for the prize pool, you can consider offering participants different things such as internships at your partner organization, at your organization, certificates, students love it, tickets to different cool events and any more things. It really is not a single person or two person job a whole team from four set invested in this, especially when we started doing it without having much knowledge about competitions. As you can see, our team includes researchers, illustrators, designers, data journalists. So sometimes it was pro bono work for us but then it really helped us lend new resources and support from different donors to do these competitions. And those who decided to receive mentorship from us to implement competitions, it will not be just me but also these people who will give you advices to implement your project in different stages. That was all, thank you. Wow, thank you so much Chivo. That was super, super interesting as well. So we now have about 15 minutes to do questions and answers. So I think the best way to do this is if anyone's got a question, if you can raise your hand, can we raise our hands here? So I go, hang on a second, I'm used to using Google Meet so I did not think about raising hands. But if you can ping me in the chat, just let us know that you wanna speak so that we're not all trying to speak at once. And then yeah, go ahead, we've got 15 minutes. So until 11 o'clock, we'll do a quick Q and A and then we will have a quick session one, two, four, all after that. Just to confirm, I'm just gonna stop the recording, is that? Yes. Yeah, okay. Thank you. Okay, I can see Helen has a question. So Helen wants the recording.