Hackathon of media projects on open financial data "Budget Stories"

We invite you to take part in the budget stories hackathon, which will be held in St. Petersburg this weekend, June 25-26 . Its main goal is to present financial data in a form that is understandable and accessible to ordinary citizens. These may be textual publications, infographics, applications based on information on government budgets, expenditures, procurement, property, and declarations.

Journalists, copywriters, programmers, analysts and designers are invited to participate.
You can register as a team or individually. The work will be led by "mentors", among which are the main experts on open data in Russia and practicing journalists.

Working with government data is always a challenge: a variety of data sources, different formats, non-obvious data structure, not always high quality and unpredictable errors. In the case of financial data, these difficulties are complemented by the need to delve into the economic content of the data, find an interesting idea and figure out how everything is arranged. And there is something to understand, for example:

• analyze subsidies from the federal budget - this is the financing that goes to organizations directly from the federal budget. Subsidies are not published on public procurement sites and are not publicized in the media, although their amounts reach hundreds of millions;
• analyze data on government contracts and compare the prices at which the same goods are purchased in different regions, how often the same roads are repaired , why zero-value contracts are concluded or which organizations purchase from the same companies;
• Understand how the media is funded in Russia , along the way being horrified by how much public funds are spent on them;
• to tell about Russia in numbers, presenting the ratings of the regions in the number of purchased tablets of arbidol, cartridges and vehicles for the heads of city administrations
• write parsers that collect data from resources that have not yet been processed or study the USSR budget .

Participation in the hackathon is free. Participants will be required to have a laptop, a desire to work and study for two days. On the site will be provided free food.
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The hackathon prize fund is 50,000 rubles, and all participants of the Budget Stories will be supported to submit their media project to the BudgetApps contest (September 2016) with a prize fund of 500,000 rubles.

You can register for a hackathon on the website: www.budgetstories.ru , and learn about news and ideas in groups in fb and vk . The hackathon organizers: ANO Infoculture and the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation .