Investigations as a tool to reform politics
Wienk, Zuzana
In Central and Eastern Europe opening government information was not only a logical step in gradual organic development of democracies. It was a radical game changer that shifted the power balance in these communities. Thanks to sharing comparable information as the ruling and economical elite citizen could suddenly become equal partners in dialogue and have gained tools to efficiently influence the public debate in favor of necessary reforms. Open government information became a threat to corrupt and nepotic networks deeply established in post communist societies. Not because they would carry direct evidence of corruption but because they documented favoritism, unfair conditions, manipulations with documents and serious flaws in the processes, law application and financial efficiency. This „evidence" was often sufficient to put a stop to a certain practice or at least demand political and legal consequences. Concrete investigations into political cases with use of newly gained right to information and government data became one of the most influential tools in reforming post-communist societies. Thanks to concrete and understandable stories it introduced societies to new paradigms, ethical and legal standards and brought evidence of destructive influence of corruption on our lives. Right to know and use government data became such an important principle that political representations do no dare to touch it. Post-communist societies paradoxically often enjoy higher legal standards and technological tools in transparency and open government than their western role models. Opening government data also liberated journalists and activists from often risky ways of using traditional sources. Our watchdog NGO - Fair-Play Alliance has been at a forefront of these efforts and investigations. This talk will therefore explore concrete cases from our first-hand experience that have shaken political scene thanks to open information and IT tools and will explore how single cases/instances can lead to deeper reforms and less corruption. It will also analyze the vital prerequisites for efforts to hold governments accountable to avoid failures when replicating an inspiring project in different settings.
 Thank you very much, Sandra. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Susana. And I'm a former journalist myself, who got very frustrated 10 years ago from jumping from one story to another. Plus, I live in a country where bad things are happening. So you find it really, really hard to adhere to this basic journalistic principle not to get involved and remain at a certain distance, because journalism is about reflection. So I decided to found a watchdog organization that used journalistic skills, journalistic analytical investigations, and started to hunt the bad guys. We disclosed concrete cases about their misbehavior, about how they misspent public resources, how they were corrupt, or involved in illicit practices. And we used these concrete examples to drive a public debate to reform politics, to diminish space for corruption, and to just make society better as we hoped we would achieve it. As Mr. Kennedy, I've been also in Berlin, not that I would like to see myself as a piece of pastry, but as this charming mistake, I also come from a country, which is Slovakia, where in 1989, the walls started to crumble and eventually fell down. It was a time where enthusiasm flourished. People celebrated their newly gained freedoms. They celebrated that they could freely vote and elect their own politicians, and they were full of hopes for a better country. While people were celebrating, there were very powerful networks being formed in the background who saw this change especially as a way to gain profit, as a way to see possibilities and opportunities that normal citizens couldn't see at that time. They were able to look up front and they were able to anticipate what would be coming, a large privatization, a large amount of state property that were held by the communist state up till that moment, and they all wanted a piece or a share of this wealth and property. So they formed a very powerful networks, which gave them incredible advantage. They had control over public institutions, they had control over judiciary, they had very close ties to politics, which came with resources, it came with money, and it came with the power to form legislative frameworks and to take decisions in the name of the state. On the other hand, citizens, they didn't even know what was happening. When all these privatization deals were being set up, where all the plans were being formed about how to use gaps in the legislation, how to use context to politics to gain wealth, the citizens were not prepared to be equal partners in the debate. How can you be an equal partner in a debate when you don't even know what is happening? So information and open government in my eyes was really a game changer in a country that I come from because it balances power from the networks, from the powerful networks, little bit on the side of the citizens. When you know what is going on, when you can read documents from public administration, you can see traces and tracks of deals, you can see traces and tracks of relationships, and you can start being a partner in this debate who is much more powerful. The very charming thing about watching the state or working with the state is that public administration is all about bureaucracy. It's so bureaucratized that there are written rules for everything. So public administration really leaves tracks, leaves written tracks in documents because you have very detailed rules, set of rules and legislation for processes like public procurement, privatization, signing a contract with the state, prosecuting somebody, et cetera, et cetera. All these decisions have to follow certain written rules but also have to be written down and stamped. So by studying these documents, you can really discover a lot of stories behind, a lot of human stories with great impact. Corruption, nepotism or clientelism are usually phenomena that also come with rule breaking. It is really hard when you want to give an advantage to a certain person who should win a tender or privatize a property, not to do it without damaging other competitors or not to do it without breaking certain rules. So these are all factors that come in handy for citizens as me who are really trying to watch the state. But the most important challenge for us is really this power as an advantage to certain networks and certain groups. So how do we change it? How can we change it as citizens who don't have that money, who don't have those resources and who often don't have these capacities and don't have institutions, public institutions that are actually working for them but often in countries like Slovakia, the public institutions actually work for these powerful networks. What we discovered as an organization is that it is really, really hard to change politics with giving it good arguments about why the legislation should be better, why the politics should be more transparent and open, why politicians should be held accountable. When you produce research, when you produce good arguments, it is usually very hard to convince politicians because they have a certain advantage that they don't want to give up. They just don't want equality for everyone because suddenly they lose this advantage of getting tenders for themselves, getting privatized property for themselves, influencing judiciary or influencing state institutions. So how do we do that? We have to figure out the way how to change the reality for the players, how to make them feel damaged because only if they feel damaged, if they lose in a certain way in real life, if they feel the effects of their wrongdoings, then they start to change their behavior and they will be much more respectful to the frameworks and to the legislation. And I will show you concrete cases where we succeeded to do so in Slovakia. The second thing we found out is that it's always very important to exert pressure. Without pressure, politicians are not listening and they don't feel a need to propose solutions. So what I really believe is in power of examples, of concrete cases that make or that change talk about corruption from something abstract, something that doesn't touch our daily lives to something very tangible, very concrete. So this is my first story. In 2007, there was a notice board on the first floor of our Ministry of Construction and Development which carried an announcement about a huge tender. This tender was 110 million Euro big. It was a nine-year contract that was supposed to bring contractors this huge piece of business. It was published, the announcement was published behind closed doors and not surprisingly it was awarded to people who were very, very close to one political leader. These people started to fill the contract. They started to get the first money from supposed services that they delivered to the state and nobody knew about it. For a year and a half, nobody knew what was going on. Then journalists published information that this contract was awarded to people closer to a political leader. That it was published only on a notice board with an ministry, so no other competitors on the market knew about such an example, but nothing happened. This report brought no political response, no public response, no pressure whatsoever. So we as an organization decided that it would be very good to look closer into this tender and we used freedom of expression in our country and open data and started to request all the information connected to this tender that we could think of. So we requested contracts from the tender, we requested invoices, we requested proof of delivery, we requested all kinds of other documents that were possible and we decided to publish them online. What you can see here is a piece of story, a new story that was reported about these scandals and on the left side you can see four prototypes of logos that were developed under the contract of this tender. These logos were 33,000 euros each and they were supposed to be produced during 2,188 hours. These companies reported that they were working on these logos. This was only one example of a scandalous money that was requested under the standard from the state by the winning bidders. Another example came with very overpriced commercials in media, trainings that were never delivered or trainings that were attended only by one or two state officers, etc. etc. We produced our own findings. The information, detailed information was also published online as you can see on our website. When you go down, you can read through all invoices and you can open anything that interests you. All this information brought a very big change. Suddenly from the quietness, all the media started to go through these invoices with our help and they started to report daily on the scandal. So politicians suddenly couldn't look to the right or left without having to react to this tender and having to respond to questions of journalists. Very concrete questions about logos, about commercials, etc. etc. So the pressure in the society was slowly building. The tender became a way to talk during the television talk shows. It was made fun of by commentators. It was made fun of by famous people on television. So very soon the whole country knew that something was going on and the politicians had to really respond. Thanks to the analysis of these cases, we also had enough arguments to go to the EU commissioner responsible for EU funding in member states and we could also go to Olaf and present them with a very detailed report on what went wrong. Olaf picked up the case and started their own investigation. European Union exerted another pressure on Slovak political elite and very soon the minister had to resign. The contract was cancelled and European Union refused to cover the money from this tender under EU funding. So there was a very concrete damage that suddenly this powerful political network felt. They were prepared for getting a nine-year contract of 110 million euro to perform such a huge contract. You have to organize really well. You have to set up offshore companies around the world who would help you to wash the money. You have to involve tens and hundreds of people into the operation and suddenly it's gone. Suddenly the business is gone. So they felt the damage. What also this scandal helped was that it empowered citizens and media with concrete open data examples that helped them to set the agenda and to exert pressure on politicians. And because the politicians knew that it wasn't enough only to cancel this concrete tender, they had to come up with solutions and proposals. So what they did is that corruption became one of the main agendas for the next coming elections, parliamentary elections, and the new government who came out of these elections had to also propose some systemic changes into the country. And one of those were that all the contracts closed between private sector and the state will be published from the beginning of 2011. And we really do have a governmental website that publishes every single contract that is signed by the state and private sector. So we will not again find ourselves in such a situation that we will not know of a powerful contract in the background, but we can monitor these contracts when they are being signed and when it's in the early stage of development. You can ask afterwards, okay? So this was an example where such a concrete case produced a very big change in our society and gave power to citizens. But sometimes open data doesn't really carry concrete elements of corruption. It will not provide you with the concrete evidence of who took a certain amount of money from whom and how it was washed through circles of shore havens and etc. But open data is too corruption in my eyes what accounting was to Al Capone. It doesn't produce enough evidence to put somebody to jail, but it often produces enough evidence to see that something is really, really wrong and get the debate going. So sometimes it's really about realization that your ambitions can't be too high and the society can't be changed overnight, that it's a longer process and what is really important is to start to get the debate going on in a country. So I will show you another example when we started to analyze another tender for cleaning the roads in Slovakia and washing the snow. We started to look into different counties and see what companies in these counties proposed. What you see here is two pieces of paper that two companies submitted for two different tenders. Both of these bidders were proposing that they will clean the snow from the roads on two different places and these pieces of paper were supposed to confirm that they really own or that they really rented a mechanism, cars, that will allow them to clean the roads. But when we looked closer and you see the details, this is a detail from the first paper and the detail from the second paper, we found out that the two companies are actually putting the same numbers of car plates. So one company in a city A was saying that it will be cleaning the roads with the same mechanisms as the company B in a completely different city. So this is how they tricked and cheated in the tender. So this piece of evidence wasn't carrying tracks of corruption, but it was enough for us to report this, to get attention of the media and to get another huge tender and contract cancelled by Slovak authorities. So this is an example where open data can really empower you to set the agenda, not to get somebody to jail, but at least you save public resources by having a certain contract cancelled. Open government was, as I said, a huge shift of paradigm in our societies. It happened in legislation, but it happened in the, it didn't happen in the minds of people. So for example, this is an example where we requested information from a register of visitors at the Ministry of Education. We wanted to see who is coming to the ministry and who is visiting ministers. And this was the official answer. We got a photocopy of the front page and the back page of the book and nothing else. So this shows you that open data is a threat to power. They really try to avoid giving you information that is very sensitive. So that's why it's very important to live in a country where you have free judiciary, where you have good appeal mechanisms, and it sometimes really takes years and years to get to the information, but then you win. And as it was proven in our organization, it feels good after five years to have a headline in the newspaper saying that you won a Supreme Court case against the general prosecution or against the Ministry of Finance and etc. And what it helps you with is that next time the Ministry of Finance or the general prosecution will not rely on not getting you the information because they know that you will come around the corner and you will give it back to them. So what is when working with very well established networks who are powerful, it is important to be clever and to save our own time and resources. That's why we started to develop open data tools that would serve us, but also journalists and others. What you can see here is our application, an internet application that matches up data from official registrar of businesses in Slovakia and registrar of public tenders. So you can put in any name of a person, Slovak or whoever else, and the application will check you how many tenders did companies with activity of such a person won in the Slovak state. And I can see you a result of a very powerful oligarch in Slovakia who is known to sponsor one political party. And it is not surprising to find out that his company has received a public tender's worth of 266 million euros without value edit tax. What you can see thanks to the application as well is a concrete position of this person within the company. So you can see if he was a statutory organ, if he was a director or whatever else, it will also allow you to see which concrete institutions in the state donated these companies with or where he won the tenders. And one of the information that is very interesting and you can see it here is that one of his biggest tenders was within an office of the parliament to reconstruct the national heritage castle. And what is more interesting about it is to know when this tender happens. And it was under the government and under the direct leadership of a representative from this political party that the oligarch is known to sponsor. When you are a journalist and you want to dig in these cases a little further, you can go through a very thorough list of these tenders and you can open each one of them and check for conditions of the tender, check for what other bidders were part of this tender, check for the contract and see for yourself. Another tool that we started to build preventively is that we started to file freedom of information requests with very basic questions. We want to see who is getting donations from the state, who is winning tenders in the state, who is getting European Union funding or all kinds of other public support. We also want to know who sponsors politics, who advises politicians, who is in the chairmanship of companies, who is on boards that decide about subsidies, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an application that collects all this information already for more than 10 years. So when you are a journalist and you want to work on a corrupt case, you don't have to file your own freedom of information requests from Ministry of Finance, to the parliament, to government and wait and wait and wait and see a situation when the government or the parliament doesn't give you the information so you have to appeal, you have to go to court, you have to wait for years. But you can click on this website and you can save yourself time. And I can show you one example of this will ring a bell to you, company Siemens. And we can see what is in our application about Siemens. So what you can find here is all the public tenders that Siemens received in Slovakia over the last 10 years. You can go in the chart. You can see civic associations that carry Siemens names. You can see that people who were advising to politics were connected in some way to Siemens. You can see that a basketball club with the name of Siemens is receiving 2% of tax from Slovakia, that it also donates money to Slovak institutions, to Slovak ministries, especially Ministry of Interior. You can also see that it had debts in custom duty. And you can also see that it receives European Union funding for education of their own employees. So when you are an investigative journalist, you just saved couple of months of work receiving this information from the state. And you can proceed and work on your case on your own. So what I would like to stress is that you would like to stress is that when you do this kind of work, use the media. Get attention, set agenda, but also be patient. And don't try to bluntly copy projects from other settings that might not work in your country. Always listen to your own needs, to your own goals, and get inspiration from others. It helped us many times. But first see if the settings in your country wouldn't be actually working against such a project. So don't replicate blindly. And sometimes it is important, especially in countries like Slovakia, to be creative. When you want a certain information from government that you believe it should be there and it's not, you need to find creative ways how to get it when politicians refuse to give it to you. And one of such examples is a project. We believed that asset declarations of high politicians as the president, ministers, members of parliament should be available online. But we were really frustrated with getting to convince the parliament to pass a legislation that would allow us to gather this information. And we didn't get it. So we decided to form our own project. It's called Open Politics. And it contains voluntary asset declarations of politicians, very detailed ones. So they declare what property they have, what depths they have, where do they travel, who do they meet. And they do it just because they want to and just because we exerted enough pressure through the media and through the citizens to request such an information. After a couple of years of this project where it was really small and unwanted at the start, last year we had a prime minister of Slovakia voluntarily being part of the project. We had the speaker of the parliament. We had half of our government and a lot of members of parliament. And what was really interesting to see is that one of the MPs even asked us if he should include a property that he doesn't own officially, not on paper. He owns it behind the scenes through a secret agreement with a different person. And we said, of course, you have to put it in there. You want to be open and transparent. And then I wondered why he asked us. And what I found out is that once they put information up there and they distinguish themselves from others as being transparent and fair, they really fear that the competition would just tell on them that they are not so transparent and they are not such good guys. So he was actually taking a preventive step from being blamed. Thank you very much. Yeah? So I was told that we have space for questions. So thank you, Susanna. And I give you. Hi, my name is Nikol. And maybe I missed it at the beginning, but how do you get the first information about the contract which was only available inside the ministry? So did you have some kind of whistleblowing or something like that? Yes, it was not part of work of our organization, but the first initial information came to a journalist through a visa-blower, through a secret source. So sometimes it is true that you can't avoid using sources. But what I really wanted to highlight is that open data can liberate you from sources. Many times you find really interesting tracks in the open data itself. So when you are a desperate as a journalist, you don't have to turn to sources, but you can really browse through these registers and through the applications. It's true that this concrete initial information came from a source. But what was interesting and I tried to mention as well is that when the first report came out, really nothing happened. So it was a huge case, but for the first month and a half, nothing really happened with it. Thanks. Any other questions, comments? You mentioned that all contracts are transparent on your platform. Are all invoices of the government also are transparent? Yes. Well, there is an official governmental site that has all the contracts and invoices. Well, there was quite a resistance, especially from municipalities in Slovakia who claimed that publishing all the invoices would be too costly for them. So the state had to come with a compromise and it said that to a certain threshold, I think it's 3,000 euros, you can only publish a list of invoices and contracts, but above that you have to also put in a scan or a document in a machine readable format. So there is a governmental site, but we also produce together with transparency international Slovakia our own site that adds up to the functionality and allows us to work with the data a little bit more. Hi, Susanna. I wanted to ask you because I know in Czech Republic the corruption is really widespread. What, do you have a sister agency or Fair Play in Czech Republic? Would you work together because the problems are obviously similar and a lot of the roots? Yes, we were one country, right? So the problems are similar. Well, we don't, but we work with a lot of organisations also in Czech Republic and we were asked sometimes to also spread to Czech Republic, but you have a great organisation in Prague, which is doing good work. I must say that we are a little bit luckier than you. I was on the jury of a journalistic award in Prague this year and I found out that for example, when your media requested certain amount of information from the state, they had to pay a lot of money because the state said that it would cost hours and hours of work of their officers. So they charged, I think, 1000 euros for information about how much money gets certain highly positioned officials within state administration paid, which could never happen in Slovakia. So in a sense, we are lucky because we have a very progressive Freedom of Information Act that allows us to get information basically free of charge. So thanks a lot. Any other questions? Yes. Well, thanks. It's a great project. Did they ever turn up to you physically? What do you do then? Do you have security protection? I must say that I feel also lucky living in Slovakia. We are told to be this peaceful nation who doesn't lead wars. So I must say that I don't know how courageous we would be in settings as Russia or really harsh countries and I really admire everybody who is doing this kind of work there. So we have a lot of verbal harassment from governments. So when we produce our results, we are usually attacked on press conferences and they try to say that we are spies coming from foreign countries being financed by Jewish money of George Shorosh and these kind of powerful people. So the government is usually trying to attack us verbally. We had a couple of incidents where the office was robbed in a very strange way or we had an incident where we locked the door in the night and when we come back in the morning it was unlocked. It was closed but unlocked so it was clear that somebody was inside. So these kind of things happen but not nothing really life threatening and I hope it will stay that way. Who are you funded by? Yes, we are funded by Open Society Foundation which is established by George Shorosh to a big deal with institutional grants. We also receive help from Slovak citizens through 2% of tax which for example in last year brought 70,000 euros which is quite a lot. We also get funding from Slovak companies especially smaller. We also offer our own consultation and training and get paid for it. We get little sources from Slovak foundations, domestic sources but also other international foundations. But it's always open grant competitions so you submit your grant in an open competition that is actually published to everybody else and you get it or you don't.
 Thank you very much, Sandra. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Susana. And I'm a former  journalist myself, who got very frustrated 10 years ago from jumping from one story to  another. Plus, I live in a country where bad things are happening. So you find it really,  really hard to adhere to this basic journalistic principle not to get involved and remain at  a certain distance, because journalism is about reflection. So I decided to found a  watchdog organization that used journalistic skills, journalistic analytical investigations,  and started to hunt the bad guys. We disclosed concrete cases about their misbehavior, about  how they misspent public resources, how they were corrupt, or involved in illicit practices.  And we used these concrete examples to drive a public debate to reform politics, to diminish  space for corruption, and to just make society better as we hoped we would achieve it. As  Mr. Kennedy, I've been also in Berlin, not that I would like to see myself as a piece  of pastry, but as this charming mistake, I also come from a country, which is Slovakia,  where in 1989, the walls started to crumble and eventually fell down. It was a time where  enthusiasm flourished. People celebrated their newly gained freedoms. They celebrated that  they could freely vote and elect their own politicians, and they were full of hopes for  a better country. While people were celebrating, there were very powerful networks being formed  in the background who saw this change especially as a way to gain profit, as a way to see possibilities  and opportunities that normal citizens couldn't see at that time. They were able to look up  front and they were able to anticipate what would be coming, a large privatization, a  large amount of state property that were held by the communist state up till that moment,  and they all wanted a piece or a share of this wealth and property. So they formed a  very powerful networks, which gave them incredible advantage. They had control over public institutions,  they had control over judiciary, they had very close ties to politics, which came with  resources, it came with money, and it came with the power to form legislative frameworks  and to take decisions in the name of the state. On the other hand, citizens, they didn't  even know what was happening. When all these privatization deals were being set up, where  all the plans were being formed about how to use gaps in the legislation, how to use  context to politics to gain wealth, the citizens were not prepared to be equal partners in  the debate. How can you be an equal partner in a debate when you don't even know what  is happening? So information and open government in my eyes was really a game changer in a  country that I come from because it balances power from the networks, from the powerful  networks, little bit on the side of the citizens. When you know what is going on, when you  can read documents from public administration, you can see traces and tracks of deals, you  can see traces and tracks of relationships, and you can start being a partner in this  debate who is much more powerful. The very charming thing about watching the state or  working with the state is that public administration is all about bureaucracy. It's so bureaucratized  that there are written rules for everything. So public administration really leaves tracks,  leaves written tracks in documents because you have very detailed rules, set of rules  and legislation for processes like public procurement, privatization, signing a contract  with the state, prosecuting somebody, et cetera, et cetera. All these decisions have to follow  certain written rules but also have to be written down and stamped. So by studying these  documents, you can really discover a lot of stories behind, a lot of human stories with  great impact. Corruption, nepotism or clientelism are usually phenomena that also come with  rule breaking. It is really hard when you want to give an advantage to a certain person  who should win a tender or privatize a property, not to do it without damaging other competitors  or not to do it without breaking certain rules. So these are all factors that come in handy  for citizens as me who are really trying to watch the state. But the most important challenge  for us is really this power as an advantage to certain networks and certain groups. So  how do we change it? How can we change it as citizens who don't have that money, who  don't have those resources and who often don't have these capacities and don't have institutions,  public institutions that are actually working for them but often in countries like Slovakia,  the public institutions actually work for these powerful networks. What we discovered  as an organization is that it is really, really hard to change politics with giving it good  arguments about why the legislation should be better, why the politics should be more  transparent and open, why politicians should be held accountable. When you produce research,  when you produce good arguments, it is usually very hard to convince politicians because  they have a certain advantage that they don't want to give up. They just don't want equality  for everyone because suddenly they lose this advantage of getting tenders for themselves,  getting privatized property for themselves, influencing judiciary or influencing state  institutions. So how do we do that? We have to figure out the way how to change the reality  for the players, how to make them feel damaged because only if they feel damaged, if they  lose in a certain way in real life, if they feel the effects of their wrongdoings, then  they start to change their behavior and they will be much more respectful to the frameworks  and to the legislation. And I will show you concrete cases where we succeeded to do so  in Slovakia. The second thing we found out is that it's always very important to exert  pressure. Without pressure, politicians are not listening and they don't feel a need to  propose solutions. So what I really believe is in power of examples, of concrete cases  that make or that change talk about corruption from something abstract, something that doesn't  touch our daily lives to something very tangible, very concrete. So this is my first story.  In 2007, there was a notice board on the first floor of our Ministry of Construction and  Development which carried an announcement about a huge tender. This tender was 110 million  Euro big. It was a nine-year contract that was supposed to bring contractors this huge  piece of business. It was published, the announcement was published behind closed doors and not  surprisingly it was awarded to people who were very, very close to one political leader.  These people started to fill the contract. They started to get the first money from supposed  services that they delivered to the state and nobody knew about it. For a year and a  half, nobody knew what was going on. Then journalists published information that this  contract was awarded to people closer to a political leader. That it was published only  on a notice board with an ministry, so no other competitors on the market knew about  such an example, but nothing happened. This report brought no political response, no public  response, no pressure whatsoever. So we as an organization decided that it would be very  good to look closer into this tender and we used freedom of expression in our country  and open data and started to request all the information connected to this tender that we  could think of. So we requested contracts from the tender, we requested invoices, we  requested proof of delivery, we requested all kinds of other documents that were possible  and we decided to publish them online. What you can see here is a piece of story, a new  story that was reported about these scandals and on the left side you can see four prototypes  of logos that were developed under the contract of this tender. These logos were 33,000 euros  each and they were supposed to be produced during 2,188 hours. These companies reported  that they were working on these logos. This was only one example of a scandalous money  that was requested under the standard from the state by the winning bidders. Another  example came with very overpriced commercials in media, trainings that were never delivered  or trainings that were attended only by one or two state officers, etc. etc. We produced  our own findings. The information, detailed information was also published online as you  can see on our website. When you go down, you can read through all invoices and you  can open anything that interests you. All this information brought a very big change.  Suddenly from the quietness, all the media started to go through these invoices with  our help and they started to report daily on the scandal. So politicians suddenly couldn't  look to the right or left without having to react to this tender and having to respond  to questions of journalists. Very concrete questions about logos, about commercials,  etc. etc. So the pressure in the society was slowly building. The tender became a way to  talk during the television talk shows. It was made fun of by commentators. It was made  fun of by famous people on television. So very soon the whole country knew that something  was going on and the politicians had to really respond. Thanks to the analysis of these cases,  we also had enough arguments to go to the EU commissioner responsible for EU funding  in member states and we could also go to Olaf and present them with a very detailed report  on what went wrong. Olaf picked up the case and started their own investigation. European  Union exerted another pressure on Slovak political elite and very soon the minister  had to resign. The contract was cancelled and European Union refused to cover the money  from this tender under EU funding. So there was a very concrete damage that suddenly this  powerful political network felt. They were prepared for getting a nine-year contract  of 110 million euro to perform such a huge contract. You have to organize really well.  You have to set up offshore companies around the world who would help you to wash the money.  You have to involve tens and hundreds of people into the operation and suddenly it's gone.  Suddenly the business is gone. So they felt the damage. What also this scandal helped  was that it empowered citizens and media with concrete open data examples that helped them  to set the agenda and to exert pressure on politicians. And because the politicians knew  that it wasn't enough only to cancel this concrete tender, they had to come up with  solutions and proposals. So what they did is that corruption became one of the main agendas  for the next coming elections, parliamentary elections, and the new government who came  out of these elections had to also propose some systemic changes into the country. And  one of those were that all the contracts closed between private sector and the state will  be published from the beginning of 2011. And we really do have a governmental website  that publishes every single contract that is signed by the state and private sector. So  we will not again find ourselves in such a situation that we will not know of a powerful  contract in the background, but we can monitor these contracts when they are being signed  and when it's in the early stage of development. You can ask afterwards, okay? So this was  an example where such a concrete case produced a very big change in our society and gave  power to citizens. But sometimes open data doesn't really carry concrete elements of  corruption. It will not provide you with the concrete evidence of who took a certain amount  of money from whom and how it was washed through circles of shore havens and etc. But open  data is too corruption in my eyes what accounting was to Al Capone. It doesn't produce enough  evidence to put somebody to jail, but it often produces enough evidence to see that something  is really, really wrong and get the debate going. So sometimes it's really about realization  that your ambitions can't be too high and the society can't be changed overnight, that  it's a longer process and what is really important is to start to get the debate going on in  a country. So I will show you another example when we started to analyze another tender  for cleaning the roads in Slovakia and washing the snow. We started to look into different  counties and see what companies in these counties proposed. What you see here is two pieces of  paper that two companies submitted for two different tenders. Both of these bidders were  proposing that they will clean the snow from the roads on two different places and these  pieces of paper were supposed to confirm that they really own or that they really rented  a mechanism, cars, that will allow them to clean the roads. But when we looked closer  and you see the details, this is a detail from the first paper and the detail from the  second paper, we found out that the two companies are actually putting the same numbers of car  plates. So one company in a city A was saying that it will be cleaning the roads with the  same mechanisms as the company B in a completely different city. So this is how they tricked  and cheated in the tender. So this piece of evidence wasn't carrying tracks of corruption,  but it was enough for us to report this, to get attention of the media and to get another  huge tender and contract cancelled by Slovak authorities. So this is an example where open  data can really empower you to set the agenda, not to get somebody to jail, but at least  you save public resources by having a certain contract cancelled. Open government was, as  I said, a huge shift of paradigm in our societies. It happened in legislation, but it happened  in the, it didn't happen in the minds of people. So for example, this is an example where we  requested information from a register of visitors at the Ministry of Education. We wanted to  see who is coming to the ministry and who is visiting ministers. And this was the official  answer. We got a photocopy of the front page and the back page of the book and nothing  else. So this shows you that open data is a threat to power. They really try to avoid  giving you information that is very sensitive. So that's why it's very important to live  in a country where you have free judiciary, where you have good appeal mechanisms, and  it sometimes really takes years and years to get to the information, but then you win.  And as it was proven in our organization, it feels good after five years to have a headline  in the newspaper saying that you won a Supreme Court case against the general prosecution  or against the Ministry of Finance and etc. And what it helps you with is that next time  the Ministry of Finance or the general prosecution will not rely on not getting you the information  because they know that you will come around the corner and you will give it back to them.  So what is when working with very well established networks who are powerful, it is important  to be clever and to save our own time and resources. That's why we started to develop  open data tools that would serve us, but also journalists and others. What you can see here  is our application, an internet application that matches up data from official registrar  of businesses in Slovakia and registrar of public tenders. So you can put in any name  of a person, Slovak or whoever else, and the application will check you how many tenders  did companies with activity of such a person won in the Slovak state. And I can see you  a result of a very powerful oligarch in Slovakia who is known to sponsor one political party.  And it is not surprising to find out that his company has received a public tender's  worth of 266 million euros without value edit tax. What you can see thanks to the application  as well is a concrete position of this person within the company. So you can see if he was  a statutory organ, if he was a director or whatever else, it will also allow you to see  which concrete institutions in the state donated these companies with or where he won the tenders.  And one of the information that is very interesting and you can see it here is that one of his  biggest tenders was within an office of the parliament to reconstruct the national heritage  castle. And what is more interesting about it is to know when this tender happens. And  it was under the government and under the direct leadership of a representative from  this political party that the oligarch is known to sponsor. When you are a journalist  and you want to dig in these cases a little further, you can go through a very thorough  list of these tenders and you can open each one of them and check for conditions of the  tender, check for what other bidders were part of this tender, check for the contract  and see for yourself. Another tool that we started to build preventively  is that we started to file freedom of information requests with very basic questions. We want  to see who is getting donations from the state, who is winning tenders in the state, who is  getting European Union funding or all kinds of other public support. We also want to know  who sponsors politics, who advises politicians, who is in the chairmanship of companies, who  is on boards that decide about subsidies, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an application  that collects all this information already for more than 10 years. So when you are a  journalist and you want to work on a corrupt case, you don't have to file your own freedom  of information requests from Ministry of Finance, to the parliament, to government and wait  and wait and wait and see a situation when the government or the parliament doesn't give  you the information so you have to appeal, you have to go to court, you have to wait  for years. But you can click on this website and you can save yourself time. And I can  show you one example of this will ring a bell to you, company Siemens. And we can see what  is in our application about Siemens. So what you can find here is all the public tenders  that Siemens received in Slovakia over the last 10 years. You can go in the chart. You  can see civic associations that carry Siemens names. You can see that people who were advising  to politics were connected in some way to Siemens. You can see that a basketball club  with the name of Siemens is receiving 2% of tax from Slovakia, that it also donates money  to Slovak institutions, to Slovak ministries, especially Ministry of Interior. You can also  see that it had debts in custom duty. And you can also see that it receives European  Union funding for education of their own employees. So when you are an investigative journalist,  you just saved couple of months of work receiving this information from the state. And you can  proceed and work on your case on your own. So what I would like to stress is that you  would like to stress is that when you do this kind of work, use the media. Get attention,  set agenda, but also be patient. And don't try to bluntly copy projects from other settings  that might not work in your country. Always listen to your own needs, to your own goals,  and get inspiration from others. It helped us many times. But first see if the settings  in your country wouldn't be actually working against such a project. So don't replicate  blindly. And sometimes it is important, especially in countries like Slovakia, to be creative.  When you want a certain information from government that you believe it should be there and it's  not, you need to find creative ways how to get it when politicians refuse to give it  to you. And one of such examples is a project. We believed that asset declarations of high  politicians as the president, ministers, members of parliament should be available online.  But we were really frustrated with getting to convince the parliament to pass a legislation  that would allow us to gather this information. And we didn't get it. So we decided to form  our own project. It's called Open Politics. And it contains voluntary asset declarations  of politicians, very detailed ones. So they declare what property they have, what depths  they have, where do they travel, who do they meet. And they do it just because they want  to and just because we exerted enough pressure through the media and through the citizens  to request such an information. After a couple of years of this project where it was really  small and unwanted at the start, last year we had a prime minister of Slovakia voluntarily  being part of the project. We had the speaker of the parliament. We had half of our government  and a lot of members of parliament. And what was really interesting to see is that one  of the MPs even asked us if he should include a property that he doesn't own officially,  not on paper. He owns it behind the scenes through a secret agreement with a different  person. And we said, of course, you have to put it in there. You want to be open and transparent.  And then I wondered why he asked us. And what I found out is that once they put information  up there and they distinguish themselves from others as being transparent and fair, they  really fear that the competition would just tell on them that they are not so transparent  and they are not such good guys. So he was actually taking a preventive step from being  blamed. Thank you very much. Yeah? So I was told that we have space for questions.  So thank you, Susanna. And I give you.  Hi, my name is Nikol. And maybe I missed it at the beginning, but how do you get the first  information about the contract which was only available inside the ministry? So did you  have some kind of whistleblowing or something like that?  Yes, it was not part of work of our organization, but the first initial information came to  a journalist through a visa-blower, through a secret source. So sometimes it is true that  you can't avoid using sources. But what I really wanted to highlight is that open data  can liberate you from sources. Many times you find really interesting tracks in the  open data itself. So when you are a desperate as a journalist, you don't have to turn to  sources, but you can really browse through these registers and through the applications.  It's true that this concrete initial information came from a source. But what was interesting  and I tried to mention as well is that when the first report came out, really nothing  happened. So it was a huge case, but for the first month and a half, nothing really happened  with it. Thanks. Any other questions, comments?  You mentioned that all contracts are transparent on your platform. Are all invoices of the  government also are transparent? Yes. Well, there is an official governmental  site that has all the contracts and invoices. Well, there was quite a resistance, especially  from municipalities in Slovakia who claimed that publishing all the invoices would be  too costly for them. So the state had to come with a compromise and it said that to a certain  threshold, I think it's 3,000 euros, you can only publish a list of invoices and contracts,  but above that you have to also put in a scan or a document in a machine readable format.  So there is a governmental site, but we also produce together with transparency international  Slovakia our own site that adds up to the functionality and allows us to work with the  data a little bit more. Hi, Susanna. I wanted to ask you because I know in  Czech Republic the corruption is really widespread. What, do you have a sister agency or Fair Play  in Czech Republic? Would you work together because the problems are obviously similar  and a lot of the roots? Yes, we were one country, right? So the problems  are similar. Well, we don't, but we work with a lot of organisations also in Czech Republic  and we were asked sometimes to also spread to Czech Republic, but you have a great organisation  in Prague, which is doing good work. I must say that we are a little bit luckier than  you. I was on the jury of a journalistic award in Prague this year and I found out  that for example, when your media requested certain amount of information from the state,  they had to pay a lot of money because the state said that it would cost hours and hours  of work of their officers. So they charged, I think, 1000 euros for information about  how much money gets certain highly positioned officials within state administration paid,  which could never happen in Slovakia. So in a sense, we are lucky because we have a very  progressive Freedom of Information Act that allows us to get information basically free  of charge. So thanks a lot. Any other questions? Yes.  Well, thanks. It's a great project. Did they ever turn up to you physically? What do you  do then? Do you have security protection? I must say that I feel also lucky living in  Slovakia. We are told to be this peaceful nation who doesn't lead wars. So I must say  that I don't know how courageous we would be in settings as Russia or really harsh  countries and I really admire everybody who is doing this kind of work there. So we have  a lot of verbal harassment from governments. So when we produce our results, we are usually  attacked on press conferences and they try to say that we are spies coming from foreign  countries being financed by Jewish money of George Shorosh and these kind of powerful  people. So the government is usually trying to attack us verbally. We had a couple of  incidents where the office was robbed in a very strange way or we had an incident where  we locked the door in the night and when we come back in the morning it was unlocked.  It was closed but unlocked so it was clear that somebody was inside. So these kind of  things happen but not nothing really life threatening and I hope it will stay that way.  Who are you funded by? Yes, we are funded by Open Society Foundation  which is established by George Shorosh to a big deal with institutional grants. We also  receive help from Slovak citizens through 2% of tax which for example in last year  brought 70,000 euros which is quite a lot. We also get funding from Slovak companies  especially smaller. We also offer our own consultation and training and get paid for  it. We get little sources from Slovak foundations, domestic sources but also other international  foundations. But it's always open grant competitions so you submit your grant in an open competition  that is actually published to everybody else and you get it or you don't.
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Thank you very much, Sandra. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Susana. And I'm a former journalist myself, who got very frustrated 10 years ago from jumping from one story to another. Plus, I live in a country where bad things are happening. So you find it really, really hard to adhere to this basic journalistic principle not to get involved and remain at a certain distance, because journalism is about reflection. So I decided to found a watchdog organization that used journalistic skills, journalistic analytical investigations, and started to hunt the bad guys. We disclosed concrete cases about their misbehavior, about how they misspent public resources, how they were corrupt, or involved in illicit practices. And we used these concrete examples to drive a public debate to reform politics, to diminish space for corruption, and to just make society better as we hoped we would achieve it. As Mr. Kennedy, I've been also in Berlin, not that I would like to see myself as a piece of pastry, but as this charming mistake, I also come from a country, which is Slovakia, where in 1989, the walls started to crumble and eventually fell down. It was a time where enthusiasm flourished. People celebrated their newly gained freedoms. They celebrated that they could freely vote and elect their own politicians, and they were full of hopes for a better country. While people were celebrating, there were very powerful networks being formed in the background who saw this change especially as a way to gain profit, as a way to see possibilities and opportunities that normal citizens couldn't see at that time. They were able to look up front and they were able to anticipate what would be coming, a large privatization, a large amount of state property that were held by the communist state up till that moment, and they all wanted a piece or a share of this wealth and property. So they formed a very powerful networks, which gave them incredible advantage. They had control over public institutions, they had control over judiciary, they had very close ties to politics, which came with resources, it came with money, and it came with the power to form legislative frameworks and to take decisions in the name of the state. On the other hand, citizens, they didn't even know what was happening. When all these privatization deals were being set up, where all the plans were being formed about how to use gaps in the legislation, how to use context to politics to gain wealth, the citizens were not prepared to be equal partners in the debate. How can you be an equal partner in a debate when you don't even know what is happening? So information and open government in my eyes was really a game changer in a country that I come from because it balances power from the networks, from the powerful networks, little bit on the side of the citizens. When you know what is going on, when you can read documents from public administration, you can see traces and tracks of deals, you can see traces and tracks of relationships, and you can start being a partner in this debate who is much more powerful. The very charming thing about watching the state or working with the state is that public administration is all about bureaucracy. It's so bureaucratized that there are written rules for everything. So public administration really leaves tracks, leaves written tracks in documents because you have very detailed rules, set of rules and legislation for processes like public procurement, privatization, signing a contract with the state, prosecuting somebody, et cetera, et cetera. All these decisions have to follow certain written rules but also have to be written down and stamped. So by studying these documents, you can really discover a lot of stories behind, a lot of human stories with great impact. Corruption, nepotism or clientelism are usually phenomena that also come with rule breaking. It is really hard when you want to give an advantage to a certain person who should win a tender or privatize a property, not to do it without damaging other competitors or not to do it without breaking certain rules. So these are all factors that come in handy for citizens as me who are really trying to watch the state. But the most important challenge for us is really this power as an advantage to certain networks and certain groups. So how do we change it? How can we change it as citizens who don't have that money, who don't have those resources and who often don't have these capacities and don't have institutions, public institutions that are actually working for them but often in countries like Slovakia, the public institutions actually work for these powerful networks. What we discovered as an organization is that it is really, really hard to change politics with giving it good arguments about why the legislation should be better, why the politics should be more transparent and open, why politicians should be held accountable. When you produce research, when you produce good arguments, it is usually very hard to convince politicians because they have a certain advantage that they don't want to give up. They just don't want equality for everyone because suddenly they lose this advantage of getting tenders for themselves, getting privatized property for themselves, influencing judiciary or influencing state institutions. So how do we do that? We have to figure out the way how to change the reality for the players, how to make them feel damaged because only if they feel damaged, if they lose in a certain way in real life, if they feel the effects of their wrongdoings, then they start to change their behavior and they will be much more respectful to the frameworks and to the legislation. And I will show you concrete cases where we succeeded to do so in Slovakia. The second thing we found out is that it's always very important to exert pressure. Without pressure, politicians are not listening and they don't feel a need to propose solutions. So what I really believe is in power of examples, of concrete cases that make or that change talk about corruption from something abstract, something that doesn't touch our daily lives to something very tangible, very concrete. So this is my first story. In 2007, there was a notice board on the first floor of our Ministry of Construction and Development which carried an announcement about a huge tender. This tender was 110 million Euro big. It was a nine-year contract that was supposed to bring contractors this huge piece of business. It was published, the announcement was published behind closed doors and not surprisingly it was awarded to people who were very, very close to one political leader. These people started to fill the contract. They started to get the first money from supposed services that they delivered to the state and nobody knew about it. For a year and a half, nobody knew what was going on. Then journalists published information that this contract was awarded to people closer to a political leader. That it was published only on a notice board with an ministry, so no other competitors on the market knew about such an example, but nothing happened. This report brought no political response, no public response, no pressure whatsoever. So we as an organization decided that it would be very good to look closer into this tender and we used freedom of expression in our country and open data and started to request all the information connected to this tender that we could think of. So we requested contracts from the tender, we requested invoices, we requested proof of delivery, we requested all kinds of other documents that were possible and we decided to publish them online. What you can see here is a piece of story, a new story that was reported about these scandals and on the left side you can see four prototypes of logos that were developed under the contract of this tender. These logos were 33,000 euros each and they were supposed to be produced during 2,188 hours. These companies reported that they were working on these logos. This was only one example of a scandalous money that was requested under the standard from the state by the winning bidders. Another example came with very overpriced commercials in media, trainings that were never delivered or trainings that were attended only by one or two state officers, etc. etc. We produced our own findings. The information, detailed information was also published online as you can see on our website. When you go down, you can read through all invoices and you can open anything that interests you. All this information brought a very big change. Suddenly from the quietness, all the media started to go through these invoices with our help and they started to report daily on the scandal. So politicians suddenly couldn't look to the right or left without having to react to this tender and having to respond to questions of journalists. Very concrete questions about logos, about commercials, etc. etc. So the pressure in the society was slowly building. The tender became a way to talk during the television talk shows. It was made fun of by commentators. It was made fun of by famous people on television. So very soon the whole country knew that something was going on and the politicians had to really respond. Thanks to the analysis of these cases, we also had enough arguments to go to the EU commissioner responsible for EU funding in member states and we could also go to Olaf and present them with a very detailed report on what went wrong. Olaf picked up the case and started their own investigation. European Union exerted another pressure on Slovak political elite and very soon the minister had to resign. The contract was cancelled and European Union refused to cover the money from this tender under EU funding. So there was a very concrete damage that suddenly this powerful political network felt. They were prepared for getting a nine-year contract of 110 million euro to perform such a huge contract. You have to organize really well. You have to set up offshore companies around the world who would help you to wash the money. You have to involve tens and hundreds of people into the operation and suddenly it's gone. Suddenly the business is gone. So they felt the damage. What also this scandal helped was that it empowered citizens and media with concrete open data examples that helped them to set the agenda and to exert pressure on politicians. And because the politicians knew that it wasn't enough only to cancel this concrete tender, they had to come up with solutions and proposals. So what they did is that corruption became one of the main agendas for the next coming elections, parliamentary elections, and the new government who came out of these elections had to also propose some systemic changes into the country. And one of those were that all the contracts closed between private sector and the state will be published from the beginning of 2011. And we really do have a governmental website that publishes every single contract that is signed by the state and private sector. So we will not again find ourselves in such a situation that we will not know of a powerful contract in the background, but we can monitor these contracts when they are being signed and when it's in the early stage of development. You can ask afterwards, okay? So this was an example where such a concrete case produced a very big change in our society and gave power to citizens. But sometimes open data doesn't really carry concrete elements of corruption. It will not provide you with the concrete evidence of who took a certain amount of money from whom and how it was washed through circles of shore havens and etc. But open data is too corruption in my eyes what accounting was to Al Capone. It doesn't produce enough evidence to put somebody to jail, but it often produces enough evidence to see that something is really, really wrong and get the debate going. So sometimes it's really about realization that your ambitions can't be too high and the society can't be changed overnight, that it's a longer process and what is really important is to start to get the debate going on in a country. So I will show you another example when we started to analyze another tender for cleaning the roads in Slovakia and washing the snow. We started to look into different counties and see what companies in these counties proposed. What you see here is two pieces of paper that two companies submitted for two different tenders. Both of these bidders were proposing that they will clean the snow from the roads on two different places and these pieces of paper were supposed to confirm that they really own or that they really rented a mechanism, cars, that will allow them to clean the roads. But when we looked closer and you see the details, this is a detail from the first paper and the detail from the second paper, we found out that the two companies are actually putting the same numbers of car plates. So one company in a city A was saying that it will be cleaning the roads with the same mechanisms as the company B in a completely different city. So this is how they tricked and cheated in the tender. So this piece of evidence wasn't carrying tracks of corruption, but it was enough for us to report this, to get attention of the media and to get another huge tender and contract cancelled by Slovak authorities. So this is an example where open data can really empower you to set the agenda, not to get somebody to jail, but at least you save public resources by having a certain contract cancelled. Open government was, as I said, a huge shift of paradigm in our societies. It happened in legislation, but it happened in the, it didn't happen in the minds of people. So for example, this is an example where we requested information from a register of visitors at the Ministry of Education. We wanted to see who is coming to the ministry and who is visiting ministers. And this was the official answer. We got a photocopy of the front page and the back page of the book and nothing else. So this shows you that open data is a threat to power. They really try to avoid giving you information that is very sensitive. So that's why it's very important to live in a country where you have free judiciary, where you have good appeal mechanisms, and it sometimes really takes years and years to get to the information, but then you win. And as it was proven in our organization, it feels good after five years to have a headline in the newspaper saying that you won a Supreme Court case against the general prosecution or against the Ministry of Finance and etc. And what it helps you with is that next time the Ministry of Finance or the general prosecution will not rely on not getting you the information because they know that you will come around the corner and you will give it back to them. So what is when working with very well established networks who are powerful, it is important to be clever and to save our own time and resources. That's why we started to develop open data tools that would serve us, but also journalists and others. What you can see here is our application, an internet application that matches up data from official registrar of businesses in Slovakia and registrar of public tenders. So you can put in any name of a person, Slovak or whoever else, and the application will check you how many tenders did companies with activity of such a person won in the Slovak state. And I can see you a result of a very powerful oligarch in Slovakia who is known to sponsor one political party. And it is not surprising to find out that his company has received a public tender's worth of 266 million euros without value edit tax. What you can see thanks to the application as well is a concrete position of this person within the company. So you can see if he was a statutory organ, if he was a director or whatever else, it will also allow you to see which concrete institutions in the state donated these companies with or where he won the tenders. And one of the information that is very interesting and you can see it here is that one of his biggest tenders was within an office of the parliament to reconstruct the national heritage castle. And what is more interesting about it is to know when this tender happens. And it was under the government and under the direct leadership of a representative from this political party that the oligarch is known to sponsor. When you are a journalist and you want to dig in these cases a little further, you can go through a very thorough list of these tenders and you can open each one of them and check for conditions of the tender, check for what other bidders were part of this tender, check for the contract and see for yourself. Another tool that we started to build preventively is that we started to file freedom of information requests with very basic questions. We want to see who is getting donations from the state, who is winning tenders in the state, who is getting European Union funding or all kinds of other public support. We also want to know who sponsors politics, who advises politicians, who is in the chairmanship of companies, who is on boards that decide about subsidies, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an application that collects all this information already for more than 10 years. So when you are a journalist and you want to work on a corrupt case, you don't have to file your own freedom of information requests from Ministry of Finance, to the parliament, to government and wait and wait and wait and see a situation when the government or the parliament doesn't give you the information so you have to appeal, you have to go to court, you have to wait for years. But you can click on this website and you can save yourself time. And I can show you one example of this will ring a bell to you, company Siemens. And we can see what is in our application about Siemens. So what you can find here is all the public tenders that Siemens received in Slovakia over the last 10 years. You can go in the chart. You can see civic associations that carry Siemens names. You can see that people who were advising to politics were connected in some way to Siemens. You can see that a basketball club with the name of Siemens is receiving 2% of tax from Slovakia, that it also donates money to Slovak institutions, to Slovak ministries, especially Ministry of Interior. You can also see that it had debts in custom duty. And you can also see that it receives European Union funding for education of their own employees. So when you are an investigative journalist, you just saved couple of months of work receiving this information from the state. And you can proceed and work on your case on your own. So what I would like to stress is that you would like to stress is that when you do this kind of work, use the media. Get attention, set agenda, but also be patient. And don't try to bluntly copy projects from other settings that might not work in your country. Always listen to your own needs, to your own goals, and get inspiration from others. It helped us many times. But first see if the settings in your country wouldn't be actually working against such a project. So don't replicate blindly. And sometimes it is important, especially in countries like Slovakia, to be creative. When you want a certain information from government that you believe it should be there and it's not, you need to find creative ways how to get it when politicians refuse to give it to you. And one of such examples is a project. We believed that asset declarations of high politicians as the president, ministers, members of parliament should be available online. But we were really frustrated with getting to convince the parliament to pass a legislation that would allow us to gather this information. And we didn't get it. So we decided to form our own project. It's called Open Politics. And it contains voluntary asset declarations of politicians, very detailed ones. So they declare what property they have, what depths they have, where do they travel, who do they meet. And they do it just because they want to and just because we exerted enough pressure through the media and through the citizens to request such an information. After a couple of years of this project where it was really small and unwanted at the start, last year we had a prime minister of Slovakia voluntarily being part of the project. We had the speaker of the parliament. We had half of our government and a lot of members of parliament. And what was really interesting to see is that one of the MPs even asked us if he should include a property that he doesn't own officially, not on paper. He owns it behind the scenes through a secret agreement with a different person. And we said, of course, you have to put it in there. You want to be open and transparent. And then I wondered why he asked us. And what I found out is that once they put information up there and they distinguish themselves from others as being transparent and fair, they really fear that the competition would just tell on them that they are not so transparent and they are not such good guys. So he was actually taking a preventive step from being blamed. Thank you very much. Yeah? So I was told that we have space for questions. So thank you, Susanna. And I give you. Hi, my name is Nikol. And maybe I missed it at the beginning, but how do you get the first information about the contract which was only available inside the ministry? So did you have some kind of whistleblowing or something like that? Yes, it was not part of work of our organization, but the first initial information came to a journalist through a visa-blower, through a secret source. So sometimes it is true that you can't avoid using sources. But what I really wanted to highlight is that open data can liberate you from sources. Many times you find really interesting tracks in the open data itself. So when you are a desperate as a journalist, you don't have to turn to sources, but you can really browse through these registers and through the applications. It's true that this concrete initial information came from a source. But what was interesting and I tried to mention as well is that when the first report came out, really nothing happened. So it was a huge case, but for the first month and a half, nothing really happened with it. Thanks. Any other questions, comments? You mentioned that all contracts are transparent on your platform. Are all invoices of the government also are transparent? Yes. Well, there is an official governmental site that has all the contracts and invoices. Well, there was quite a resistance, especially from municipalities in Slovakia who claimed that publishing all the invoices would be too costly for them. So the state had to come with a compromise and it said that to a certain threshold, I think it's 3,000 euros, you can only publish a list of invoices and contracts, but above that you have to also put in a scan or a document in a machine readable format. So there is a governmental site, but we also produce together with transparency international Slovakia our own site that adds up to the functionality and allows us to work with the data a little bit more. Hi, Susanna. I wanted to ask you because I know in Czech Republic the corruption is really widespread. What, do you have a sister agency or Fair Play in Czech Republic? Would you work together because the problems are obviously similar and a lot of the roots? Yes, we were one country, right? So the problems are similar. Well, we don't, but we work with a lot of organisations also in Czech Republic and we were asked sometimes to also spread to Czech Republic, but you have a great organisation in Prague, which is doing good work. I must say that we are a little bit luckier than you. I was on the jury of a journalistic award in Prague this year and I found out that for example, when your media requested certain amount of information from the state, they had to pay a lot of money because the state said that it would cost hours and hours of work of their officers. So they charged, I think, 1000 euros for information about how much money gets certain highly positioned officials within state administration paid, which could never happen in Slovakia. So in a sense, we are lucky because we have a very progressive Freedom of Information Act that allows us to get information basically free of charge. So thanks a lot. Any other questions? Yes. Well, thanks. It's a great project. Did they ever turn up to you physically? What do you do then? Do you have security protection? I must say that I feel also lucky living in Slovakia. We are told to be this peaceful nation who doesn't lead wars. So I must say that I don't know how courageous we would be in settings as Russia or really harsh countries and I really admire everybody who is doing this kind of work there. So we have a lot of verbal harassment from governments. So when we produce our results, we are usually attacked on press conferences and they try to say that we are spies coming from foreign countries being financed by Jewish money of George Shorosh and these kind of powerful people. So the government is usually trying to attack us verbally. We had a couple of incidents where the office was robbed in a very strange way or we had an incident where we locked the door in the night and when we come back in the morning it was unlocked. It was closed but unlocked so it was clear that somebody was inside. So these kind of things happen but not nothing really life threatening and I hope it will stay that way. Who are you funded by? Yes, we are funded by Open Society Foundation which is established by George Shorosh to a big deal with institutional grants. We also receive help from Slovak citizens through 2% of tax which for example in last year brought 70,000 euros which is quite a lot. We also get funding from Slovak companies especially smaller. We also offer our own consultation and training and get paid for it. We get little sources from Slovak foundations, domestic sources but also other international foundations. But it's always open grant competitions so you submit your grant in an open competition that is actually published to everybody else and you get it or you don't.
resources, how they were corrupt, or involved in examples to drive a public debate to reform newly gained freedoms. They celebrated that they could freely vote and elect their own were not prepared to be equal partners in the happening? So information and open government in my eyes was really a game changer in a country what is going on, when you can read documents most important challenge for us is really this power as an advantage to certain networks and politicians because they have a certain advantage concrete cases that make or that change talk something that doesn't touch our daily lives to happened. This report brought no political This was only one example of a scandalous money The information, detailed information was also respond. Thanks to the analysis of these cases, was a very concrete damage that suddenly this that corruption became one of the main agendas such a situation that we will not know of a doesn't really carry concrete elements of corruption. It will not provide you with the concrete evidence of who took a certain amount of put somebody to jail, but it often produces you another example when we started to analyze completely different city. So this is how they not to get somebody to jail, but at least you contract cancelled. Open government was, as I you that open data is a threat to power. They really try to avoid giving you information that working with very well established networks who started to develop open data tools that would serve us, but also journalists and others. What thanks to the application as well is a concrete was a director or whatever else, it will also check for conditions of the tender, check for stress is that when you do this kind of work, use working against such a project. So don't ways how to get it when politicians refuse to using sources. But what I really wanted to harassment from governments. So when we produce