Presentation at the workshop Political watchdogs - Lessons Learned from Data-driven Campaigns ( bit.ly/watchdog11)

1. K-Monitor
Watchdog for Public Funds
- Introduction
- K-Monitor database
- Ahalo.hu database

2. Introduction
• Founded in 2007 as a grassroot NGO
• Professional operation since 2010
• 5 employees
• Main donors: OSF, CEE Trust, EU, Embassies +
V4 fund, individual donations
• Annual budget around $ 150.000

3. Main pillars of operation
• Anti-corruption advocacy
• Research
• Data Projects
Special focus on Open Government Data

4. Anti-corruption advocacy
• Advocating for reforms and assessing government policy in the
following fields:
• Public procurements,
• Asset declarations,
• FOI issues,
• Party and campaign financing
• Whistleblower protection
• Lobby regulation
• Monitoring the OGP process of the Hungarian government
• Monitoring the implementation of the government’s anti-corruption
programme
• Monitoring campaign costs of the elections in April 2014
• Anti-corruption minimum campaign

5. Research
• Research on whistleblower protection in the CEE region (2011)
• Chapter on anti-corruption agencies in TI’s NIS (2011)
• Research on the transparency of public procurements in the V4 region
(2012)
• Mid-term evaluation of the government from the corruption perspective
(2012)
• Local research country correspondent for the EU’s anti-corruption report
(2013-)
•Evaluation of the government-term from the perspective of corruption
(2014)
• „Red flags” in public procurements (with TI Hungary) (2014-2015)
• Stringer for research companies

6. Open Data Projects
• k-monitor.hu – database & map of corruption and public spending
• ahalo.hu – database on public procurements, EU funds, agricultural
subsidies, company information and elite networks
• opendata.hu
• Increasing civil efficiency through open data – project to enhance the
capabilities of NGOs on how to use data in their advocy and communication
activities
• Partner in the project “Parliamentary Montoring for Transparency &
Anti-Corruption in the V4 Region”
• k-spots (2014) mobile app
• Red flagging tool (2014-2015)

7. k-monitor.hu
• Aim: Create a database and a
map of corruption in Hungary
• Objective information,
• Traceable cases,
• archiving local and old news as well
• manual monitoring of the
Hungarian online press

8. k-monitor.hu - database
• K-Monitor’s first project
• 2007 offline database
• 2008 first webpage (Drupal)
• 2010 new webpage
• 2014 over 30000 articles

9. k-monitor.hu
• Possible data sources?
• Official data
• only anonimously available
• mostly on petty corruption
• high latency
• Press
• lots of information but hard to collect
• biased
• libel cases possible
• Whistleblowers (leaking vs. bribespot)
• good visibility needed to receive stories
• trustworthy? - danger of defamation
• protection of personal data

10. k-monitor.hu
• Methodology I.
• Press articles + whistleblower reports (restricted access)
• Only online press
• Focus on most popular national & regional news portals
• Daily monitoring + archives (earliest from 1998)
• Record articles that report on eg. dubious spending of public funds
(pf), corruption, misuse of pf, waste of pf, transparency of spending
pfs, suspicious lobbying, conflict of interest, nepotism, fraud,
embezzlement, bribery, cartel, etc.

11. k-monitor.hu
• Methodology II.
• Both specific cases and related issues in general
• Record articles that confute an accusation, publishing
rectifications
• Tagging persons, institutions involved
• Using predefined keywords that describe an article
• Tagging locations
• Filtering duplication of news
• Creating summarising articles for major cases, recording the overall
cost of corruption - if available

12. k-monitor.hu
Search & browsing
Taxonomy

13. k-monitor.hu - map
• Cases connected to
counties and
townships
• Points out the lack of
investigative reporting
outside of Budapest
• Even cases in
„dense” counties are
mostly connected to
national scandals

14. k-monitor.hu
• Who are our users?
• Citizens looking for information on politicans
• Companies checking competitors or possible partners
• Journalists looking for backgroud material
• Researchers
• Around 12000 invidual visitors a month
• 2/3 through Google, 1/3 from referrals and directly
• Awards
• Justitia Regnorum Fundamentum Award from the Hungarian
FOI & Data Protection Commissioner (Ombudsman)
• Best practice in access to information at EU AC report 2014

15. k-monitor.hu
• Further application of collected data:
• Source for evaluation at Telenor ethical company award
http://telenoretikusvallalatdij.hu/Palyazati_felhivas
• Rankings of politicians, institutions
http://vastagbor.blog.hu/2010/04/26/ub_2
• Timeline of cases
http://buntetoeljarasok.transparency.hu/
• Create the network of people involved  aHalo
• Served as red flag in OLAFs PP research
• Media analysis: Assessment of portals excluding or leaving out
specific topics

16. k-monitor.hu
• Challenges
• Code is not open source
• Stories from blogs are getting more important
• More specific locations needed
• Maintenance is very time consuming
• Hard to maintain high-quality with volunteers
• Sustainabilty issues - donors
• Counting costs of corruption is misleading
• Even some decent people will hate you
• Threats & lawsuits

17. k-monitor.hu
• Future steps
• Test methods to substitute or facilitate manual work
• Turn it into open source and build an API
• Revision of tags and articles according to experiences and new ideas
• Use tags that describe processes
• Introduce keywords that didn’t seem necessary but have to be
applied for older articles
• Incorporate blogs
• More locally-focussed content  mobile app
• Implement geo tagging  mobile app
• Track relations between entities and actors in press articles 

18. ‘The Network’
at http://ahalo.hu

19. Basic idea: demonstrate the connection
between people, companies and
institutions from the K-Monitor database
VS.
Extended idea: Why not incorporating
information from official sources and
company registry?

20. …. Yes! why not?
- Monstre project started in Summer 2011
- In cooperation with TI Hungary and the
Hungarian Civil Liberties Union
- Expected launch: October 2012, January
2013, May 2013, September 2013…
- Accessible since October 2013 but still
in beta version with lots of work to be
done.

21. Disclosing and visualizing personal and
business connections between Hungarian
politicians and businesspeople
SCRAPED DATA:
 Election database
 Procurement
database
 EU subsidies
 Agricultural subsidies
 Company information
 NGO database
 Investigative articles
from K-Monitor’s
corruption database
MANUALLY EDITED:
Type of relations
(interpersonal, interorg,
person/org)
Data on more than 90.000 transactions (parties,
value, type and subject of transactions, date, any
related transaction)
Data on more than 45.000 individuals (business
interests and political affiliations), personal
relationships (if known)
Data on more than 40.000 organizations /
institutions (stakeholders and officers of private
companies, officers of municipalities, related
transactions)

25. SHOW THE
NETWORK
MAP!
AN EXAMPLE: THE
PROFILE OF A
MUNICIPALITY
RELATED
PEOPLE
RELATED
ORGANIZATIONS
RELATED
TRANSACTIONS
NAME
TYPE OF
RELATION
START
DATE OF
RELATION
END DATE
OF
RELATION
SOURCE
OF
RELATION

26. TOP
TRANSACTIONS OF
THE MUNICIPALITY

27. Mistakes:
• The final project plan was too ambitious
• Started the project without sufficient
capacities
– No proper analysis of the availability of quality data
when merging the two project concepts
– No experience with such data intensive projects
(scraping, mashing, cleaning databases)
– No sufficient capacity for cleaning data
– Little financial capacities to correct errors
– Treating developer as partner, not subcontractor

28. Unfortunate:
• Academics we wanted to partner with acted
as rivals
• Data sources changed regularly
• Developer had to be fired - hard to find a
good ruby developer in Hungary

29. Lessons learnt:
• Properly assess your capacities in advance
• Start at the basics
• Find a good developer and experts before the
implementation
• Be able to give up parts of the project
• Start testing it as soon as possible

30. Success:
• Managed to mash up data that have not been
linked before
• Created unique content
• Great experiences and lessons for future
projects
• Solid base for further developments

31. ahalo.hu – other projects: Red flags
PUBLIC
PROCUREMENTS
OF THE
MUNICIPALITY

32. k-monitor.hu – other projects
kspots

33. Thank you!
Sandor Lederer
lederer@k-monitor.hu