TecTalk - Reverse-Engineering Government Transparency

Free talk and a get-together.
subject: Reverse-Engineering Government Transparency

TecTalk is the monthly Meetup program of Stadslab Eindhoven – about technology developments with social impact.
The hacker ethic teaches us that information should be free. So why do governments still keep so much of it inaccessible and out of reach? In this talk, we'll break down the barriers to digital transparency, show how hackers can help open up the government, and lay out a vision for a more democratic, accountable and open state.

Governments should be radically more transparent, because public information and open data allow researchers, businesses, and voters to make better decisions. But too often, public data is fragmented, incomplete, hard to access, or never published at all.
At Open State Foundation, we’ve spent more than a decade working to unlock that information. In this talk, we’ll share how we use a hacker's mindset to reverse-engineer transparency:

• from tracking how long ministries take to answer Access to Information requests (the answer will surprise you),
• to scraping hundreds of document portals into one search engine,
• to building public calendars of ministerial meetings that anyone can subscribe to.

But above all, we’ll ask: how can hackers help open up the government?

Quinten Coret
Quinten is a developer at Open State Foundation, where he works on tools that make government data more accessible for everyone. With a background in econometrics and data science, he focuses on transparent data use to better understand society.

Come and join us at StadsLab Eindhoven.
Gasfabriek 6, Eindhoven.