Collecting the EU's Regional Funds

Abstract

One of the key funding mechanisms of the European Union is the Regional Policy, which helps to implement infrastructure projects across the 27 member states. Money is allocated along a set of objectives and disbursed at the regional level, by 60-odd managing bodies. But who is getting the money and what is it really spent on? The answer lies distributed across the local administrations and has only been collected into a common database once, in 2010. It took the TBIJ and Financial Times eight months to gather the information, leading to a series of disclosures about misallocated funds and shady projects. This is why we believe that there should be a constantly-updated database of these reports, maintained by an open community and available as a resource to journalists and policy makers at any time. The right time to start such a data commons, as the 2007-2013 budgetary cycle of the EU is coming to a close and it's time to get a picture of how well the goals set out for 347 billion Euros of funding during this period have been reflected in actual projects. We want to make a map of member states and regions where open data projects are already collecting this data and then form small teams to take on the uncharted terrtories, find PDF reports and to convert them to clean and useable data. So, join the ERDF Ghostbusters and help us to map the European money!