Close to 500 billion of EU subsidies flow back into the member states through a complex system of subsidies, grants and regional funds. Information on who receives these funds is scattered over a web of regional and national data portals. The fact that the data is spread around and not available in one standard format in one place hinders transparency of the EU subsidies tremendously.

Over the last year we have brought all the data for the EU structural funds together. Over a 100 datasets of EU funded projects were scraped, cleaned, standardised and uploaded into software tools such as open spending for visualising public money. We will use this project to demonstrate how to trace public money with open data, how to set up a large scale data project, and how we have used different methodologies, standards, and tools to realise this large scale open financial data project.

In this workshop we will interactively demonstrate how to trace EU data, the lessons learned and the tools used. In the second part of the workshop we will do a hands-on demonstrator together with the participants, tracing and visualising the EU structural Funds.

The cases and pilot studies that we have developed in the realm of this project will be waved through our story illustrating the lessons we learned and best practices on setting up an open data story, whilst at the same time giving insights in financial transparency in the European Union in their own right.