Open Ownership’s first technology showcase - video

  • Publication date: 13 August 2020
  • Author: Steve Day

On 30 July 2020 Open Ownership held our first technology showcase – an online webinar hosting talks by speakers from government, civil society, and the private sector – demonstrating technology working with beneficial ownership (BO) data. Over two hours, our speakers shared their projects, ranging from procurement red flag dashboards to commercial data platforms and national company registers.

The session was recorded and we are pleased to share the video for those who could not make it:

We found this set of talks particularly enlightening, as it highlighted some of the more technical work that is often overlooked when we talk about the benefits and challenges of implementing BO.

The showcase also demonstrated the wide variety of projects that are underway in this area, and how interconnected open data, government digital transformation, and non-governmental innovation are in solving transparency and corruption problems. Indeed, the most common theme from data users was on interconnected data sources and types of data. Open Ownership will be considering how to leverage all the showcased technical work for the public good. Do let us know if you have any feedback on the event!

In detail our speakers were:

Louise Crow - mySociety

Louise talked about mySociety’s recent work with the UK Government Digital Service’s Global Digital Marketplace Programme. Building a dashboard to identify red flags in procurement contracts by connecting them to BO data.

See Louise’s slides

Jump to Louise’s talk at 07:24

Khairil Yusof - Sinar Project

Khairil showed us Sinar’s Politikus project, and the impact of using the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS), Open Contracting Data Standard, and Popolo to power structured data collection through a traditional content management system.

See Khairil’s slides

Jump to Khairil’s talk at 18:53

Kadie Armstrong - Open Ownership

Kadie presented some recent support Open Ownership gave to Armenia’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative secretariat, using the BODS and pipeline of tools to turn BO form disclosures into visual, structured data.

See Kadie’s slides

Jump to Kadie’s Talk at 35:16

Stuart Swindell - Dun & Bradstreet

Stuart continued our visualisation theme with a talk about Dun & Bradstreet’s BO products and how they use visualisations to make complex information accessible to their users.

Jump to Stuart’s Talk at 47:43

Friedrich Lindenberg - OCCRP

Friedrich demonstrated OCCRP’s Aleph tool for investigative journalists, which includes BO data among many other sources and manages a knowledge graph through their Follow The Money ontology.

Jump to Friedrich’s Talk at 1:07:46

Evgen Romanov - YouControl

Evgen gave a walkthrough of YouControl’s abilities to match people across different company data disclosures, for example, highlighting ultimate beneficial owners who have not been declared as such through techniques such as address matching.

See Evgen’s Slides

Jump to Evgen’s talk at 1:20:51

Larry Agoro - PesaFlow

Larry gave us a live demonstration of Kenya’s upcoming BO register from the perspective of a company filling out their declarations. He showed us the lengths the developers of the beneficial ownership register had gone to in order to validate the data.

Jump to Larry’s talk at 1:38:16

Publication type
Videos

Blog post

Sections
Technology