Open Interests Europe brings together developers, designers, activists, journalists

and other geeks for two days of learning, fun, intense hacking and app building.

Within any political process there are many interests wanting to be heard - companies, trade unions, NGOs - and Brussels is no exception. Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe and LobbyControl have begun to data-mine the lobby registers of the European Commission

and of the Parliament to find out who the lobbyists are, what they want and how much they are investing. You will have the exclusive opportunity to work with this data before it is made public in their upcoming portal. What can you do with this data?

Topic expert

Erik Wesselius is one of the co-founders of Corporate Europe Observatory. In the past few years, Erik has focused on issues related to lobbying transparency and regulation as well as EU economic governance. In 2005, Erik was active in the Dutch campaign for a "No" against the EU Constitution.

What others have done

Here are some projects that might serve as inspiration:

• Sunlight Lobby Tracker
• Who is Lobbying?
• LittleSis
• Mapa76
• Facenuke

Subsidies paid to owners of fishing vessels and others working in the fishing industry under the European Union’s common fisheries policy amount to approximately €1 billion a year. EU Transparency gathered data relating to payments and recipients

of fisheries subsidies in every EU member state from multiple sources, from European Commission databases to member state government databases and inter-governmental fishery organizations such as ICCAT. What can you do with this data?

Topic expert

Jack Thurston is policy analyst, activist, writer and broadcaster. He is co-founder of FarmSubsidy.org, winner of a Freedom of Information Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

What others have done

Here are some projects that might serve as inspiration:

• Vessel Subsidy Map
• European Fisheries Fund Database
• Illegal Fishing Database
• JRC Scientific Fisheries Data

Each year governments of EU member states spend between 9 and 26 per cent of GDP on private contracting. Private contracts on public services such as infrastructure or health care are recorded in the European tender register. OpenTED.org has scraped, parsed and released procurement data

on 700,000 contracts from 2006 to 2011. Join us for a deep dig into this bulk of procurement data. We expect investigative stories on no-bid contracts, government outsourcing trends and what companies benefitted from the Greek public construction boom before the crisis.

Topic expert

Anders Pedersen is a data journalist and co-founder of OpenTED.org. He is the winner of the Nordic Newshacker and a Robert Bosch Stiftung Journalism Fellow.

What others have done

Here are some projects that might serve as inspiration:

• ZNasichDani / From Our Taxes
• Open Contracting Initiative