About the project

DIGIWHIST – The Digital Whistleblower. Fiscal Transparency, Risk Assessment and Impact of Good Governance Policies Assessed.
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DIGIWHIST, an EU Horizon 2020 funded project, brings together six European research institutes, with the aim of empowering society to combat public sector corruption.

Imagine driving on a road which is full of potholes, in spite of having been repaired only a few months ago.

DIGIWHIST would allow you to instantly identify the corresponding government contract (e.g. using geolocation), the construction company and the amount of public money involved.

In addition, you would be able to take a photo of the potholes and attach them to a contract or organisation profile, thus contributing to the evidence of poor quality.

By DIGIWHIST’s mobile app and web portal, you can thus file reports linked to the corresponding procurement information concerning contracts, winning companies and contracting bodies directly to the respective public authority. We do not, however, allow for general whistleblowing or uploading of documents.

Marrying ‘Big Data’ analytics with such a rich local knowledge of citizens, we believe, will drastically increase the capacity to hold governments and their contractors to account.

OBJECTIVES

DIGIWHIST’s goal is simultaneously to increase trust in governments and improve the efficiency of public spending across Europe. It will do this through the systematic collection, structuring, analysis, and broad dissemination of information on public procurement and on mechanisms that increase accountability of public officials in all EU and some neighbouring countries.

The project will compile and evaluate micro-level data using information from individual public procurement transactions and winning firms’ finance and ownership structures. This data will be linked to information on aggregate asset and income declarations data in order to detect potential conflicts of interest in the system of public procurement, and more specifically, to identify systemic vulnerabilities in the respective legislations and their implementation.

SCOPE

This project work will be carried out simultaneously across 35 jurisdictions:

28 EU Member States
the European Commission
Armenia
Georgia
Iceland
Norway
Serbia
Switzerland

CONSORTIUM PARTNERS

OUTPUTS

Collection of legal and regulatory norms on public procurement, conflict of interest, income and asset disclosure, and access to information
Collection of micro-level public procurement data combined with company and other datasets in an open, structured, and standardized format linked to company and public organisation data
Development of indicators measuring transparency, corruption risks, and administrative quality
Creation of a series of interactive web portals and mobile apps allowing for accessing data
Development of data collection algorithms regularly updating the database, keeping it relevant beyond the project’s lifetime

WATCHDOG TOOLS

digiwhist.eu

This is your hub to find more information on DIGIWHIST, partners and key researchers, as well as presentations on a few countries to showcase the transparency tools to be developed by the project. The resources page serves as a depository for all project publications and contains research papers, external news and events.

opentender.eu

Making Public Tenders More Transparent: national procurement portals in 35 jurisdictions and mobile apps providing three main functionalities:

Downloadable databases and documentation
Easy-to-use interactive analytic tools
Allowing users to contribute

We are looking for national partners to provide input on the portals at the development stage and help implement and sustain them.

EuroPAM.eu

The European Public Accountability Mechanisms is an observatory of European transparency legislation, similar to national procurement portals. This comprehensive and structured database on legal and regulatory norms covers the four following areas: I) public procurement II) conflict of interest III) income and asset disclosure IV) access to information and open data.

RISK Assessment Software

An easy-to-use risk assessment software for public authorities, which will be based on the on the data collected and the indicators developed by DIGIWHIST, to assess corruption risks in their public procurement procedures.