Held in the historic town of Mechelen, Belgium, Dataharvest has built a reputation for challenging the conventional conference blueprint. It’s designed to feel like one big editorial meeting: alongside training sessions and expert talks, collaborations are built, data is shared, and cross-border projects are conceived.
Investigative journalists, data analysts, and coders break down how they’ve followed the money, uncovered anomalies, and defended the public’s right to know — enabling attendees to walk away with techniques and methodologies they can apply to their own stories.
This year’s schedule is packed full of inspiring sessions and speakers, as well as hands-on workshops to improve your data skills. Below is a non-exhaustive round-up of the ones we’re keen to catch…
This session, run by Lorenz Naegeli from Zurich-based WAV Research Collective, will take you through a lengthy battle to access Swiss government information on arms exports. A decade after its initial Freedom of Information (FOI) request and the high court battle that ensued, Rüstungsreport now offers the most comprehensive arms exports database in a European country.
You’ll learn how they got their hands on the elusive data and built the database, as well as the many investigations that emerged from it — including how the Russian war machine relies on Swiss high-tech.
Oligarchs, corrupt officials, and criminals — or more generally, the “bad guys” — sit at the heart of most investigations. Who are these individuals, where are they based, and what data do they leave behind in open sources?
This session takes you through real-world case studies involving the likes of neo-Nazis, secret service officers-turned-kidnappers and unpeaceful UN peacekeepers. Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter Sebastian Erb will show you how to unlock information from email addresses, phone numbers and data leaks, and will walk you through investigations that started with a name and ended with a knock on a bad guy’s door.
3. How local LLMs can help you with sensitive information: a beginner’s guide
While AI is increasingly finding its way into newsrooms, many journalists are understandably reluctant to feed sensitive data into web-based tools. If you’ve ever thought, “Should I really be telling ChatGPT this?”, then this session’s for you.
Local LLMs offer a more secure alternative for journalists, as they run on your computer rather than on the web. This is an introductory workshop featuring our EveryPolitician lead, Johan Schujit, and data journalist and trainer Claus Hesseling. You’ll learn about what hardware you need to run local LLMs, the available frameworks, and which models are best suited to which tasks.
4. Gambling on the beautiful game: Following the money and suspect sponsorships in European football
European football — and the figures who orbit it — have had their fair share of financial scandals in the last decade. Investigate Europe’s Chris Matthews and Lorenzo Buzzoni will shed light on the dark underbelly of the “beautiful game”, covering opaque football sponsorships and the increasing influence of betting operators, investment companies, and crypto.
You’ll learn about the tools and techniques used, including how to make the most of corporate registries or VPNs, and how to pull on key investigative strands to unravel a range of cross-border stories.
5. So… you want to investigate crypto?
You’ve heard of follow the money, now it’s time to follow the crypto. ICIJ’s Coin Laundry investigation exposed how crypto companies have propped up a shadow economy that lavishly profits from crime — uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illicit funds linked to suspected criminals, including a Cambodian conglomerate that facilitated money laundering for hackers and scammers.
In this session, Delphine Reuter and Miguel Fiandor from ICIJ’s data team will show you how to uncover similar stories. You’ll learn about the tools and techniques used to investigate major crypto exchanges and how to find leads within a trove of data.
6. Using AIS data platforms to investigate shipping and shadow fleets
Our round-up wouldn’t be complete without a session on the shadow fleet. This one provides a practical guide to using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to investigate maritime anomalies, illustrated with two case studies involving the Russian shadow fleet.
Wiebke Denkena, from Greenpeace Germany, and freelance investigative journalist Thomas Simon Mattia will demonstrate how to use AIS data and vessel metadata to assess the environmental risks posed by shadow fleet traffic. They’ll also walk through a case study of a new ship-to-ship (STS) transfer hub off the coast of Sicily that has been involved in multiple sanctions breaches.
Mini sessions to improve your data skills:
Fun sessions for hackers and OSINTers
- FunForensics: What can you squeeze out of a second-hand laptop? (Limited spaces)
- “The Mechelen Connection” (Escape room)
