Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The opening of the conference will take place in the Aula Hanswijk (Z1.13, on the first floor), and will be streamed into the Aula Donche (Z1.15, first floor).

Drawing on real cross-border investigations from OCCRP's Research & Data team, this session will share the tools, techniques, and workflows the team relies on daily to support hundreds of journalists around the world. From geolocating images and tracking assets to social media investigations and smart browser hacks, this session will offer a practical, field-tested OSINT toolkit.

With shrinking newsroom budgets and a constant stream of "must-have" tools, it's harder than ever for journalists to know what OSINT tools might actually be worth using or paying for. This session cuts through the noise and focuses on what works right now.

Whether conference attendees are new to open-source research or looking for a sharp refresher, they will leave with concrete skills, trusted tools, and time-saving methods they can immediately apply to their own investigations.

This session will explain the methods behind an investigation into the European Defence Fund (EDF) that uncovered how structural weaknesses allowed Israel’s largest state-owned weapons manufacturer - directly involved in the war in Gaza- to receive millions in EU funding, despite rules meant to support only European companies. The reporters will explain how they identified relevant projects and traced the flow of funds.

They will break down our data work (scraping the tenders portal and building a dataset) and guide you through how the EDF policy works, its loopholes, legal framework, and how to work with the EU’s defence expenditure processes.

In today’s political environment of increasing militarisation, where a huge share of EU funding is directed toward defence, journalists need to learn how to access and analyse European public defence tender data, understand the EDF tendering and decision-making process, and see how European governments fund and benefit from defence projects.

This session will demonstrate how combining data work, investigative reporting, cross-border collaboration, and legal analysis can uncover hidden practices, reveal intentional gaps and inconsistencies that favour the arms industry over EU principles and international law.

This session will cover how to use trade information for investigative reporting, from the theory behind commercial flows to its application to real investigative cases. The first part of the presentation will focus on the "dictionary" that is crucial to read and interpret trade data. Then, it will explore how to source official customs statistics for free, understand crucial variables in import-export sheets, and find workarounds to expensive third-party commercial providers.

Examples from real investigations will show the power of using trade data in covering topics such as deforestation, sanctions evasion, the military industry, cocaine trafficking, but also much more "ordinary" commercial flows that might be linked to pollution/environmental issues. Throughout the session, participants will be welcome to bring examples of commodities they would like to track and guided in a few hands-on exercises to familiarise themselves with finding and understanding this kind of data.

The session is suitable for beginners. No technical/coding experience is needed, but the participants should be familiar with spreadsheets.