Supreme Audit Institutions Hack EUROSAI in Prague
At the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) of the Czech Republic in Prague, 68 programmers, data analysts and auditors from 21 countries gathered for the historic March 2020 International Hackathon of Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs)—an event promoting international SAI cooperation, which is a priority for the upcoming European Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) Presidency.
Using audit institution and open data, along with statistics from varying countries, teams intensively worked for two days developing applications and visualizations designed to support audit work and/or promote information sharing. Eleven projects were created, and an expert jury—representatives from the University of Economics in Prague, Czech Ministry of the Interior, Czech Statistical Office, private industry, as well as a notable Czech data journalist—chose three winning endeavors.
Top honors went to “WE12,” a visualization designed by delegates from Croatia, Estonia and France. Facilitating work with EUROSAI’s Database of Audits, “WE12” conveys data more analytically, provides an effective overview, illustrates audit quantities by country, and encourages SAIs to participate in the database and add to audit results.
“ROD4SAI,” designed by the Swedish-German team, took second place. Using Swedish Parliament open data and other metadata, “ROD4SAI” enables parliamentary data searches and comparison by topic. The application permits an extended database to be incorporated into a page containing an overview of reports, references, and other SAI Sweden-specific information mentioned in parliamentary speeches.
Third place was awarded to a Czech-designed concept called “AuditsToGAEther.” Working with data from SAI audit plans and statistics from several international institutions, such as the European Commission, European Statistics and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the program allows SAIs to mutually compare audits—both planned and under preparation.
Results from the International Hackathon of SAIs will be presented at the upcoming XI EUROSAI Congress, which will also feature a workshop devoted to this topic. For more information about the International Hackathon of SAIs and to access links to respective applications and event photographs, visit https://hackathon.eurosai2020.cz/.
