Who owns your city? The crowd-powered data investigation entitled Who owns Hamburg? aims to bring more transparency in the housing market in Germany. With the help of thousands of citizens, we investigated the main driving forces for rising rental prices. We used our our online tool CrowdNewsroom to provide a space for tenants and owners to contribute with valuable information about housing owners and related stories. These contributions were centralised into a database that journalists can use to analyse the data and investigate the big story behind the single stories. We have already expanded the project to more cities in Germany and offer our tool to other newsrooms for cooperation.

In this talk we will present the lessons learned, how we built our tool, how we partnered with local media to lead a large campaign and how this investigation raised a debate in the city about possible solutions based on facts.

Organised in association with Correctiv.

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