Hackers gathered in Brussels to investigate the work of the European parliament. Photograph: Tomas Spragg/European Movement Photograph: Tomas Spragg/European Movement

It is the end of a long weekend in Brussels and 36 Europeans are gathered in a room where they have spent the past 48 hours - leaving only to sleep for short periods and to find food and energy drinks.

This is a hackathon, an event where computer programmers join with designers, journalists and activists to create digital projects at high speed. Hack days can be focused on using a particular application, programming language or are used to create a new product for a particular company.

The hackers gathered here are not the criminal sort who attack computer security or intercept voicemails, but believers in open government and in using technology for good.

Most are volunteers who have travelled from countries across the European Union. They want to create something that holds the European parliament to account and encourages citizens to vote in the elections in May.

Computers are branded with stickers that warn “this is an NSA-monitored device” and an Orwellian sign on the door reads “ignorance is strength”. When introductions begin, a hacker from Hungary shouts: “We want to dig dirt!” and is received with cheers.

Europe's 'lack of information'

The Europarl Hackathon has been organised by Xavier Dutoit, who works with NGOs to help them use technology. What started as a plan to get a few friends together in his hometown turned into a continental event, oversubscribed with 200 applicants.

They are united, he says, by what he calls “the hacker spirit – everybody here is thinking the same thing: I know that something is broken and I know I can do something to fix it”.

When the European parliament was first elected in 1979, voter turnout across the EU was 62%. It has been in steady decline ever since, with turnout in the UK consistently well below the European average. This is in spite of the fact that more proposed amendments are introduced into law at the European level than in any national parliament.

When it comes to national elections in the UK, anger against the political class is most often cited as the reason for voter apathy. Xavier Dutoit believes that Europe suffers from the opposite problem: a lack of information.

“There is a huge gap between the power of the European parliament and citizens’ knowledge of it. It frightens me. At the national level, we hold politicians to account. But the only people holding MEPs accountable are in the Brussels bubble. Can you name your MEP? Can you name a single MEP?”

The EU's first database of declarations of interest

Some of the hackers here are interested in challenging specific laws or issues. One group has built a tool that enables users to assess the green agenda of their MEPs, on a ranking from "climate champion" to "climate killer".



An online tool that shows how green each MEP is. Photograph: Laurence Watson Photograph: Guardian

Another group has created a campaign website to challenge the EU on its copyright laws, out of a frustration with being unable to access YouTube videos in Germany: “this is not a national issue. The internet does not have borders”, says developer Florian Stascheck.

The largest group of hackers has spent the weekend clustered in a separate room, scrutinising hundreds of individual PDF documents, which make up the declarations of interest of the 766 members of the European parliament. Each document, a scanned PDF handwritten in the language of the MEP, must be manually translated and added to a spreadsheet.

To the hackers' knowledge, it is the first time anyone has tried to systematically hold MEPs to account in this way. They are creating the first common database of its kind in the EU.

The requirement for MEPs to declare their financial sources and potential conflicts of interest became mandatory for the first time in 2012, part of the new code of conduct introduced by the European parliament. The ruling followed the cash-for-laws scandal, in which four MEPs were accused of accepting money to influence legislation. Austrian MEP Ernst Strasser was jailed for bribery in January 2014.

Dumping PDFs online 'is not open government'

But many NGOs are angry that the parliament shows no will to implement the code and it is clear that some MEPs do not take the exercise seriously. The Danish MEP Jens Rohde lists his occupation as "master of the universe" while many others have neglected to fill in any information at all.

Ronny Patz, who works for Transparency International, has lead the project over the weekend. “Why do we, as citizens and volunteers, have to come and spend the entire weekend in Brussels liberating handwritten Lithuanian and Greek just to hold our representatives to account?" he says. "The information goes through the hands of the parliament’s adminstrators - dumping PDFs on a website is not open government.”

Although the project is not yet complete, the hackers are forming a campaign that uses technology to make the EU accountable. Their parting commitment is an open letter addressed to the secretary general calling for a more access to a parliament that is open in practice.

Dan O’Huiginn is leaving the hackathon to take an eight hour flight back to Sarajevo. He says he will miss the hacking community.

“There is technological knowledge here but there is also an atmosphere of idealism," he says. "In Bosnia, no one believes they can change how corrupt and incompetent politics is.

"Here, people just write a bit of code and do something about it.”

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