Recent & Upcoming Talks | Eviota

Sustainability measurement and reporting for the CFO

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0100

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

The discussion will be based on the accounting documents sent to us in advance. We will create a first version of a simplified sustainability report about your music or film company (for profit, or non-profit.) we will not share any financial information in the meetup, only visualizations of risk heatmaps, and common reporting and sustainability problems.

Why connect to your accounting software?

The accounting system already records all those economic events that may have an impact on how your company, directly or indirectly, causes greenhouse gas emissions, uses precious water, or may help to close (or, accidentally, widen) the gender pay gap.

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

New trends in controlling: the strategic and digital challenge

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:30:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

16:30: Meet and greet
17:00: Short presentation
17:15: Discussion of your reporting

Why connect to your accounting software?

As soon as the modification of the EU accounting directive take effect, you will have to connect your financial accounts to your sustainability reporting.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We start from the annual summary of supplier and buyer ledgers, or the trial balance that has this information.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries. It is easy to reconcile with US GAAP based documents.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity.

Open Data Day in The Hague 2023

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 13:00:00 +0100

Reprex is a finalist for The Hague Innovators Award 2022, and the prize of the audience, in the startup category with our respectable competitors, Sibö, WECO, STHRIVE and ECOBLOQ.

Reprex will organize events on the International Open Data Day. Save the date in your calendar.

LineCheck, Milano, IT

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 15:15:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Green Deal, this time for real

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex will participate in the panel about on Thursday, November the 24th at 3.15pm about environment and sustainability in the music industry and introduce Eviota, our simplified, connected financial and sustainability reporting tool.

At LineCheck X, you can find out more about our projects

You can get a free, total value chain based sustainability report. (Get in touch with us before 18 November)
We will demonstrate how you can eradicate packaging waste from your music events by making the packaging edible.
And you can find out how we are trying to find where energy is going down the sewage, literally, with Thermowatt and the Green Deal Data Observatory.

Beta test our sustainabilitiy reporting tool

We are looking for beta testers for our simplified sustainability report that is made from your trial balance. We sign and NDA about your accounting data if you test with us, and you can test with older data, too. Beta testing is free.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

The European Commission estimates that the cost of connecting sustainability and finanical reporting will cost on average €10,000 for corporations. We want to bring down the voluntary reporting costs for MSMEs below €500 euro to benefit from green loans, green insurance and other green financing.
It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollutions, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. We are also showcasing harmonized gender inequality data collection with our other project (see below.)

Digital Music Observatory: survive in the music business without a data engineer

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

We will introduce Surveyharmonies, a survey recycling and survey harmonization tool. You can participate in our international gender bias survey in January 2023. Our team will also participate in the KeyChange Creative Lab on Friday, 25 November at 11.00.
You can learn about our Listen Local project, which helps local music ecosystems remain visible on global platforms.
We will offer you a cup of tea or coffee in an edible cup.

Harmonizing surveys on gender (in)equaliaty

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you.

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. Read more on our blog.

Reprex Nominated for The Hague Innovators Award

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Reprex is a finalist for The Hague Innovators Award 2022, and the prize of the audience, in the startup category with our respectable competitors, Sibö, WECO, STHRIVE and ECOBLOQ.

The transition towards a sustainable and inclusive economy depends on collaboration. That is why we are bringing together startups, scale-ups, investors, policymakers, and other impact makers from around the world in The Hague for the 7th edition of ImpactFest.

Please share our video message on YouTube among your colleagues and friends.

With the The Hague Innovators Challenge, the municipality of The Hague challenges startups, scale-ups, and students to present their innovative ideas for global issues, as described in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

💜 We ask you, humbly, to support us with a vote or by sharing our appeal. We're part of the #opensource, #opendata, and #openscience movement that depends on your support to stay online and thriving, but many of our users or simply look the other way🤦🏻‍♀️https://t.co/Qcdh7saPpW
— Competition Data Observatory (@CompDataObs) November 6, 2022

The nominees receive a substantive program aimed at further development and the growth of the plan or organization. At the end of the substantive program, all nominees submit a definitive action plan and this is pitched to a professional jury. The jury chooses one winner per category.

Big Data for All: Building Collaborative Data Observatories

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:30:00 +0000

Reprex’s co-founder, Daniel Antal talked in the Eindhoven Innovation Café about these issues. You can watch the recorded version of the the livestream that starts at 5 minutes and 22 seconds:

This is a past event. Check out our forthcoming events or write to Daniel Antal or to antaldaniel. Or send an email.

The event invitation text and links

Big data and AI creates inequalities. It puts historically marginalized people, like ethnic minorities, and womxn, at a disadvantage. Because AI and checking on AI require plenty of data, usually only giant corporations, the wealthiest governments, and university entities can make it work for them. Reprex is a Hague-based, international startup that wants to impact various sustainable development goals by enabling smaller organizations to join their smaller datasets, use open data, create linked available data, and collaboratively make a change.

Reprex is a finalist for the Hague Innovation Award for impact startup (please 🙏, vote for us!). Daniel Antal, one of the co-founders, will talk about their approach to building an international coalition of music organizations to pool data and challenge data monopolies using organizational techniques, a collaboration ethos, and data from the open-source developer world.

Using the example of independent music creators, who often find themselves in a position where it is more expensive to claim their money from global platforms, he will talk about how to reduce inequalities in the world of big data and AI with collaboration on web 3.0. In the Q&A he will take questions on how to apply their know-how, and generally linked open data to other art+tech or creative segments or problems for which everybody is too small, like meeting the Paris Accord greenhouse gas targets bit by bit, small company by small company.

In the Q&A, we can discuss many things

How can Reprex help an individual creator in music, or in fashion and design, or any other area?
What sort of help it can give to researchers, research institutes, specialist consultancies, law firms, and other knowledge-based actors?

What sort of partners is Reprex looking for in Eindhoven?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Green Deal Data Observatory and simple, connected, financial and sustainability reporting for creative enterprises and others

Reprex: the impact startup

Check out our accomplishments since the foundation in 2020

Crunchconf: Open Data, New Gold Without the Rush

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 10:10:00 +0000

Every year, the EU announces that billions and billions of data are now “open” again, but this is not gold. At least not in the form of nicely minted gold coins, but in gold dust and nuggets found in the muddy banks of chilly rivers. There is no rush for it, because panning out its value requires a lot of hours of hard work. Our goal is to automate this work to make open data usable at scale, even in trustworthy AI solutions.

Summary

In his presentation, Daniel compared the current state of open data (including governmental open data and scientific open data) to a thrift store. You can often find bargains, or historical data that would be impossible to source from data vendors, but on a strictly as-is basis, without a catalogue, service, or guarantee. Therefore, working with open data requires a careful reprocessing, validation, and in many cases, frequent re-validation. Open data is often over-estimated: it is never a finished product, often it cannot even be downloaded, therefore it requires further investment to make it valuable. However, because most open data arrives from the governmental sector, you can tap into information sources where no market alternative exists. Open data in some cases may be a cheaper substitute to market vendors, but often it is an exclusive source of information that do not have any market vendors.

Sisyphus was punished by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. This is the price that project managers and analysts pay for the inadequate documentation of their data assets.

The practices related to the exploitation of open data are not only relevant in an open data context: these are good data ingestion and procurement practices for any third party data, and in large organizations, for any cross-departmental data. (See the blogpost: The Data Sisyphus.)
Case Study: Belgian Drought/Flood Risk Awareness, Financial Capacity & Hydrology a complex integration of various open data sources.

In the second part of the presentation, Daniel talked about our modern data observatory concept. We have reviewed about 80 functioning and already defunct international data collection programs. Data observatories, like Copernicus’ Observatory, are permanent infrastructure to record various domain-specific data, such as alternative fuel information, information on homelessness, or on the European music business. In our assessment, most of the EU, OECD, UNESCO recognized or endorsed observatories use obsolete technology and do not rely on the new achievements of data science. Reprex, our start-up offers an open source, open data based alternative solution to build largely automated data observatories. We believe that human judgement is needed in data curation, but processing, documentation and validation is best done by computers.

Case Study: Reprocessing geographical information with administrative boundary changes

At last, he presented a few development directions with our open-source software, mentioning our work withing the rOpenGov community. This part of the presentation was originally meant to open the way for a half-day open data workshop, but due to the current pandemic situation, the physical part of the conference and the workshops were not held.

The presentation largely included the topics of our Data & Lyrics blogpost: Open Data—The New Gold Without the Rush

Presentation Slides

See the presentation slides here.

Reprex Open Data Day 2021

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 15:30:00 +0200

Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business, and civil society. Reprex is a start-up that utilizes open data with open-source reproducible research: please challenge us with your data requests and participate in our web events.

The Reprex Open Data Day 2021 will be two informal conversations based on a series of run up introductory blogposts centered around two themes. Because important guests became ill in the last days, we are going to consolidate the two talks into one with less structure. We want to create an informal, inclusive, collaborative online event on International Open Data Day 2021. Please, grab a tea, coffee, or even a beer, and join us for an informal conversation. We hope that we will finish the afternoon with ideas on new, open-data driven collaborations.

9.30 EST / 15.30 CET: Open collaboration in business, policy and science. Creating evidence-based policy, business strategy or scientific research with small contributions with independent components with incentives. Short introduction with examples: joining environmental sensory data and public opinion data on maps; creating harmonized datasets across the Arab world. Survey harmonization, mapping, data products. Scaling up open collaboration: making small organizations competitive with big tech in the big data era. Data sharing, data pooling, data altruism and observatories. The new European trustworthy AI and data governance agenda.

You can click through a short presentation to familiarize yourself with our topics.

See you here.

Case studies:

We are connecting raw survey data about Climate Awareness in Eurobarometer surveys. Here is the reproduction code (intermediate to advanced R needed.) You should use the development version of our retroharmonize package at github.com/antaldaniel/retroharmonize
We are tracking changes in the boundaries of provinces, states, counties, parishes with our regions open source software – reproduction code here. You will need our regions package which is available on CRAN or in the rOpenGov GitHub repo.
We will talk about how to join this with air pollution data and put it on the map with Milos Popovic, who prepared this nice choropleth animation.

We will discuss data observatories (permanent data collection programs), open collaboration (open-source inspired way of cooperation among small and large independent actors) and data altruism.

Any questions: send Daniel a message on Keybase, Whatsapp or email.

Hello on International #OpenDataDay2021 from🌷 the Hague!
- We have brought some new data to the light about 🌡climate change awareness
- We created some tutorials how to harmonize survey and geographical data
- Join us at 9.30 EST/15.30 CET 👇https://t.co/7J7pvi3sPC #ODD2021 pic.twitter.com/DwkGQaDhW1
— dataandlyrics (@dataandlyrics) March 6, 2021