This project "Who owns your city" aims to fill a huge knowledge gap: While real estate prizes are immensely increasing in Germany, the ownership of real estates is anything but transparent. Property records are not public, therefore there is no public data. A few years ago, the German research network correctiv.org shaped the idea to crowd-source data to answer the question "Who owns your city". Since then, the idea has been picked up by several major newspapers in different cities.
Journalists use readers and citizens to research data. This also leas to a high reader engagement and to public discourse on this topic. Through the data, journalists are trying to find patterns interesting for their own city, but also to find unique characters. In this project, you won't necessarily find interactive tools or maps - they use the data to find and tell stories and to held the government accountable to change certain laws and regulations concerning real estate.
This is the link to one of the projects: "Who owns Lüneburg?" https://www.landeszeitung.de/wem-gehoert-lueneburg/ They were especially complimented about the way they interacted with users and citizens during the whole project. Unfortunately, it is all in German. In this article, one of the main campaigners talks about the value of conversation and crowd-sourcing to obtain data: https://medium.com/@FrauCsu/crowdsourcing-and-a-fundamental-need-for-debate-how-does-journalism-succeed-as-conversation-930287c89306