Open-source scores another win for journalism

[monsterstack]

I read this (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/) [niemanlab.org] article, which has a look at the technology behind the Guardian's crowd-sourcing of the MPs' expenses scandal.


Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking.

...

As for the software, it was all open-source, freely available to the Guardian — and to anyone else who might want to imitate them. Willison hopes to organize his work in the next few weeks.

All in all it's great to see somebody with an established community mobilise that community to do something pretty spectacular. I was really impressed with the costs they incurred too. Fifty quid? that's almost stupidly cheap and accessible. It makes me wonder what other things we can put crowd-sourcing to. Any big news with a lot of raw data could benefit from something like this. What do you lot think?

[MikeTheC]

That's cool. I remember doing a paper for Comp I and one of the things I wrote about and cited was this Norwegian guy who was introducing crowd-sourcing to the policy-making process in his country.

You always need leadership. Mob rule doesn't work. However, you also need to make the process of governership and law making accessible to the governed.

What I really wish, though, is that the media (and this is a fool's quest, I know) would actually "get" the competition to Microsoft's products and report tech news with accuracy. Meh, who am I kidding?

*puts the crack pipe down*

[monsterstack]

That's cool. I remember doing a paper for Comp I and one of the things I wrote about and cited was this Norwegian guy who was introducing crowd-sourcing to the policy-making process in his country.

You always need leadership. Mob rule doesn't work. However, you also need to make the process of governership and law making accessible to the governed.

What I really wish, though, is that the media (and this is a fool's quest, I know) would actually "get" the competition to Microsoft's products and report tech news with accuracy. Meh, who am I kidding?

*puts the crack pipe down*

Most people I know are very distrustful of the media, anyway. It's common knowledge that with enough money you can get pretty much any old garbage published. In my newsreader I often get press releases streamed in about tech stuff. The journalism pieces that inevitably start trickling in afterwards are very often just reworded versions of the press release itself. Bummer.