monsterstack
June 24th, 2009, 02:46 PM
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?
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?