So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.
Meanwhile, that process is doing much more than just finding ‘stories’. It’s generating data: the date, the amount, the type of expense, the type of document. When this stage is finished, The Guardian will have a database that will allow people to filter, mix and combine the expenses data in different ways.
It’s also about telling a ‘story’ in a different way. There’s an element of game mechanics in the site – that progress bar (shown above) compels you to bring the site to completion (it strangely reminds me of the Twitter game Spymaster). This makes it more engaging than a made-for-print exclusive – as I wrote about Help Me Investigate, this isn’t ‘citizen journalism’: it’s micro-volunteering. And when you volunteer, you tend to engage.
And when you treat news as a platform rather than a destination, then people tend to spend more time on your site, so there’s an advertising win there.
Finally, we may see more stories, we may see interesting mashups, and this will give The Guardian an edge over the newspaper that bought the unredacted data – The Telegraph. When – or if – they release their data online, you can only hope the two sets of data will be easy to merge.
[...] who is winning in the data wars? Here’s what Paul Bradshaw had to say earlier this morning: “We may see more stories, we may see interesting mashups, and this will give The Guardian an [...]
[...] no interest takes 3 clicks. That’s two too many. I agree with much of what That Canadian Girl and Paul Bradshaw have written but this is only day two and we’re something like 10% through the task in hand. The [...]
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[...] Paul Bradshaw (aka Online Journalism Blog) observes of the Guardian experiment: This isn’t ‘citizen [...]
[...] on Twitter trying to find a good way to crowdsource analysis of the documents (this was before The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool went [...]
[...] who is winning in the data wars? Here’s what Paul Bradshaw had to say earlier this morning: “We may see more stories, we may see interesting mashups, and this will give The Guardian an [...]
[...] The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism … So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far. [...]
[...] Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has already applauded The Guardian’s crowdsourcing MPs’ expenses tool for allowing readers to act as their own investigative [...]
This is a good interface, but the volunteerism seems to have dried up less than halfway through the project. Do any Guardianistas reading have lessons they’d like to share with the group?
Good point. Figures as of today (July 2): We have 457,153 pages of documents. 22,668 of you have reviewed 194,270 of them. Only 262,883 to go…
Will try to track this…
[...] at it again. Following the very domestic issue of MPs’ expenses, The Guardian’s latest experiment with crowdsourcing goes international: Iran. “We want [...]
[...] form as possible so that readers may form their own judgements (such as the Telegraph and the Guardian in the UK have done with MPs’ [...]
Update: as of today (Oct 13) “458,832 pages of documents. 24,078 of you have reviewed 212,807 of them. Only 246,025 to go…”
[...] The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism … – So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far. [...]
[...] trends towards collaboration in sites like Help Me Investigate. As Paul Bradshaw commented on his Online Journalism Blog: This isn’t ‘citizen journalism’: it’s micro-volunteering. And when you volunteer, you tend [...]
[...] Daily Telegraph puts the audience to work to analyze [...]
[...] techniques were coincidentally explored at the same time by The Guardian’s MPs’ expenses app (Bradshaw, 2009). This provided an interface for users to investigate MP expense claim forms that used many [...]