Iran election: faces of the dead and detained | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout

They’re at it again. Following the very domestic issue of MPs’ expenses, The Guardian’s latest experiment with crowdsourcing goes international: Iran.

“We want to put a face to each of those hundreds – possibly thousands – killed or arrested since the Iranian election.

“Where we have a picture we have used it. However, our information is incomplete. If you have a picture of any one of these individuals or information we do not have please click below.”

Simple.

(Oh, and there’s also a spreadsheet of data and the invitation to post visualisations to the Datastore’s Flickr group.)

Coincidentally, a very similar project was mentioned by Arianna Huffinton at yesterday’s Activate Summit organised by… The Guardian.

NPR: Turning The Camera Around: Health Care Stakeholders is basically an image of healthcare lobbyists with rollovers that tell you who they are and how much they have spent. The explanatory paragraph ends:

“We’ve begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going. Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is — e-mail dollarpolitics@npr.org or let us know via Twitter@DollarPolitics.”

The piece, Huffington explained, went viral, which is pretty key for most crowdsourcing projects (and, by the way, for engagement, democracy… you know: the small things).

Meanwhile, the New York Times is also doing a little crowdsourcing on Iran:

“The New York Times would like readers in Iran to help us document the post-election unrest in Iran. Please upload your photographs using the form below, letting us know when and where the photographs were taken and whether you wish to remain anonymous.”

Or is it just citizen journalism? I guess it depends what they do with the material – it could be a lot clearer. 

More? Here are the webpages I’ve tagged ‘crowdsourcing’ on Delicious

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There’s a great interview with NPR’s Andy Carvin over at Poynter where he talks about their coverage of Hurricane Gustav. It’s a classic example of what I’ve previously called ‘Distributed Journalism’, and a lesson for any news organisation in how news production has changed:

“For Hurricane Gustav, he has led 500 volunteers putting together the Gustav Information Center, which includes a Wiki and a site called “Voices of Gustav.” The Voices site is set up to accept calls from people who have been displaced, with the idea that volunteers would transcribe the calls and post them online in a searchable format.  That effort tapped into the Utterz Web site.  The effort includes three Twitter feeds including GustavAlerts, which is a breaking weather feed. GustavNews follows news stories and GustavBlogs focuses on how blogs are reporting the storm.  Another another team of 50 or so volunteers is working on transcribing reports from ham radio operators and other radio scans.

“Carvin tells me that he thinks of Twitter as a citizen generated wire service while the wiki is more like a reference desk.”

Particularly interesting is that the Gustav Information Center does not feature “an NPR logo, a link to NPR or any mention of NPR at all.” This is particularly important in making a space ‘owned’ by the users. Likewise: “by utilizing free tools for building wikis, social networking interfaces, Twitter feeds, Google Maps, etc, we’re able to mobilize folks to complete very detailed work and collaborate as equals.”

Also worth pointing out is the highlighting of atypical disaster volunteers: the geeks.

This video from GRITtv has a bit more information:

Final word:

“It’s also important to not fear sending people away from your own website when necessary. Even as NPR builds up its internal social networking infrastructure, for example, we still plan to continue reaching out communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc, because that’s where those communities spend most of their time and are comfortable working with each other. They have unique infrastructures and dynamics that could never be fully replicated within a news org, so you need to be prepared to be working across multiple networks and connect the dots. And when a story breaks quickly and you need help, you need to act quickly, too. Use whatever tools are available to get the public involved helping you pull it all together.”

Worth reading in full.

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