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