Lessons from the Guardian’s Crowdsourcing Experiment

Back in July, I noted on this blog how the Guardian newspaper was using crowdsourcing to analyze the mountain of documents that had been released in relation to the UK House of Commons MPs expense scandal. Since the documents were generally image scans of expense claim forms, with handwritten data and receipts, machine interpretation was impossible. If needles were going to be found in this haystack, someone would have to look at each page. Rather than have Guardian employees do this, this crowdsourcing experiment asked Guardian readers to do this scanning. Now that the exercise has run for a while, it’s good to check back in on how it’s work and what lessons there are for future similar exercises.

Advertisement

CANARIE Funding Announcement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 13, 2009
CANARIE INVESTS MILLIONS MORE IN CUTTING-EDGE CANADIAN RESEARCH: Nine new IT projects win $10.5 million in funding

(Banff, Alberta) CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network, is pleased to announce at the Summit 09 international cyber infrastructure conference, the second-round of winners in CANARIE’s flagship IT research funding program. These nine winners, from research facilities across Canada, represent some of the very best and brightest IT research initiatives in the country.

Absent Citizens: Michael J. Prince Book Launch & Talk

Michael Prince is Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy in the Faculty of Human and Social Development, University of Victoria. In his new book, Absent Citizens: Disability Politics and Policy in Canada, Prince describes how disability exists in the shadows of public awareness and at the periphery of policy making.

Brushes with Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson jointly won the Nobel Prize for economics today for separate work on governance and institutions for resolving conflict especially (in Ostrom’s case) in common-property settings. I was first turned-on to her work by Rod Dobell (see, e.g., “Social Capital and Social Learning in a Full World“) and Darcy Mitchell (see, e.g., “When Communities Collide“) in the mid-90s. Ostrom’s work influenced some of my work around 2000, especially an article I wrote called “On the Saturday Morning Soccer Field: A Habermasian Perspective on the British Columbia Commission on Resources and Environment.”

BC – Washington Framework for Transportation, Competitiveness and Prosperity

No bonus points awarded for guessing that Gordon Campbell was behind that title (his first choice was “SharedBorderNow”). The British Columbia Premier (He who takes wonkishness to the next level, and then some) has signed this Framework agreement with his Washington State counterpart, Governor Chris Gregoire, at the conclusion of the joint Cabinet meeting between Washington and British Columbia, held October 9 in Seattle. (Holding the meeting in Seattle means the Premier can avoid that awkward moment when he welcomes the Governor and her Cabinet to the “Best Place on Earth”.)

Collaborative Urban Planning: Applications of the Auckland Experience to Vancouver Island

Notes from a Director’s Dialogue
Tuesday, October 6, 2009, 12:00- – 1:30 p.m.
Room A373 (Tom Shoyama Boardroom)
School of Public Administration
Human and Social Development Building
University of Victoria – Victoria, BC, Canada

Collaborative Urban Planning: Applications of the Auckland Experience to Vancouver Island