The Guardian Gets Serious about Crowdsourcing MP’s Expenses

The Guardian has just launched a Crowdsourced platform to facilitate MP expense reviews by its readers.


We all heard about the first experiment to crowdsource a review of MP’s expenses. Now 458,832 pages of documents are getting reviewed by Guardian readers in an unprecedented effort to bust bad usage of taxpayers’ money. 25,000 people got involved with staggering results. ‘Only’ 240,581 pages to go!

The Guardian recently kickstarted the 2nd version of the project with a further 40,000 pages. For your inner geek enjoy this great post by Simon Willison which explains how they developed the platform for this complex project.

Note the part about asking the right question:

“The biggest mistake we made the first time round was that we asked the wrong question. We tried to get our audience to categorise documents as either “claims” or “receipts” and to rank them as “not interesting”, “a bit interesting”, “interesting but already known” and “someone should investigate this”. We also asked users to optionally enter any numbers they saw on the page as categorised “line items”, with the intention of adding these up later.”

Read the rest of the post.