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15 July 2009 2:08 PM
The Best Example of Crowdsourcing Yet?
This is a fascinating case study in crowd-sourced journalism:
Okay, question time: Imagine you're a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrivalsomehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country's biggest political scandal of the decade. They've had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.How do you catch up?
If you're the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.
Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days' help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.
Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it's the scale of the Guardian's project -- 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent -- that's breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.
That Q&A is here.
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