MPs’ expenses, again
There’s been a lot of disappointment after the latest, official, release of MPs’ expenses. The data has been heavily censored to hide sensitive details, but also removing a lot of the more controversial claims. As the Daily Mash put it: “Experts stressed that by publishing a censored version of the expenses the MPs had somehow managed to achieve the impossible and made the whole thing even worse.”
There are also something like 100 000 documents currently available, so if you actually want to look through any of it then you’re in for along slog. Unless, of course, you harness the power of crowds…
The Guardian have posted an interesting feature that lets its users browse through scanned pages of handwritten expenses claims, filtered by MP or party, and then tag that page with data about the content and its significance, and whether it’s an above-the-line claim or something that needs to be looked into by the paper’s staff. Like the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, this is great way to process a massive amount of non-machine-readable data; by getting thousands of people to perform these easy-for-people, hard-for-computers (‘Human Intelligence Tasks’) jobs you can quickly and efficiently create a searchable, sortable set of data.
It’s certainly a popular idea – the number of human-searched documents is climbing by thousands every couple of minutes. And there’s something about the idea I like, as well. Using technology to connect thousands of people around the world and bringing them together to achieve a task that technology alone can’t manage… and all for the purpose of bringing to task the people in power. Now that’s democracy!