

Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s expenses-scandal experiment - baseonmars
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/

======
mustaphamond
As a programmer who works at a newspaper, I must say that this is totally
wicked.

For minimal investment you get a lot of people doing work for you - for free -
and a huge PR boost. Plus a bunch of nerd cred.

------
ramidarigaz
This is one of the more brilliant examples of a company getting their shit
together to do something awesome on VERY short notice.

The Guardian did an awesome job, and kudos to the developer, Simon Willison.

~~~
prawn
Agree - practical info as well for anyone working in a remotely similar field.
Very cool.

------
brown9-2
Interesting article (for an American who didn't even know about the UK
scandal).

How much of a coincidence is it that the main Guardian developer is also one
of the co-authors of Django? Article reads as a very nice endorsement of
Django.

~~~
adw
Well, hopefully simonw (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw>) will
drop in on this thread himself...

But the Guardian were certainly (justifiably) pretty delighted when Simon
started working there - check the press release:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/22/guardianmediagro...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/22/guardianmediagroup.digitalmedia)

The Guardian are really, really good people - and I'm not just saying that
because our startup works with them. The fact that they're working with HN-
reading startups says quite a bit anyway, though, doesn't it?

------
by
I'm impressed by the speed and frugal resources with which they implemented
the site and the project has obviously been a huge success, but it is not true
that it all had to be completed on that timescale. The release of the MP's
expenses has been expected for months, if not years. A delay to the launch of
the site would have invoked the 'isearch' law of project management:

"The worst delay to the completion of any project is the management decision
to start the project."

------
BearOfNH
Impressive story, despite the Django and EC2 plugs.

Of course this suggests a start-up project: a business service that does
crowdsourcing. The service would be customized for one task and would have
various forms of cheat detection (e.g., CAPTCHAs, user profiling, meta-
moderation and maybe some secret sauce).

Mechanical Turk is fine in many cases, but this story shows sometimes it's
better to roll your own (or have somebody else roll it for you).

