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.
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?
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."
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).
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.