The Mob rules – Crowdsourcing MPs expense claims

There is a growing importance of a new kind of journalism, participation between trained, experienced, professional journalists and the citizen.

Trumped by the Daily Telegraph in exposing the British MPs expense scandal the Guardian is fighting back in a unique way using crowdsourcing (using the talents of the crowd) to sift through 70,000 receipts and expenses claims submitted by MPs.

The Guardian has developed an “Investigate Your MP” tool with the idea that “many hands make light work”. The best themes that emerge will be published in the newspaper, with credits for the author.

The application allows users to point out whether a claim from a set of PDF images realised by Parliament is interesting - such as a duck island - and worthy of further scrutiny.

This is very similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which uses the power of crowds by enabling companies to outsource manual tasks for a small financial sum to workers at a lesser cost than hiring staff to do tasks computers struggle with.

The difference is instead of being used as a semi exploitive commercial enterprise, crowdsourcing is exposing MPs abuses and improving governance in the UK.

It’s also fun. There is a voyeur feeling in wading through pages of MPs claims and discovering how much of - our money - they have spent on their new bathrooms.

Hats off to the Daily Telegraph in breaking the scandal but it cannot be good that a single newspaper with its own bias continues to set the agenda by dripping feeding stories into the public domain.

In engaging thousands of people, passionate to get something done the Guardian is showing how citizen contributions can compliment professional journalism by uncovering stories that the political class would prefer never to see the light of day.