[okfn-discuss] Fwd: crowdsourcing regulatory data

Fri Feb 19 18:48:02 UTC 2010

Below is a new project idea from OKF board member Martin Keegan.
Project still needs a name.

This is exactly the kind of thing it would be great to put in the incubator!

Jonathan

---------- Forwarded message ----------

I want to be able to get international comparative data crowdsourced. This
would be useful for all sorts of things, but my motivation is helping
civil society groups better target their activities.

I propose a system which works as follows: a moderator decides he wants a
dataset mapping country names to some boolean, such as the answer to the
question "Is it possible for an association to get a bank account without
incorporating?". He goes to some well-known location, such as
http://countrydata.okfn.org/, and creates his one-line questionnaire, and
is given a URL of the form http://countrydata.okfn.org/club-bank-accounts,
which he then publishes, doubtless on some sod-awful microblogging
service.

We also make him specify a time period during which the questionnaire is
active (and squirrel this away to shove in our metadata package at the
end).

Visitors to the website can then fill in the questionnaire in relation to
their own country. The website requests but do not require identification.
The moderator can zap responses he adjudges to be wrong. A quick and dirty
chart of countries colourcoded on a world map is provided (either to the
moderator or to all visitors - not sure), though this only makes sense
where there's a single question in the questionnaire.

Once the time is up, the dataset is published on that website and
registered in CKAN.

Data types which should be permitted in v1 are booleans and floats / ints,
though in the latter case the moderator needs to specify acceptable ranges
(needed for validity checks and the gradient on the maps). In v2 we permit
enumerations (that is, a forced choice between responses specified by the
moderator).

Mk

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg