[okfn-labs] Crowdcrafting + reference lists = crowdsource lists of stuff?

Thu Feb 21 15:26:36 UTC 2013

Agreed that canonical reference data should be authoritative rather than
opinion based. ;-)

I'm talking more about using standard reference lists (e.g. counties in the
world, cities or counties in the UK) to then generate new lists which may
not be 'reference data' per se - like 'Twitter account for every local
education authority' or 'URL of national contact point for multinational
corporation X'.

Generally this would be a way to get a piece (or several pieces) of data
for every item you had on a given list. A recent use case would be wanting
to get the Twitter accounts for a given list of climate change denial think
tanks [1].

What do you think? Useful/not useful? Perhaps Google Docs is the easiest
and best way to do this for now?

J.

[1] See:
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/school-of-data/2013-February/000168.html

On 21 February 2013 14:56, Friedrich Lindenberg <
friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:

> Isn't crowd-sourcing this stuff pretty much what wikidata does?
>
> For reference data, I'm still a big defender of "one neat authoritative
> source" rather than "everyone's opinion" - the whole point there is that it
> should be as stable as humanly possible rather than a constant negotiation
> :)
>
> Still, keen to see how this goes!
>
> - Friedrich
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been recently wondering whether it might be possible to use
>> Crowdcrafting to crowdsource lists of things. A fairly standard case would
>> be finding an X for every Y, where Y is something like:
>>
>>   * Every country in the world
>>   * Every city in a given country
>>   * Every state/region in a given country
>>   * Every public body in given country
>>
>> For the X you might want to have one field for the piece of information
>> that you're after and another field for the URL that you found it on.
>>
>> For Y, there might be some standard reference lists that you could use
>> (like lists of countries around the world, or cities in a given country),
>> or you might also want to upload a list yourself.
>>
>> I guess a publicly editable Google Docs spreadsheet might well be the
>> best thing to do in the first instance, but thought that it also could be
>> interesting to have things like % done, possibility of multiple respondents
>> to verify a given response, etc.
>>
>> Could Crowdcrafting easily be used for this sort of thing?
>>
>> J.
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg<http://twitter.com/jwyg>
>> Director of Policy and Ideas
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> | @okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
>> Support our work: okfn.org/support
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Friedrich Lindenberg | OpenSpending & OKFN Labs | @pudo
> http://openspending.org | http://okfnlabs.org | http://pudo.org
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
Director of Policy and Ideas
The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> |
@okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
Support our work: okfn.org/support
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