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Newspaper Crowdsources 700,000-Page Investigation of MP Expenses
projector writes with an interesting project from the UK: "The Guardian are crowd-sourcing the investigation of 700,000 pages of UK MPs' expenses data. Readers are being invited to categorize each document, transcribe the handwritten expenses details into an online form and alert the newspaper if any claims merit further investigation. 'Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked "investigate this!" and we'll take a closer look.'"
Do I need to say more?
But I'm pretty sure that almost ANYONE in their shoes would have done the same...it's called the human condition. You are given the power to abuse something and you think nobody will notice....so you do. Flame away but i probably would have.
I argue because it's the internet....and I can.
Two things about crowdsourcing:
1) It is terribly efficient.
2) It solicits input from the public.
Interestingly enough, neither of those are directly related to truth.
Why don't our corporate controlled, drug-addled newspapers act like their British counterparts?
Ours is a direct republic, so in theory, our press must be more active in exposing the illegal, false and corrupt expense accounts of the numerous Ted Stevens clones that walk the same halls that Lincoln and Jackson walked.
Why don't our media have a daily expose show at 7 PM detailing the latest claims our diseased congressmen and senators claim as expenses?
British press is so Cool!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
No doubt pro-Bush renegade hackers will already be attacking the site, keen to repeat their Clark County anti-Guardian campaign by deleting any data that casts suspicion on right-wing MPs.
As it happens though the claim for the duck island does not appear in the official expenses data as it's blacked out along with, I would guess, almost anything else likely to cause embarrassment for the MP.
Apparently once the fees office had blacked out the bits they didn't think the public should see the MPs had several months to look at their own claims and recommend any other sections they didn't think should be public so when you look at the actual claims, and some MPs are much worse than others, there is an awful lot you can't see.
What really pisses me off is the string of MPs saying
"Well my claim was completely within the rules and I have done nothing wrong however I now realise the rules were horribly wrong and fundamentally flawed so what we need to do is change the rules to make them stricter."
No ! What you need to do is behave in an honest and honourable fashion and not try to screw the system for as much as you think you can get away with.
I commend the idea and the effort. But there are 700,000 documents, each with how many pages each? It's an interesting idea but will the crowd's enthusiasm hold up?
The mySociety folk that created TheyWorkForYou, PledgeBank and others have their own MP expenses site and also want your help. See here: http://whattheyclaimed.com/
Anyone who has seen the expenses will know that the important stuff is all blanked out.
There are pages that are entirely black in there.
There are pages that say things like:
"Dear xx, here is your invoice of £2,500 for the following work:" ...and then everything below it blanked out.
The BBC had a copy of Gordon Brown's uncensored expenses document and compared it to the official version. The uncensored version said "£99.00 Sky TV", the censored version just said "£99.00".
The whole thing is a farce, we need to get the uncensored version - there was suggestion yesterday the Telegraph who obtained the leaked uncensored versions would release them to the public today but I've heard nothing more since.
There are some gems in the official version, under MP Ian Cawsey's expenses I noticed he'd sponsored a local football team £300, and then charged the tax payer for that sponsorship via the expenses system, but I feel if we start this now we'll only need to start right over when we do finally get hold of the uncensored version.
I suppose there's an argument finding breaches in the official release will allow us to apply more pressure to get the uncensored version though maybe? I'd have thought people's time would be better spent actually pressuring for the release though of the uncensored versions overall and then do something like this.
Still, good work to the Guardian for working with what we have at least, you can't fault them for that.
Just WOW. Look at all the shenanigans they dug out in just one day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/jun/18/mps-expenses-houseofcommons
Great idea and good job Guardian.
They will get 690,000 pages tagged investigate this. Given an open and apparently unchecked money source the MP's will have pushed every last thting they can through the system. I've heard a few people on the news saying that we should think ourselves lucky because corruption in other (developing) nations is so much worse. That has got to be one of the most idiotic arguments I've ever heard. I'm not about to advocate stringing them up but there are at least a few cases that should be investigated by the police and numerous others that should result in sackings. I suspect though that the police will never become involved and so far I don't think anyone has been sacked (quite a few have jumped before being pushed).
I don't think anyone expected their MP to be whiter than white. People would have turned a blind eye to claims for a few extra miles traveled and a bit of food and maybe even some modest second home improvement / repair but some of these MPs have been claiming for houses they didn't even own! IMHO the worst revelation is that it would appear that they even changed the law so that their scond homes were exempt from capital gains tax a luxury that, AFAIK, nobody else can say they have and in a booming house market a loophole that has netted many MPs sizable amounts of money.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it already is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M for those who'd like to see the original
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
This is the censored database, there is nothing interesting or even slightly embarrassing left in here. Almost all of the scandals exposed by the Telegraph from their database has been censored out of this one, and there are huge amounts of other blanked out parts. I'm afraid that we will never know just how bad this got.
"Also, the Guardian's claim that there's a receipt for a duck-house in there is false, as that claim was rejected and no rejected claims have been released officially."
The Guardian doesn't make that claim, the summary does. The Gaurdian actually backs up your statement that it was rejected...
"...he admitted claiming £1,645 for a floating "duck island" in his garden...[snip]...a claim for a floating duck island designed to protect his ducks from foxes. This was rejected by the Commons authorities."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
He's quite an enigma this Barack Obama. Don't you think?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Register is the IT version of The Sun; A Red Top tabloid.
Not quite. The Register deliberately copies several traits from the tabloids. The red masthead is the most obvious of these. They also use a lot of slang, and run plenty of trashy comedy stories. However, these are always reported in a very cynical and/or tongue-in-cheek fashion, not at all like the crap you read in newspapers like The Sun.
What's more, when it comes to their tech-related articles (the majority of their output) they often publish some very interesting pieces of investigative journalism. They put out some slightly dodgy op-ed occasionally, they don't always nail their stories, and their copy editing is poor (rarely a story without a typo) but overall the site is an entertaining, and usually highly informative, read.
This is just an attempt by the Guardian to steal the thunder of the Daily Telegraph, who have been at the centre of this by publishing uncensored figures.
And what's the point of 'investigating' this stuff when we know the Telegraph has all the answers? Well, I'm sure the guys at the Guardian will publish the results of their so-called 'investigations' when the Telegraph release the rest of their data...
Apparently this site runs Django, and was built in but a few days. Great show of open source power there! Worth a mention IMHO.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The mySociety folk have done some really great work. They run TheyWorkForYou which gives you detailed reports on how your MP voted and everything they've said in Parliament, and WriteToThem, which provides a very easy way of writing to your representatives and collating information about how often MPs respond to letters. They are also responsible for the petitions.gov.uk site. It's really great to see them getting involved here.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do we really need buzzwords for everything. "Crowd sourcing" isn't really new- it's called team work.
*sigh*
Do you put the first person you meet on the street in charge of the police force? Toss a coin to see who should be chief judge (and select from EVERYONE)?
No.
We're supposed to select these people as the best.
Or is EVERYONE a self-serving cheating lying bastard, no exceptions?
We even give them power and freedom we don't give other ordinary people.
When they say "Trust us, but we can't tell you" like the 48 day retention or the Iraq War "information" we are supposed to trust them because they are supposed to be Honourable Members. Yet when we see them skimming profits, we're supposed to see them as Just Like Us.
Well, if they're Just Like Us, how about giving them no more respect than any of us, no more by on the laws and rules the the others Just Like Us have to work with.
No Political Privilege.
No Grace And Favour.
No Parliamentary Confidentiality.
No Power but what we have as ordinary citizens.
A page reload for every mouse click and scroll down every time because of all the useless crap at the top of the page? They'd get ten times more results if they employed somebody who know basic HTML 3.0 instead of all this new-fangled stuff.
No sig today...
He's a politician, that sounds like a genuine work expense.