Lambdacurry

Volunteer data mining of governmental data grants


Following an initiative by the Sunlight Labs in the US, I think we have a great opportunity to combine Right-To-Information, volunteers and Web 2.0 technologies to make the government much more transparent.

The initiative is part of a project by the U.S Transparency Corps, a non-governmental watchdog organisation, to create a technological platform to enable thousands of volunteers to manually analyze PDF scans of paper documents, and file the governmental grants in a searchable database. This helps bring under public scrutiny, a large part of fund allocation which frequently comes under discretionary authority and therefore does not have to be reported.

In India, a large problem with Right-To-Information is that information is not available. This is because, deliberately or otherwise, a lot of intra-governmental workflows happen over paper with no electronic trails. This makes the RTI largely ineffectual.

An architecture to get volunteers to convert paper-scan data into electronic form has to be very carefully designed - to take care of the malicious aspect of people trying to put incorrect values, for kicks or for personal benefit. Technologies like reCAPTCHA have figured out how to account for trust in people and that can be capitalized upon here.

Combined, all these technologies have the potential to take the Right-to-Information to new heights of govt. transparency.


Lambdacurry

Volunteer data mining of governmental data grants

Published

August 04, 2009

Find me on Twitter @sandeepssrin

Did i make any mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.