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Guardian launches 'major crowdsourcing experiment' with MPs' expenses application

Posted: 17/06/09 By: Judith Townend

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A team of developers at the Guardian led by Simon Willison have created a Django application running on Amazon EC2, which allows users to search and help identify stories in MPs' expenses data released by UK parliament today.

Within 90 minutes of its launch, 1700 users had audited MPs' expenses using the Guardian's new crowdsourcing tool, according to a tweet by the Guardian.co.uk editor, Janine Gibson.

The data, which includes 700,000 individual documents, contained within 5,500 PDF files, covers all 646 members of parliament and the Guardian has been liveblogging discoveries since this morning.

The Guardian has now uploaded all the released documents onto a microsite named 'Investigate your MP's expenses' in a more useable format than the PDFs provided by the House of Commons.

"It's a huge release of information, which manages to be both extremely open and terribly closed at the same time. Open because it allows the public unprecedented access to MPs' claims over a huge amount of time. Closed because key address and personal details are blacked out, and the information is impossible to analyse electronically," said Janine Gibson, in a media release.

"There are no guarantees that we'll discover any more expenses scandals through this online experiment. But, regardless of that, we hope that our site will prove extremely valuable in making this information as transparent as possible, and enabling the public to actively use the information, rather than just look at it."

The Telegraph, which began printing stories about MPs' expenses with information from unedited data in May 2009, said that it will release an 'uncensored' version of documents in a print supplement in its Saturday edition.

Journalism.co.uk was not able to confirm if, or how much, of this information would also be published on its website.

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