Overview
Crowd sourcing can be an efficient way to increase quality and availability of machine readable data, particular in cultural heritage institutions. On a policy level, identifying community crowd sourcing projects outside government institutions can also be an indicator of valuable datasets that should be prioritised for open release.
Why
Many institutions lack resources necessary to manually go through large collections of unstructured data that has been created over the years. By engaging and collaborating with external communities on this data it is possible to create more detailed machine readable data supporting a wider range of re-use cases.
Intended outcome
- More machine readable open data supporting a wider range of use-cases in services and applications.
- Engaged communities & social engagement.
Relationship to PSI Directive
Possible Approach
Planning Phase
- Identify the exact need first and then seek groups able to support solving that need via crowd sourcing.
- Think of crowd sourcing as another tool to create/improve data sets and think about the phases of your data collection project and where crowd sourcing could best fit in.
- Involve stakeholders who could benefit from a free source of certain data sets and have them provide funding in order to sustain crowd sourcing efforts
Implementation Phase
- The tasks have to be very small.
- Utilise a gamification approach if at all possible.
- Use crowdsourcing without the user's knowledge e.g. CAPTCHA systems to solve micro tasks.
How to Test
Different tests can be undertaken:
- Is the crowd sourced data being used by third parties?
- Is the crowd sourced data as complete as an already existing official source of the same data?
- Is the crowd sourced data being updated by volunteers?
Often quite short. In the case of Share-PSI BPs, it's likely that all tests will need to be carried out by people rather than machines but if something is machine testable, that's often more precise.
Evidence
Examples of crowd sourcing to replicate a government dataset that is not freely available:
Examples of succesful use of crowd sourcing to create or improve PSI:
- Galaxy Zoo
- openwheelmap.org
- FixyourX efforts like Fix my street or Markaspot
- example of bus stop locations being corrected by OSM community
- Crowd Sourcing Canadian Postal Codes
Tags
crowd sourcing, collaboration