Outline of the best practice

Encourage crowdsourcing around PSI

Management summary

Crowd sourcing can be an efficient way to increase quality and availability of machine readable data, in particular for 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 prioritized for open publication.

Challenge

To increase the quality and quantity of machine readable data.

Solution

Using innovative methodologies, such as crowd sourcing, can assist in increasing the quality and availability of open data and open content, in particular for under resourced institutions such as cultural heritage institutions. Allowing crowd sourcing projects which assess, for example, government institution datasets, can also indicate the highest value datasets to be published as a priority.

Best Practice identification

Why is this a Best Practice? What's the impact of the best practice?

• Many institutions lack resources necessary to manually go through large collections of unstructured data that has been created ofer the years. By engaging external communities to collaborate on this data it is possible to create more detailed machine readable data supporting a wider range of re-use cases.
• More machine readable open data supporting a wider range of use-cases in services and applications.
• Engaged communities / social engagement

Links to the PSI Directive

• Article 1: Benefit to the knowledge economy
• Article 5: New services and applications
• Article 14-18: Cultural heritage institutions
• Article 20: Machine readable metadata

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

• More machine readable open data supporting a wider range of use-cases in services and applications.
• Engaged communities / social engagement

Relationship to PSI Directive

• Article 1: Benefit to the knowledge economy
• Article 5: New services and applications
• Article 14-18: Cultural heritage institutions
• Article 20: Machine readable metadata

What do you need for this Best Practice?

Elements identified:

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 really small tasks
• Utilize gamification approach
• Use crowdsourcing without the users knowledge e.g. captcha systems to solve micro tasks.

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:

• openaddressesuk.org (UK)
• postnummeruppror.nu (SE)
• openstreetmap.org (Intl)

Examples of succesful use of crowd sourcing to create or improve PSI:

• [Galaxy Zoo](http://www.galaxyzoo.org/)
• openwheelmap.org
• FixyourX efforts like Fix my street or [Markaspot](http://www.markaspot.de/en)
• example of bus stop locations being corrected by OSM community
• Crowd Sourcing Canadian Postal Codes

Applicability by other Member States

applicable to all member states

Contact info

Related Best Practices

• Best Practices/User engagement and collaboration throughout the lifecycle