You may have heard the latest developing trend around outsourcing the information worker such as the law firm Pinsent who outsource litigation work to South Africa, however I was very impressed by this article which Matt Harris passed on to me – essentially the Telegraph have had a fantastic couple of months with the expenses scandal and held all the cards on this huge story… that is until the information entered the public domain, this is where the Guardian came up with the ingenious plan – get the public to sift through the information and spot new insights.
The user goes to the site and can then trawl through the claims, through a simple interface certain storeys can be flagged and then the Guardians journalists can investigate the most interesting / highlighted cases – almost feels like you are playing a game / being nosey:

At the time of writing – of 458,832 pages of documents 200,139 have been reviewed by 23,089 people. So only 258,693 to go...
There is another site, Galaxy Zoo, which I know of which harnesses the power of the public as a free resource and that is in identifying galaxies
Next question – how can you make this work for commercial gain – Guardian have started already in identifying areas of interest in order to get their employees to do the high value investigation / analytics rather than trawling. Keen to know your thoughts?
Thanks,
John
Technorati Tags:
Outsourcing,
Information Worker,
Data Visualisation,
Data Visualization,
Information Visualisation,
Information Visualization,
Knowledge Management,
Social BI,
User Experience,
User Interaction,
John Brookmyre