The Guardian has today launched a major experiment in crowdsourcing following the publication of thousands of MPs' receipts by the House of Commons.
The Commons has published 700,000 individual documents, contained within 5,500 PDF files, covering all 646 members of parliament, at parliament.uk. This is an enormous potential dataset, comprising four years worth of expenses and claims outlining MPs' mortgages, second home purchases, duck houses and soft furnishings. The Guardian has uploaded all of these documents to its own microsite, Investigate your MP's expenses, allowing members of the public to interact with and analyse the data; an impossibility on the government's website.
Investigate your MP's expenses opens up this data to as many people as possible. The Guardian wants the public to help analyse the information and potentially discover more great stories buried within the material. Through the experiment, the Guardian will be able to begin to piece together a unique picture of how MPs' claims have changed over time. The analysis is also likely to uncover those MPs who have claimed minimal expenses.
Editor of theguardian.com, Janine Gibson, said: "We've already had a great response from Guardian readers on our live blog of MPs' expenses, which we started as soon as the documents were published. We're confident that our microsite will take this interaction to a new level, enabling users to fully investigate the documents and track what they – and other users – have found.
"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.
"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 system will enable members of the public to be able to search through the receipts of all MPs - including their local MP - and look at their records directly.
For every document for every MP, users of the site will be able to:
Add narrative on individual expenses
Highlight documents of interest
Tell us how interesting that receipt is and provide a context for each receipt
Help us by entering the relevant expenses figures and dates on each page
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Notes to editors:
The tools to investigate MPs' expenses were built by Simon Willison and other Guardian developers, as a Django app running on Amazon EC2. A major challenge was making each page of the documents available for independent review.
This experiment is the latest development in the Guardian's initiative to open its content to readers, as exemplified by the Guardian Open Platform.
For further information contact:
Hayley Dunlop, Press Office: 020 3353 3818 / 07879 430474