Good crowd sourcing by the Herald

The Herald reports:

The New Zealand Herald has today launched an experiment in crowdsourcing following the release of donations and expenses’ returns for candidates at the 2014 general election.

The Electoral Commission has published returns for all 462 candidates, including all 121 current members of Parliament. Donations and expenses for candidates from the previous 2011 election are also available.

This is an enormous potential dataset and the Herald has uploaded nearly 900 documents to its own microsite, Money in Politics, allowing members of the public to interact with and analyse the data.

That’s a smart move. Going through 900 returns would take one reporter ages and drive them to suicide. But many people wil be happy to read through one or two and summarise them.

So far 468 out of 473 donation returns for 2014 have been done.  But only two out of 473 expense returns.