13 - Making Data With Readers at La Nación

Summary

Abstract

Using civic marathons and the open-source platform Vozdata to collaborate with readers, universities and NGOs around large data-driven investigations.

Keywords: civic marathons, crowdsourcing, investigative journalism, open source, researcher–journalist collaborations, open data

At La Nación we have produced large data-driven investigations by teaming up with our readers. This chapter takes a look behind the scenes at how we have organized reader participation around some of these projects, including through setting goals, supporting investigative communities, and nurturing long-term collaborations with our readers and other external organizations and partners.

In such projects often our goal is to tackle the “impossible” by using technology to facilitate large-scale collaborations, enabling users to engage with investigative journalism and the process of making official data public.

For example, we spent around five years transcribing 10,000 PDFs of Senate expenses, two years listening to 40,000 intercepted phone calls and a couple of months digitizing more than 20,000 hand-written electoral forms.

For these kinds of crowdsourcing initiatives, we relied on the online collaborative platform Vozdata. The platform was inspired by The Guardian's MPs’ expenses and ProPublica's “Free the Files” crowdsourcing campaigns and was developed with the support of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations and activists. The software behind Vozdata was open-sourced as Crowdata.

Organizing Participation

For these projects our collaborators were mainly journalism students, civic volunteers, transparency NGOs and retired citizens. They have different motivations to participate depending on the project. These may include contributing to public interest projects, working with our data team and getting to know other people at our meetups.

Vozdata has teams and live ranking features. We have been exploring how these can enhance participation through “gamification.” We had excellent results in fostering civic participation in this way around Argentina's national holidays. Participation in the construction of collaborative databases is mostly undertaken remotely (online). But we have also encouraged users to participate in “offline” civic events held at La Nación or during hackathons at various events. Sometimes we have built open (i.e., freely reusable) databases with journalism students at partner universities.