Crowd Sourcing (aka the wisdom of crowds) is the exercise of collective intelligence that uses web technologies to aggregate talent, knowledge and ingenuity while reducing the costs and time formerly needed to solve problems.

By asking a huge number of people to pay attention to something for a short period and bring their expertise and experience to bear on it, the idea is that people will notice the things that they know most about and be able to focus on just that part of the issue long enough to make a worthwhile contribution without unduly interrupting their other work.

By spreading the task over a very large number of people, the chances of the work being biased by one perspective alone is also reduced. And when it comes to keeping an eye on Government, we need need all the eyes we can get.
Which is why the Sunlight Foundation has launched Transparency Corps, a Web service that enables citizens to help create greater government transparency by performing small, discrete tasks to analyze and enhance the usefulness of government data. Sunlight’s Transparency Corps aggregates simple actions... that require human intelligence, but not specialized political knowledge.

“Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Sunlight created Transparency Corps as a new way for people to volunteer to make government transparency a reality,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “Now, when people ask ‘how can I help?’ Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information.”

[...] In the future, other organizations can collaborate with Sunlight to use the Transparency Corps service to distribute public research projects. Additionally, Sunlight encourages other organizations to use the open source code that powers Transparency Corps to create their own services for aggregating volunteer actions.

Currently the Transparency Corps is scrutinising requests from American politicians for "earmarks" special funding for local programmes that very often are political payoffs rather than worthwhile uses of public money - what sued to be called "pork barrel" politics.

Continuing with our earmark data drive, here is a smaller batch of earmark requests, by Rep. Jackie Speier for FY 2010. You'll be shown the PDFs that Rep. Speier posted, and asked to pluck the most interesting pieces out of them, and then enter them into our form.

When you're done, you can click the "I'd Like Another Task" button to do more. Do as many as you like - you'll earn points every time! By helping us, you'll be contributing to our growing earmark database.

I'm especially interested in the role of social capital being generated by the work, as those of us who work with volunteers know, a pat on the back and a thank you are great rewards, when its done in public that benefit can be multiplied greatly.

I'll be interested to see how they enable their contributors to share that social capital.

When you talk about the work you are doing on your website or in emails, do you mention those who have volunteered? Is it by name or just a general thanks, and do you have a way for your supporters to associate their online presence with your organisation?

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