Lobbyists have always been somewhat hard to pin down and their influence has been hard to calculate. But, with hugely important legislative decisions on the horizon, NPR has decided to take to the people in order to find out who these lobbyists really are. By using crowdsourcing, NPR has been able to not only indentify a number of the over 200 people packed in to watch a Senate committee meeting earlier this month. Check out the full story here.
While crowdsourcing poses the inevitable danger of mis-identification (after all, how do you verify these things?) it’s also yet another step in the move towards further governmental transparancy. And while the Obama administration polls the public to generate new OMB guidlines on the topic it seems that NPR is taking matters into their own hands. After all, a picture tells a thousand words.
Filed under: politics, technology, crowdsourcing, lobbying, politics and technology
