Intellectual Property Law

Great things at/via TheyWorkForYou.com

By Susan Crawford

Take a look at TheyWorkForYou.com.

Now look at OpenAustralia.org.

Look familiar?  Indeed, look identical?

This happened (as I understand it) with the blessing of TheyWorkForYou.  It’s a movement!  It’s crossing the globe!  Very exciting.

Another great thing happening at TheyWorkForYou is crowd-sourced video-marking.  It’s quite impressive - and so simple.  The problem: lots of video of parliamentary sessions, hours and hours of it.  Lots of transcripts of parliamentary sessions - not necessarily accurate.  Very hard to get to precisely the comments on the video that you want to see for a particular issue etc.,  much less compare that video to the transcript.

So TheyWorkForYou gets people to thump a red button when a certain speech starts.  Thousands of people are helping out.  This way, the content TheyWorkForYou provides is getting more and more useful for everyone.

And the genius move, appealing to our competitive side:

You can start matching up speeches with video snippets right away, but if you take 30 seconds to register a username then we?ll log every speech that you match up and recognise your contribution on our ?top timestampers? league table. We?ll send out mySociety hoodies to the top timestampers - they?re reserved exclusively for our volunteers as a badge of honour.

It’s like the NASA crater-labeling activity - but much more immediately useful for everyone.  Plus prizes.

I understand Tom Steinberg of TheyWorkForYou is coming to PdF next week - yet another reason to show up, provided there are any seats left.

HT Kevin Marks.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on June 19, 2008 (boomark / email).