Here is the UK there is uproar as a 'serious' newspaper (The Daily Telegraph) published all of expense claims from members of parliament around a month ago. It has been hilarious as large numbers of MPs have expensed renovations of 'second homes'(including a moat) which were hundreds of miles away from their constituencies through to boxes of matches and bags of compost...all at the taxpayers expense!
The thing is, The Telegraph released 700,000 documents in 5,500 individual PDF formats covering all 650 MPs in parliament.
Rival paper, The Guardian has now uploaded all the released documents onto a microsite named 'Investigate your MP's expenses' in a more useable format than the PDFs provided by the House of Commons.
This is a fantastic take on crowdsourcing whereby The Guardian is asking readers to help its team of journalists trawl through the documents. Anybody can get involved by reading the various claim forms and receipts, and ritually humiliating them forcing them to resign or publicly apologise
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
Many MPs have been taken down and a large number have paid back monies due to 'misunderstandings' - however there's some great stuff to be found in here
"Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, appeared to have claimed for a £4.99 Toblerone bar, but later insisted the item had been a free gift from a supplier and he had not claimed for it. Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh, spent £66.66 in March last year in Tesco on a range of food stuffs from digestive biscuits, stuffed olives and HP spicy BBQ sauce. On another occasion his £111.77 supermarket receipt included expensive pate and two bags of sweets."
Now this isn't a political blog - but how much will crowdsourcing affect marketing?
So far Starbucks and Dell have experimented with great effect. It allows a brands' strongest asset (its customers) to shape the services the brand provides and that can only be a good thing
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