A week ago at the Personal Democracy Forum, we unveiled TransparencyCorps, a new distributed volunteer-force application. It is a lightweight open source platform along the lines of “Mechanical Turk.” Like all of our newer projects, it is open source software and you can check it out over on github. The app was written by Eric with tasks being written by several members of the Sunlight Labs team. It is written in Rails.

It is necessary and always will be: while we bring in a lot of data from Government, human eyes need to look at data and make associations that computers cannot. In the realm of transparency, there are solid links between documents on the web that are publicly available that machines simply cannot accurately make. So we built TransparencyCorps as a way for us to build a community to help out and complete these tasks.

TransparencyCorps isn’t just for us though, but for all people in the transparency community. We’re inviting our partners to create their own tasks and add them to the service along side our own in the hopes that in numbers we can do great things.

We’re pretty excited about it as a platform and we’ll continue to add more to it. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to add your own or give us feedback. Make sure to tell Jeremy how great his leader-board drawings are.