Compiling this list of names of people who have been talking to member of parliament and are mentioned in the reports of hearings is the first stage of a research project by Regards Citoyens and Transparency International France.

In the next stages they will use the compiled list to look into the frequency of contacts and the companies and organisations represented. The names were contained in 1100 documents, that were available as scanned pages. In the documents names were automatically detected by scanning software but it needed human eyes to both get the actual name as well as the corresponding information about organization, function and background provided in those documents. To ensure the quality of the data collected, each name and connected data items were looked at by several volunteers, and when at least three volunteers gave the same interpretation of an entry it was accepted into the compiled list. In 2500 of the cases it took a fourth volunteer to make sure the data was sound. Regards Citoyens published an interesting analysis of the crowd sourcing project showing its inner workings. The tools used for the crowd sourcing has been made available for download. Also the compiled list will be made available in due time, after possible issues of privacy etc. have been cleared up.Even though this is the first stage of a research project only, it is already an interesting step in itself. The response and involvement of more than three thousand volunteers in less than two weeks to go through the documents released by the French Parliament clearly shows the public interest in the opening up of PSI.

Als see the previous item we published on this research project