Watch My Street and The Crowd

We launched Watch My Street (www.watchmystreet.co.nz) this last week and it has been fascinating to ‘watch’ the reaction from traditional data suppliers, the real estate industry, and consumers.

Bottom line - we’re pretty pleased with what’s happened.

One of the fun things we saw during the week was the interaction between ratepayers and Wellington City Council (WCC), enabled by Watch My Street. Enabled, because we have taken data/information that has traditionally been difficult or expensive to access (controlled by the few) and made it freely available in an interesting and informative way. We’ve put it out on the internet and made it useful.

What we saw was the internet concept of crowdsourcing spring into action. This is where diverse, distributed groups of people get together, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes organised, for a common purpose. Crowdsourcing, to be specific, is when tasks are outsourced to a distributed group of people, but to an undefined ‘public’ rather than a specific body or group. That is, the ‘crowd’ is not organised or even specifically identified and does the task for free simply because they want to. You get a better result because the collective experience, skills and knowledge of the crowd is far greater than any individual or small group.

A key data set for Watch My Street is the WCC Rating Information Database (RID, or District Valuation Record - DVR).  For a council this database is a fundamental component of its operation - it is the record of everything relevant to setting and addressing rates on a property. For obvious reasons Councils spend significant sums of money every year validating, checking, and updating this database.

We launched Watch My Street for Wellington ratepayers and for WCC a wonderful thing happened. Ratepayers went onto www.watchmystreet.co.nz and searched their property. They looked it up and checked the details we displayed on the property. They made sure it was right, and if there were errors they let us and the Council know. Awesome! The issues uncovered ranged from confusing boundary records, address inaccuracies, to the recorded age of buildings and so on - the whole gamut basically. The WCC data is pretty good, but even a smart operator like them will have errors in a large complex database.  For WCC this is fantastic - they get their database updated and it doesn’t cost a cent!

By making their data interesting people took notice.

This is a brilliant example of why Government in New Zealand needs to open up data to citizens - the case for Open Data is compelling and this is just one aspect of it. After all - who is better to check and validate a property’s data, someone sitting in an office or driving around to see if they can notice something inconsistent - or the person that owns and lives in the property? No competition. And the best thing from everyone’s perspective - its free! Council isn’t paying for people to check data and ratepayers aren’t paying the rates required to hire the people to check the data on their property.

How much does your council spend on colating, validating, checking and verifying their data? Wouldn’t it be better to make it available for you to verify? Wouldn’t it be more interesting and useful when you can see a complete picture of your property, your street, and your suburb?

To see more check out your property on www.watchmystreet.co.nz 

Not in Wellington? Then send a request  for your town/city data to be made freely available here.