News Challenge - How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? - Swarm Survey - The collective knowledge engine

"The insights we gain collectively from pooling the information we have individually has the power to change our understanding of the world and what’s happening around us.   From crowdmapping disasters to searching satellite imagery to tracking political campaign messaging to crowdsourcing the price of milk, there are many ways to use the power of active communities as a data task force to get a clearer picture of an issue that affects us all. The problem for publishers, communities and groups of active citizens who all have a need to create clearer pictures of what’s happening in the world is that each crowdsourced data research project is typically a standalone and independent data set with a data collection and publishing system that gets built and rebuilt over and over again for each new project.   This long and diverse list of collective research projects from 2012 is a small sample of what is in development every day today: http://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/2012/06/14/1833/the-power-of-collective-research-task-based-investigations-and-swarm-intelligence ... It will provide easy to use self-serve interfaces for collecting and connecting data, robust data editing and analysis tools, and output systems that make data accessible and useful.  In addition to the high quality crowd research toolset, Swarm Survey will be an open data network.    Research projects will be open and re-usable by other research projects on this and other platforms.  The political campaign messaging from one project may be useful when joined up against voting intentions in another study, for example.  Or perhaps the crowdmapped price of milk from one research project may be a useful datapoint in a research project about urban supermarket development ..."