Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics. A ...

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) DOI 10.1007/s10606-016-9250-0

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics. A case study on civic participation in the digital age Reinhard A. Handler

& Raul Ferrer Conill

Media and Communication Studies, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad , Sweden (Phone: +46 54 700 2506; E-mail: [email protected]; Phone: +46 54 700 1426; E-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, and data practices. To do so we analyse an investigative journalism story run by The Guardian that combined open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. The case study highlights how data can be made accessible to people who usually do not have access; how game mechanics can be deployed in order to foster civic participation by offering users a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness; and how crowdsourcing can organise a large group of people into achieving a common goal. The combination of these three elements resulted in a case for civic participation in the digital era. Keywords: Civic participation, Civic technologies, Crowdsourcing, Game mechanics, Open data

1. Introduction In 2009 the British newspaper The Telegraph received almost two million documents containing information about UK Members of Parliament’s (MPs) expenses. The Telegraph, following traditional journalistic practice, assigned documents to the reporters with the aim of revealing as much information as possible. This led to several stories that would trigger a major political scandal anchored in the UK’s parliamentary expenses and the misuse of allowances by the MPs. A month later, the rival newspaper The Guardian received the documents and having lost the time edge, they decided to test a new approach. The Guardian started to advertise an investigative journalism crowdsourcing campaign, calling to action the readers and asking them to sieve through the large set of leaked documents (GNM press office 2009). To do so, The Guardian created its own microsite and app for mobile phones making about 450,000 documents openly accessible for their readers, as well as a simple interface to guide them. After reading a document, each user had the possibility to flag documents as BNot interesting^, BInteresting but known^, BInteresting^, and BInvestigate this!^ Additionally, the interface built by The Guardian’s data team contained a progress bar and a leaderboard, which are basic game elements. The progress bar showed how many of the available documents have been reviewed and the leaderboard displayed a ranking of readers based on the number of documents they examined. This generated a large sum of tip-offs, as well as discarding irrelevant material, thereby accelerating the process tremendously. The crowdsourcing campaign managed to attract 20,000 readers to review 170,000 documents in the first 80 hours

Reinhard A. Handler and Raul Ferrer Conill involving the users in a joint investigative journalism initiative with a 56 % visitor participation rate (Andersen 2009). This success was achieved by a small group of developers and almost zero cost on infrastructure. But the success was not measured only by the stories discovered by the users or the speed in which they combed the data, but the high capacity of The Guardian to mobilise users to participate. This is interesting for several reasons. First of all, The Guardian made a large data set openly accessible. In a time when datafication raises concerns about technology taking over decision-making processes, The Guardian’s data initiative shows that open data can be used to enhance civic participation, allowing people to interact with and analyse data. Secondly, The Guardian opted for a crowdsourcing approach in order to let the users analyse a large data set. The term crowdsourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe (2006), editor at Wired Magazine. He explained that businesses were increasingly using web applications to outsource work once performed by employees to an undefined network of individuals, the crowd. On the one hand, crowdsourcing often draws critique for its potential to exploit intellectual labour and innovative creations for little or no reward (Busarovs 2013; Cabiddu et al. 2012; Postigo 2003). On the other hand, crowdsourcing is also celebrated as a method to engage users (Gordon et al. 2013). In this article, we suggest that The Guardian’s initiative illustrates that crowdsourcing can also be used as a proxy for civic participation. And thirdly, as Simon Rogers, then editor of The Guardian’s datablog suggested (Bouchart 2012), the incorporation of game mechanics played a major role in engaging the users with the project. Therefore, we will discuss how The Guardian combined crowdsourcing and game mechanics to engage a large number of users. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, and data practices. To do so, we commence by discussing open data in relation to big data, both of which are expressions of a larger trend usually called datafication (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; Van Dijck 2014). Then we continue with a contextualization of crowdsourcing in regards to the example of The Guardian, to later reflect on how game mechanics were combined and applied in order to drive participation. Altogether, we propose that the combination of open data, crowdsourcing, and game mechanics allowed The Guardian to shift the dynamics of media agency by facilitating civic participation. 2. Big data, small data, open data, closed data The Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment rested upon data that were made open and accessible for the public, something that usually is not associated with data practices. On the contrary, the growing pervasiveness of data in today’s society is largely discussed on the basis of big data that are contained in safeguarded silos. Here, data are represented as the collection of large amounts of data that have been generated on social networking sites, user comments on media outlets, or review platforms in combination with metadata that relate to these communications, for

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics example, the geolocation, the time or duration. Such data can only be gathered by those with the capacity, knowledge, and infrastructure to do so. Pariser (2011) and Turow (2011), among others, provide critical accounts for the emergence of big data. They suggest that the new properties of big data result in a data divide where only a few have access. Additionally, according to Andrejevic (2013) the data divide perpetuates traditional structures of power that seldom are discussed when addressing big data. While there certainly are ethical and legal challenges to big data, this necessarily is not directly related to the size of datasets nor the properties of big data. Thus, the consequences of the quantification of user generated data on the Internet need to be critically analysed. However, this is not necessarily a data discussion but rather affords a critical reflection of power structures and hegemonies (Fuchs 2013). The Guardian’s example showed that large datasets can be made accessible to the people who usually do not have access, leading to civic participation that challenged the political class. This resulted in a large number of resignations and sacking of politicians, together with the repayment of misused expenses. Hence, we argue that the case study can be discussed as an effort to deploy open data rather than proprietary data. The arguments regarding the advantages of open data are well established. It has been suggested that open data furthers transparency and democratic control; increases the degree of autonomy in the lives of people in order to enable them to represent their interests in a self-determined way; promotes public participation; leads to improved and innovative business solutions; and leads to the production of knowledge through the combination of data patterns (Auer and Lehmann 2010; Huijboom and Van den Broek 2011; Davies and Edwards 2012; Janssen et al. 2012; Johnson 2014). These rather optimistic assumptions need to be addressed in a critical manner in order to discuss The Guardian’s exercise. Kitchin (2014) highlights four potential problems of open data initiatives: funding and sustainability, the marketisation of public services, the misconception that data is neutral (i.e. objective and for everyone to use), and utility and usability. These four problems resonate in the case in the following manner: 1) The costs of funding and sustaining an open data environment puts at risk the return on investment of the operation (Martin et al. 2013). A stable financial base was a major advantage The Guardian had over ordinary open data initiatives. 2) Another problem is the possible marketisation of data that has been collected by public services, made open for free and commodified by a third party (Kitchin 2014). The Guardian as a for-profit media organisation has as a foundational goal to inform the public while being subjected to commercial pressures. The tension between the professional and commercial logics is the classic dilemma of the journalistic field (Gross et al. 2001; Richards 2004; Frost 2014). 3) It is a misconception that open data is neutral and objective and for everyone to use. Social privileges are often embedded in open data, excluding certain information and data users (Johnson 2014). The documents The Guardian received were only open to a certain extent. While it allowed access to MPs’ claims, the data was partially closed since personal details of politicians were blacked out and

Reinhard A. Handler and Raul Ferrer Conill impossible to analyse (Rogers 2009). 4) The success of open data systems are contingent to their usability. It requires more than the simple provision of access to data and the provision of the tools and instruments with which to use the data (Janssen et al. 2012, p. 199). The Guardian’s dataset consisted of many small documents each of them could be read through and labelled in a reasonable amount of time by a user. The Guardian’s exercise had utility for the users in two ways: it applied game mechanics and ‘people really cared about the issue’ (Rogers, as cited in Bouchart 2012) because they could investigate their local MPs’ claims. An analysis of the emerging data landscape should distinguish between varying types of data, different data practices as well as questioning the interests and ideologies to which data initiatives are subjected. The general discourse on datafication feeds the narrative that the technological and social realms have been separated and taken diverging trajectories. This is a result of the inherently technical nature of datafication whether the data is big, small, open or closed. We argue that The Guardian’s data initiative shows how a combination of technological and sociocultural elements that counters the purely technological understanding of datafication because it allows social actors to make sense of (large) accessible datasets through complicit strategies of collaboration, such as crowdsourcing. 3. The participating crowds The term datafication condenses a technological development that is driven by a quantitative increase in digital data. The hope invested into this »quantification of everything« is a new understanding of the world and the production of new knowledge on the base of correlation instead of explanation (Andrejevic 2013, p. 17). There is an overabundance of data generated on social networking sites, user comments on media outlets, review platforms, and governmental data sources, yet there are still few models to easily explore data sets, analyse information, run modelbased algorithms, share information, and collaborate on projects that aim to enhance civic participation. We suggest that this shortcoming can be negotiated by crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, by its very nature pools together the efforts of various groups of people so that information regarding a particular topic can be put into order. Successful crowdsourcing projects have been completed in various fields, including urban planning, science, the arts and business innovation (Brabham 2009; De Croon et al. 2014; Gauvin 2015; Howe 2006). Therefore computer supported collaborative practices like crowdsourcing are greeted euphorically because of their assumed democratic potential of sharing ideas, knowledge and skills in a transparent way (Benkler 2011; Shirky 2008; Shirky 2010). This optimistic approach is problematic because the emphasis on social connections is overplayed (Lovink 2013). Not only is it claimed that the networked computer has transformed the passive audience of broadcast media into active participants and agents of cultural production (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006; Rosen

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics 2006), but also that social organisation at large is allegedly transformed. Top-down systems are believed to be replaced by collaborative networks that neglect strict hierarchies and are built on ‘trust and long-term cooperation’ (Benkler 2011, p. 1) fostering active social engagement and active participation. We would like to call that trend the »socialisation of everything« and we suggest that such an idealistic concept is a counter-strategy to the fears of increasing commodification of social processes with the aid of technology. In this paper we argue that these two different notions (quantification and socialisation of everything) are a reflection of the dichotomy between culture and technology. Datafication is allocated in the technological realm, whereas collaboration is to be seen as belonging to the cultural sphere. But separating culture from technology becomes problematic in a world where these two realms are caught up in a network of relations (Winner 1986; Balsamo 2011). The Guardian’s data initiative exemplifies how a collaborative practice like crowdsourcing is related to the technological process of datafication by creating an interface that combines involvement with data and collective civic participation. Before writing about the possibilities and advantages crowdsourcing offers, the term needs to be clarified because, there is a profound uncertainty about what crowdsourcing as a concept is. The reason for this ambiguity is a result of the wide variety of practices that are associated with crowdsourcing. Estellés and González (2012) have mapped the scholarly literature on crowdsourcing, analysing 209 documents and finding 40 original definitions, some of them mutually exclusive. They assess a ‘lack of consensus and a certain semantic confusion’ (p. 10), suggesting that crowdsourcing is a term in its infancy and at the same time predicting further transformations and additions to the concept as new applications appear. For the purpose of this paper, we will adopt the definition that Brabham (2013, p. xvi) proposed: ‘This deliberate blend of bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals is called crowdsourcing.’ This definition is illustrated by The Guardian’s experiment, which is built upon a melange of bottom-up and top-down processes that brings together a variety of people with diverging motivations (Howe 2008, p. 38). While crowdsourcing has not always been dependent on digital interfaces, the new characteristics of the network society (Castells 2006) have reconfigured our understanding of crowdsourcing as a practice that is predominantly anchored in a technological structure. Thus, crowdsourcing is situated within computer supported collaboration which includes ‘all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music’ (CSCW 2004). The Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment deployed an interface to guide the contributors’ engagement with the data at hand. It did so by offering a combination of crowdsourcing and datafication in order to make sense of large amounts of data that could not have been analysed automatically. A lot of the data was unstructured or sometimes handwritten and could not have been analysed or processed by computers. Here again, crowdsourcing is the

Reinhard A. Handler and Raul Ferrer Conill social element of this socio-technical realm that is enhanced by communication technology. Not only because humans were prompted to read documents that were inoperable for computers but, more significantly, the crowd cleaned, evaluated and categorised the data. Large amounts of data are of little avail until they are made processable: ‘While automated data mining tools can find recurring patterns, outliers and other anomalies in data, only people can currently provide the explanations, hypotheses, and insights necessary to make sense of the data.’ (Willett et al. 2012, p. 227). The element of interpretative sense-making of data in combination with datafication is neither a social, nor a purely technological process but a combination of two different approaches that are so far, more often than not, negotiated separately. What The Guardian achieved with its crowdsourcing initiative is a great example of engaging users in civic participation. Citizens mobilised in a investigative journalism initiative that would hold accountable those in power for the good of democracy. The interface further fostered participation by linking the data with the personal environment of the contributors. People could click into their local MPs claims and investigate their account expenses. Thereby, one person’s search was turned into multiple local searches in the crowd’s knowledge neighbourhoods (Aitamurto 2015, p. 14). All in all The Guardian’s experiment illustrates that crowdsourcing can be a productive way of combining the advantages of technology with socio-cultural practices which reflect traditional human(istic) efforts and insights. Thus, we cannot assume that the digital artifact created by The Guardian alone triggered civic participation, as it resides in the social ambitions of the participants. In this way, the technological affordances overlap with the societal underpinnings of participation. This assumptions follows Sassen’s (2002, p. 365) call for recognising the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of technologies for different social orders. Such an understanding reflects on the current debate on how participation can be conceptualised in the digital era. The new participation paradigm, as Livingstone (2013) calls it, problematises how participation is shaped and enacted through media technologies. It acknowledges the difficulty of addressing participation both in terms of action and scope. Pateman (1970) conceptualised participation in Participation and democratic theory as a process that addresses power disparities in societal decision-making processes. Yet, when translated into the digital era, participation is often conceptualised as an umbrella concept for different instances of engagement, action, and interaction (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013). While traditionally linked to news consumption and political engagement (Habermas 1991; Pew 2010; Bennett et al. 2010), civic participation is undergoing a major shift (Graybeal and Sindik 2012) adopting many different forms. Adler and Goggin (2005) conclude that there is a lack of a widely agreed-upon definition for civic engagement. However, in this article, we adhere to Delli Carpini (2012) and Graybeal and Sindik’s (2012) understanding of civic participation as actions that lead to social involvement and political activities. Here, our interest lies on engaging in a discussion how participation is afforded by interactive interfaces. In other words: Why did The Guardian’s became such a

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics successful initiative? We have already discussed open data, and crowdsourcing. The focus is now placed the game mechanics used by the interface of the website, which, we argue, helped trigger participation. 4. Game mechanics as triggers of participation The combination of civic participation and games is often met with a certain degree of friction. Probably the most famous take on this friction is Putnam’s (2000) suggestion that the amount of time spent consuming popular and entertainment media (specifically games) is using up the limited time from citizens and users, time they could otherwise use for engaging in public and civic activities. However, in the age of multipurpose devices, this assumption becomes problematic because there is a lack of digital metrics that indicate democratic values and civic engagement. In the example of The Guardian, the proxy for civic participation was engaging with the data and reporting to the editorial staff. The interface of the website aimed to engage the user in reading and processing the documents. According to Strömbäck et al. (2012), any behaviour such as media choice or civic engagement is contingent upon a combination of opportunity, motivation and ability. Thus, increasing the motivation and ability of the users, leads to a higher chance of of participation. Using a persuasive design (Fogg 2009), The Guardian’s design team relied on basic game mechanics to increase the user motivation and eventually trigger participation. This is acknowledged by one of the creators of The Guardian’s interface: BAlso if you make something more like a game this can really help to engage people. When we did the expenses story a second time it was much more like a game with individual tasks for people to do. It really helped to give people specific tasks. That made a big difference because I think if you just present people with the mountain of information to go through and say ‘go through this’ it can make for hard and rather unrewarding work. So I think making it fun is really important.^ (Rogers, as cited in Bouchart 2012) The high participation in The Guardian’s initiative is partly explained by the way in which games motivate players to keep playing. Games are so engaging because they foster a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, a feature that is usually considered more engaging than traditional media (Przybylski et al. 2010). Competence (users’ sense of ability, they are accomplishing something), autonomy (the users feel in control, providing a sense of meaningful choices), and relatedness (the activity is related to something beyond the user’s self) are traits that can be triggered by interfaces. According to Deci and Ryan’s (1985) Self-Determination Theory (SDT), together these three factors are responsible for persuading the users to act, and to increase the desire to carry on a task so that the task in itself becomes engaging.

Reinhard A. Handler and Raul Ferrer Conill This can be seen in The Guardian in how they used game mechanics, specifically aiming to trigger these three traits. Firstly, the system afforded an enhanced sensation of autonomy. On the one hand, readers were given the possibility to act as gatekeepers by having the choice of what documents The Guardian should further investigate. On the other hand, the users had the capacity to investigate politicians, holding them accountable for their actions. Secondly, the readers’ perception of competence was triggered by giving them status. The crowd was considered capable of participating in a nationwide political scandal investigation. Additionally, a leaderboard, one of the most common game mechanics, ranked the most active users, acknowledging their effort. Finally, the system was particularly good at creating a sense of relatedness. This was done by adding up the crowd’s overall effort and displaying a progress bar that reflected how many documents were analysed, and how many were left to achieve the goal. The aggregated progress showed that the individual effort was part of a larger collective effort, shared by the participants. It is worth noting that the attempt to enhance relatedness, taps into the already shared interest for the topic, even after it stopped making front-page headlines (Rogers, as cited in Bouchart 2012). Thus, the game mechanics implemented by The Guardian fostered these three motivations. This is how so many recurrent players kept on returning to the case, analysing the documents. We suggest, that the high degree of participation in The Guardian’s experiment can also be understood due to the fact that games and particularly videogames are engaging people. A Pew study (2008) reported that 97 % of U.S. teens play videogames on a regular basis and do so in a variety of devices. Gaming has become a pervasive form of media consumption that transcends all layers of the socioeconomic fabric of most societies. Beyond the basic outcome of entertainment, gaming, especially multiplayer gaming, provides sources for participatory action, social interaction, and often simulates civic action (Quandt and Kröger 2013). There is an ambivalent set of results on the effects of playing video games and the level of engagement of youth with news media and civic activities (Williams 2006). What seems clear is that gaming is an activity embedded in the daily habits of people’s’ everyday life and ‘are increasingly a crucial social thread woven throughout our everyday lives’ (McGonigal 2011). The use of game mechanics in non-gaming contexts is also commonly known as gamification (Deterding et al. 2011). We argue, the high degree of participation in the case of The Guardian can partly be explained by gamification and the use of game mechanics. 5. Civic technologies So far we have identified a combination of three elements - open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics - that facilitated one of the most successful collective investigative journalism initiatives. The Guardian, helped by the use of game mechanics,

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics managed to engage readers to join a crowdsourcing initiative that sieved through large amounts of data. We have explained how these three elements formed part of this initiative that triggered civic participation. It could be argued that the readers of The Guardian represent a segment of the British population that has a tendency to participate in civic activities. Also, the topic at hand – the misuse of public funds – was an extra motivation, allowing regular citizens to investigate their MPs. While we acknowledge the multifaceted factors that inspired The Guardian initiative, our interest here, is to focus on the mix of open data, crowdsourcing, and game mechanics. We contend that this unique blend is a great example of what has loosely been referred to as civic technologies, a term that does not have an established definition. To our understanding, civic technologies are specifically created to enable, facilitate, and enact civic participation. A particular characteristic of these technologies is the dual source of action. On the one hand, civic participation is enacted by social norms and values that entice action. On the other hand, the design of the technology itself automates mechanisms that trigger participation. This is often channeled through an interface. As Hackos and Redish (1998) argue, the interface allows interaction between the technological and social worlds and links them with each other. The result of this interaction is a socio-technical construct where design, technological affordances, algorithms and users conflate. In the case of The Guardian, the interface triggered motivations that encouraged users to intervene in the political arena. This is not to say that the driving forces that shape user behaviour can be solely explained by the internal logic of technology. In fact, such a technological determinist approach and its disregard for individual and social collective action is often criticized (see Williams 1990; Giddens and Pierson 1998), and countered by notions such as the social shaping of technology (Williams and Edge 1996). After all, as Manovich (2001) argues, an interface is culturedependent and based on cultural conventions that combine the human and technology. An interface like every other technology is built in a certain context and with a particular architecture. As Rieder and Schäfer (2008) argue, ‘the way we create technical artifacts – and software most importantly – heavily influences the cultural role they will play’. Thus, we acknowledge the power of technological innovation in order to shape certain social practices by considering the dualism of technological determinism and social determinism as two sides of the same phenomenon (Peters 2011; Wershler 2012). Precisely as Actor-Network Theory (Latour 1992) postulates, we conceive the current paradigm as a socio-technical association in which the social and the technical are difficult to disentangle from each other, endowing a degree of agency to both human and non-human actors. So, reflecting back on The Guardian example, was the sole creation of an interface enough to drive civic engagement? We argue that the interface alone would not have resulted in civic participation. Similarly, we argue that the task in which users engaged would not have been accomplished without the interface either. The success

Reinhard A. Handler and Raul Ferrer Conill of the initiative was contingent on both the social and technological aspects. Creating an interface that made us of crowdsourcing and game mechanics allowed people to access open data they had an interest in analysing. The interface guided users and triggered extra motivations automating the process of engagement. The combination of complex infrastructures and human behaviour is a feature of civic technologies and enables participation in the public sphere. Civic technologies as Zittrain (2009) suggests are not constrained by gatekeepers. The Guardian built an open access platform where users could select which documents to analyse. It was not only open to a select group of people. Civic technologies also rely on an ‘astounding amount of goodwill and cooperation’ (ibid.). The people who analysed documents for The Guardian did this work for free. Their predispositions towards the cause were further fostered by The Guardian’s deployment of game mechanics. The Guardian’s initiative made possible civic participation at a time when traditional forms of engagement in the public sphere are said to be faltering (Putnam 2000). This offers a hopeful note that technologies can help citizens with creating a critical mass of people that engages with current civic problems. What The Guardian example highlights is the need for reflection on a changing digital media landscape, as well as new approaches towards participation with special attention to new approaches like open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics. 6. Conclusion The first generation that has grown up under the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, media, and whose Bplaytime^ entertainment is pervaded by video games since a very early age is now old enough to participate in civic activities. The nature of sociability through networked device has changed the ways in which young people engage in society and feel connected to others. The social aspect of gaming and how the new media users interact with interfaces as a driver of civic engagement clearly point to a merging trend between user and technological agency. As it has been pointed before, the current definition of civic engagement is at most, rather vague. As social interactions evolve and become digitally mediated, so does civic engagement and how citizens participate in social affairs. Based on the important existence of a social layer in online games that require sociability and cooperation in order to achieve more meaningful goals, it is argued that the incorporation of game mechanics that trigger civic life will affect the civic engagement of those players in a positive way. With the current trend of Bgamification of everything^ games and game mechanics have been steadily pervading daily life tapping at new ways to motivate people into action, not only entertainment. Old habits and rituals have shifted and the way that young people, who are used at instant stimulation via constant feedback, look at the world is different from those who only had limited access to video games. If the overexposure to media has shifted the way youth engages with the world, other fields of

Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics daily life, such as education, health, and civic engagement will have to eventually shift too, in order to meet young citizens’ needs and expectations. The Guardian initiative shows how game mechanics can be deployed in order to foster civic participation by offering users a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness. It also made use of data that was made accessible for people who usually do not have access. This highlights the need for expanding the notion of data as an assemblage of monitoring technologies that collect information which is stored in silos, analysed by algorithms and represented via digital interfaces. However, we do not adhere to the celebratory rhetoric that recognises data as sole means to solve and understand human issues. Such an understanding reflects the utopias and ideologies associated with the imaginary digital society, a technical utopia that informed a technological program (Flichy 2007). Therefore, it is all the more important to critically address the differential representation of data and scrutinise some of the assumptions that are so far unquestioned. While such critical research is evolving in the humanities (Kitchin 2014; Papacharissi 2015) there is a need for a more intensive discussion on the social nature of data. Crowdsourcing as introduced by The Guardian highlights how certain aspects of data can be addressed by social actions resulting in a case for civic participation in the digital era. The combination of an interface with social practices resulted in a successful model for civic participation that did not rely on social interactions but still carried a social component. People did not talk with each other, they did not socialise or claimed to belong to a community, they simply interacted with the interface but still were related to a common goal. The unique blend of open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics offered by The Guardian is an example for civic participation in the digital era. While this model does not guarantee success, we suggest that further studies should look at the interplay of the three mentioned elements as a symbol for the growing entanglement of technology and our society.

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