[Catalyst] Attention Australian Catalystarati (or anyone else with an interest in internet activism)

[Toby Corkindale]

Kieren Diment wrote:
> On 13/01/2009, at 12:17 PM, Gavin Carr wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 08:16:46PM +1100, Kieren Diment wrote:
>>> Open Australia (http://openaustralia.org) are trying to digitise the
>>> parliamentary register of members interest to improve transparrency 
>>> in the
>>> federal parliament.    The register at the moment is only available 
>>> in the
>>> basement of the federal parliament in a locked filing cabinet in a 
>>> disused
>>> toilet behind a sign which says beware of the tiger ... you get the 
>>> idea.
>>>
>>> One of our ilk has kindly started rigging up a prototype which is 
>>> available
>>> at github from http://github.com/TJC/openaustralia-rmidet/tree/master
>>>
>>> If you're an Australian Catalyst coder with a few tuits, or of you're 
>>> not
>>> Australian, but you want to get some practical experience with
>>> crowdsourcing document transcription, please fork the git repository and
>>> have a play.
>>
>> Are you looking for contributors, Kieren, or just for general 
>> feedback? If
>> the former, is there a TODO list somewhere, or a dev mailing list or
>> something people can join?
> 
> Unfortunately I'm pretty low on tuits for a couple of months, but I'd 
> love to see this succeed - the openaustralia is pretty high visibility 
> in Australia, and I'd like to see more perl and catalyst programmers 
> doing interesting stuff in this space.  As far as I can see the problem 
> that needs to be solved here is how to efficiently provide crowdsourced 
> document transcription.  Toby's got a prototype that does document 
> display, next up I guess is getting it transcribed.

I had some good free time over the Xmas break (aren't family wonderful? 
;) but am also fairly busy during January.. should improve by the end of 
the month though.


My short-term plans for the prototype are:
  * Include the recently-released per-senator PDFs into the pdf-to-jpeg 
conversion stream.
  * Create a DBIC schema that represents the data we need to capture.
  * Create login/logout pages, and admin pages to manage users.
  * Create pages to allow you to select a senator or minister to work 
upon, and then uses JQuery tabs for all the different info that can be 
recorded. Uses type-ahead searching for company names, suburbs, ASX 
stock symbols, etc.
  * Create review pages for admins to compare what users have done vs 
the pages it allegedly was transcribed from.

-Toby