Campaign Transparency: 2003 and 2006 campaign returns

Would you like to help digitize the 2003 and 2006 campaign donations? OttWatch needs your help, even more than the last time.

The crowdsourcing effort to fully digitize the 2010 campaign donations required two steps. Step one involved me (and two others) clicking on each individual donation to mark it as unique. Step two is the one many more people took part in - transcribing the name/address/amount details. After all the effort, 4605 donations from 2010 were inputted.

Amazing what you get just by asking, like 203 pdfs of 2003/2006 campaign returns for all wards & mayor. Ready to do it all again?

— Ottawa Watch (@ottwatch) January 28, 2014

This implies there are somewhere around 9000 more donations to catalogue if we jump into the 2003 and 2006 financial records. This is going to require I open up step-one to the full community. Nobody has the time to click 9,000 times.

Can you help process just one of the 203 returns? Some are short (no donations), some are longer (the mayor races). Ultimately it's pretty easy work. Here's what to do:

1. Go to http://ottwatch.ca/election/processReturn/ and log in using Twitter or Facebok. You'll be presented with a list of campaigns in a pseudo-random order. Please pick the one at the top of the list. (We're prioritizing candidates who are on council now, or are running again as challengers).
2. Use the Next and Previous pages to go through each page of the financial return.
3. When you see a donation record, click on the first letter for that row (see example below). Please click right on the letter.
4. Use the Rotate button if needed. It will rotate the page clockwise 90-degrees. You can rotate multiple times until the page is readable.

If you have problems or make any mistakes, don't worry about it. Just drop me an email (ottwatch@ottwatch.ca) and let me know your twitter handle (or I'll use your name from Facebook) to sort it out. Worst case I can delete everything you put in and we can re-do it.

Where to click:

May as well make a full-on training movie: