The great thing about Corrigo is that there are so many people encouraging us to carry on with it. You probably would not expect two guys bothering to set up a whole website, a facebook and twitter account, publish their thesis online, take part in a Mozilla contest – without a real plan. I mean: a strategy.

The truth is: We gave up the whole project more than once. There has never been a real plan – just a vision, or rather a wish. But people kept asking us questions about Corrigo and how it developed. They invited us to great conferences to have the opportunity to get to know even greater people!

So if not for ourselves, we had to carry on at least for all those nice and cooperative people. So let’s do it, or as it read in several of our presentations:

Let’s make it hacken!

And this time be assured: We do have a plan! Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Coders, please save the date:
February 22nd / 23rd 2013
ZEIT Online, Berlin

We are so happy and humbled to present you the renowned ZEIT to be our host!

We are planning a hackathon, so to develop a first protoype and will provide you with more details later.

If you are interested (you do not necessarily have to be a programmer!) in joining this special event, please register here (the corner on the righthand side) with our newsletter so that we can keep you updated.

So, who is in?

No doubt about it. We were a bit disappointed that we did not make it to Berlin. That our final assignment was – so far – the last post about the Knight-Mozilla learning lab, which was however a great experience.

This was at the end of August. The following weeks Corrigo got a bit out of our focus. To get us back on the track, what could have been better than a proper deadline? Thanks to Darren and Ali we got the chance to present Corrigo on the 33rd Webmonday in Brotfabrik, Frankfurt (very nice city by the way).

For those who missed it – no worries. The guys from sysops.tv recorded the 18 minutes we spent on stage. So watch the video! For those who saw and liked it, and for those who want to make Corrigo “hacken” as much as we do please let us know beneath in the comments or drop us a line: make_it_hacken@corrigo.org.

We are thinking about organizing a hackathon by the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012. You can push these thoughts forward by saying “yes, yes, yes I want to hack with you” or by saying “yes, yes, yes here’s some money to buy some pizza for all the awesome hackers” or by saying “yes, yes, yes I got the perfect location for this crazy hackathon”.

“Whatever the future holds for accuracy and journalism as a whole, it seems certain that the river of errors and corrections will continue to flow for decades to come.”
Jeff Jarvis (2007)

It could be so simple. The journalist works accurately, his texts are wirtten to the best of his knowledge and belief. And if there is something wrong, his colleagues and readers will point that out. The journalist thanks them for the hint, corrects the error and has made the world a little bit “correcter”.

Well. There are doubts about the accuracy in journalism. Texts are produced under time pressure. The fact-checkers are retired, their colleagues are busy and the readers indignant. The journalist is annoyed by the hint, he might correct his error and blames the news business. Although you can hardly find the type of journalist described in the first place, there is something you definitely come by regularly: errors.

It’s these mistakes Corrigo is focused on. Of course, there’s a high degree of professionalism in online journalism and you can find both extremes of the case scenarios described earlier.

Technological change has not only increased the need for quality control – but made it possible in the first place. The internet in general and social media in particular enables all citizens to participate in quality control.

Good News – Bad News

That’s the good news: There are millions of fact checkers out there and you always find somebody who knows it better.

The bad news is: The european research project MediaAcT has shown that many of the established tools of media accountability – including the press councils – fail to systematically involve citizens.

Without the public’s voice, these instruments are too quiet. Only as a common orchestra, supported by the mighty choir of the public, they can be heard.

The Corrigo Orchestra

There are already some pioneering projects like MediaBugs and NewsTrust, which share some of Corrigo’s ideas. While their services vary considerably in function and degree of professionalization, they have one thing in common: they do not reach many people.

And as long as Crowdsourced Media Accountability Services do not achieve critical mass, publishers and media professionals will not have the pressure to diminish the number of errors.

Still: Pressure alone would not lead to less errors and transparency. If the Corrigo orchestra wants to be heard it will need the right “tonality”. This is one of our key findings  after analysing error culture in journalism. Instead of “crowd versus Journalism” Corrigos slogan should be: “Journalism featuring Crowd”.

Corrigo is a Crowdsourced Media Accountability Service that helps its users to flag and correct factual errors, missing links and typos in online news sources. It comes as a browser add-on based on web annotation technology. This makes you see errors and corrections right in the context. To give you a better impression of our idea we produced this screencast:

Strengths

• Corrigo increases the visibility of errors in the direct context of the article.
• Corrigo accelerates the process of reporting and correcting errors and helps to document it.
• Corrigo separates error messages from comment threads and helps editors, to identify them easily.
• Corrigo lives and breathes in the browser.
• Corrigo stops the spreading of errors by marking them in correlated texts.
• Corrigo enables a comparison of the accuracy of online media.

Weaknesses

• New browser versions bring a need for constantly updating the required add-on with them.
• Web annotation systems are barely known and used.
• To sustain further development, communication and technical infrastructure, Corrigo is dependent on funding.
• Up to now: Corrigo is not working in Apps.

Opportunities

• Corrigo is able to establish a more open in dealing with errors and to increase the quality in online media.
• Corrigo has the potential to build a network of existing instruments of Media Accountability.
• Corrigo can be supplemented with additional function, for example, connections to services such as churnalism.com or tineye.com, web services, looking for the origins of texts and images to find unlabeled news releases and stock material.
• Journalists may use Corrigo pro-actively. With the help of Corrigo they could ask the crowd to verify a statement in an interview or a text.
• Via plugins Corrigo can be connected with content management systems, in order to enable an efficient management of errors and corrections within a few clicks.
• As a non-profit open-source project Corrigo can be internationalized and extended functionally.

Threads

• The existing culture of errors can complicate the introduction on the market.
• Despite all methods of quality control within the community: An abuse of technology for can never be excluded.
• Some legal issues are still unclear. Court decisions may change the legal framework to the disadvantage of Corrigo.

Hacks usually fear to dive into the world of hackers. So it was good to have Christian Heilman, a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on HTML5 and John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, in the boat. They pushed us into the ocean and showed us what’s under the surface of the water: the fascinating world of the open web.

John Resig gave us some interesting insights in the conception and realization of an open-source software project, which is first and foremost organizing communication and documentation in a smart way. Concerning Corrigo this is going to be a real challenge.

Corrigo is planned to be a tool to control quality in journalism. It’s our democratic conviction that such a tool mustn’t be in the hands of the state or the economy. Since the media as the “fourth force” control the government forces, the state in turn and in the sense of “checks and balances” may have no means of controlling the media. And as quality control of media is too important to be run by enterprises with economic interests it has to be run by the public, which is – going back to the philospher of the Enlightenment John Locke the supervisory of a balanced political system.

This means that while building and coding Corrigo as a non-profit and open-source project it’s important to find a balance between the liberty of the open-source community and the goal of creating a tool which empowers the public to take part in controlling the quality of the media without giving them any chance to abuse this power.

As John Resig made me think about the development of open-source software and let’s say some political or economical aspects of Corrigo, Christian Heilman inspired me to rethink the technical realization of Corrigo. Heilman told us what’s possible with today’s and tomorrow’s browsers. He’s a big fan of applications run by the browser because you don’t have to install software or to update a plugin. At the current state of conception we think that a browser add-on is the only way to realize what we have in mind.

Corrigo shall enable its users to flag and correct errors, missing links and typos in online news sources, so that other users see errors and corrections right in context (to get a better imagination of our intent we recommend to check our presentation on slideshare including some first mock-ups). We think that web annotation is the right technology for that. But is a browser add-on based on web annotation technology the only possibility? After having puzzled a playing music video in my browser we’re not sure anymore. There must be ways we haven’t thought about. So let’s go diving! Share your thoughts with us.

We are done.

No, don’t worry – we are still kind of pre-seed in terms of Corrigo, the product. But we are done with our studies. And to proof that we are officially through we proudly present you our diploma thesis! As some of you had asked how things went we like to humbly add that we achieved a “1,0″ for the whole thesis as well as for our “defence”.

As we graduated from German University of Applied Sciences h_da the whole thesis is written in German. So if you don’t bother or just want to enjoy the shiny pictures (pp. 107 ff!) you’re welcome to download the

full version of “Corrigo – Conception of a Crowdsourced Media Accountability Service” (pdf!)

P.S.: After having researched the great universe of errors we are completeley convinced that there has to be at least one error among these many pages. So if you find one, please tell us – so that we can correct our mistake :)

One hundred sixty-two pages – that’s our final output of four years of online journalism at h_da University of Applied Sciences. And it’s also all about our visions and whishes that constitute Corrigo.

We already passed our oral exams and are now looking forward to our graduation (party!). By Friday you can call us Diplom-Online-Journalisten.

And there’s even more we can celebrate: We actually made it and can advance to the next stage within the Knight-Mozilla challenge “Beyond Comment Threads”!

We are really proud to be chosen to join 60 other participants attending a four-week learning lab. There will be two mandatory lectures (entirely online) each week – including speakers like John Resig and Jeff Jarvis. Awesome!

It all began with that sticky idea: Geek comedian Tom Scott couldn’t stand “dodgy” journalism anymore. So he created some “warning labels” to put them on free papers he found on the London Tube.
It’s clear: If you can put stickers on newspapers, it should be possible online more than ever. Studying online journalism, we made this the subject of our diploma thesis. For three months, we analysed quality (control) in German and American journalism. We learned a lot about fact checking, accuracy and (failed) attempts to involve the public in media accountability.
Now we put all these learnings together and conceived a proper service: corrigo
It helps you flag and correct factual errors in online media – directly at the article.