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JA edited this page May 21, 2022 · 7 revisions

Welcome to the OpenOversight wiki!

Getting Rosters into OpenOversight

In order to add roster data to OpenOversight, you must have an Administrator account on a running instance.

  1. The administrator should first add a new department to OpenOversight. They can do this by going to "Volunteer" -> "Add New Department".
  2. The administrator can now add police officers to OpenOversight by navigating to "Volunteer" -> "Add New Officer".
  3. For each officer, you should fill out the form with as much data as you have from the roster.

Police Data Sources

There are many ways that one can get data on police officers, here are a few ideas:

  • Body cameras if the footage can be FOIAed in your state
  • Public cameras operated by police. Try to FOIA for camera data from times and locations there are likely to be police officers in public spaces (e.g. during the day near police departments). Resolution might be an issue, but it's worth a shot, and many surveillance camears do have zoom capability.

Crowdsourcing Resources

Once data is uploaded to the platform, the system automatically allocates the work to contributors and tests them against known answers hidden within the task (what CrowdFlower refers to as a "job" [5]). The way in which contributors perform on these hidden test questions calibrates how much the system trusts them on an individual level. As long as contributors remain trusted they're allowed to continue working on a given job. If they become untrusted, they're removed from the job and all of their work is disregarded. Multiple contributor judgments are collected and an aggregate answer with an associated confidence score (agreement of the contributors weighted by the trust of each contributor) is provided as a result - effectively returning the "most trusted judgment," for a given unit of data.

from Wikipedia's description of CrowdFlower

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