We often talk about crowdsourcing for collective intelligence, or ideation. What about crowdsourcing for crowd production? Putting a call out to get a high volume of simple tasks done quickly and economically – even free.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been around for several years now, with (currently) over 57,000 “Human Intelligence Tasks.” There’s also Crowdflower, a site currently in Beta, created for small tasks that humans do better than computers.

Another newcomer to the crowd production arena is The Guardian. On June 18th, it launched the “Join us in investigating your MP’s expenses” campaign calling to the crowd to overcome the data hurdle of holding MP’s accountable for irresponsible spending of public funds. The crowd was asked to sift through more than 450,000 pages of public records to find MP expenses worth investigating.

Not only has the exercise proven a good comeback for The Guardian after The Telegraph increased its readership by over 600,000 with access to the documents a month earlier, but The Guardian discovered a new-world way to enlist readers to help whistle blow irresponsible acts by public officials. It is nice to see journalism and crowdsourcing play nice together for a change.

What do you see as the future for crowdsourcing for news media?