[LINK] Grocery Choice - what's the problem?

[Lea de Groot]

On 29/06/2009, at 9:35 PM, David Boxall wrote:

> Agreed. I reckon our elected representatives have been conned.

I think the whole scheme was flawed.
How is it in the supermarkets interest to give us good data on their  
prices?
Ignoring the 'good citizen' and 'be honest and people will love you  
and stick with you' motifs (neither of which I think anyone would use  
to describe our big business supermarkets, sadly) - they have no  
reason to want to do this, so there would be the ongoing question of  
'is the data good - are they lying?'
It would be a constant battle with the data.

But!

There is an obvious alternative, and I am mildly surprised that  
Choice, a seemingly internet savvy group, hasn't gone it alone and  
decided to demand funding for.

Crowdsourcing. [1]

Seen motormouth.com.au?
Its crowdsourced comparative petrol pricing.
I expect the same for grocery prices would be just as good.

I do wonder what i am missing, that this isn't happening? :)

Lea
[1] in the unlikely event that, despite begin a linker, you don't know  
what crowdsourcing is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing  
"Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task  
traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing  
it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in  
the form of an open call." So, grocery prices would be suplied by the  
general public, all 20 million of us, as we felt like entering them.
-- 
Lea de Groot
Brisbane, .au