Although you can’t tell form its homepage, the Washington D.C. Examiner is actively seeking everyone’s help to do computer assisted reporting.

Inspired by the book The Wisdom of Crowds, the opinion editor Mark Tapscott has launched the Washington Examiner Community Action Network (WeCan), which makes local government databases open to the public. The hope is that with so many eyes picking apart the data, leads will develop.

“As it happens here at The Examiner I don’t have enough staff to do everything I want, but there are literally hundreds of people in the Washington region that are civic activists in one region or another and they have enormous experience and contacts,” said Taspcott. “They will see things that we won’t.”

In just one month WeCan has made four government databases available to the public and has already generated several leads. The response has been larger than expected considering the only promotion of the project has been in four editorials announcing each database. Perhaps the attention is because this project makes the Examiner “stand out from the crowd” of local papers.

Tapscott says he is following three citizen generated leads from the Montgomery County Public Schools salaries database which will either be editorials or news stories. Other citizens have pointed to interesting material regarding the overtime payments in the Alexandria city workforce database.

“There are lots of folks out there who are accountants and can download databases and do sophisticated research and reporting that we for a lack of time or oversight wouldn’t.”

From the database on Metro System Employees, Taspcott suspects he received a tip from a metro employee. Not being sure, this is where the strengths of professional journalists come in. With time saved not hunting down leads in the street, they can track down hot tips to see if they check out. It’s the same way they would treat any anonymous phone call, but the databases have streamlined the process and made it more open.

WeCan is guided by the same principle as the Porkbuster’s campaign and Sunlight’s Congressional Family Business Project except on a local level.

Soon Taspcott wants to introduce a new feature to WeCan revolving around FOIA’s. The databases are created through the FOIA process, but often journalists receive the run around while trying to gather public information.

“It’s a conversation between journalists and government and they hold all the power and journalists tend to get screwed.”

In some respects this run around is news in itself. That information is public and paid for by our taxes. So Tapscott wants to educate people on the FOIA process and make it more public. The idea is to announce what FOIA’s journalists are requesting and encourage citizens to make phone calls and check on requests, holding city and county agencies more accountable.

But first WeCan needs to get space on the Examiner’s front page. Right now the only way to get to the databases is through Tapscott’s editorial columns. There is huge potential for local projects like WeCan if they garner enough public attention. The hope is that WeCan will get its own web page in the next month or so, but there is no telling where it will fall on the litany of interests in the Examiner universe.