Design creates transparency

This website is fascinating. It's a story about a seemingly insurmountable task and an ingenious solution that involved fine design.

If you visit the website: http://sarahsinbox.com/ you'll find all of Sarah Palin's emails from when she was governor of Alaska. Doesn't seem too exciting so far? Wait until you hear the story behind it.

The History:
A number of American newspapers were given access to Sarah Palin's email from her time as governor of Alaska through a Freedom of Information request. The journalists wanted to see if there was anything of interest to the public amongst her correspondence.

The Difficult Task:
The governor of Alaska's office provided the newspapers with the information that they required. But there was a catch: If they really wanted it, they would have to go to Alaska and collect 250 pounds of paper that the emails were printed on -- no digital option was given. And because the information was not in electronic format, searching for any information involved sifting through all of the emails by hand, without search tools, a long process.

The Solution:
While other organizations like the New York Times chose to crowd source the emails to help them in their hunt for interesting information and provide readers with access to a database of the scanned emails, an organization called Sunlight Foundation went one step further with a website that mimicked Gmail in its look and feel, and in its functionality. They did this by taking Palin's digitalized emails and loaded them into a website with a Gmail frame. The result is this amazing page where you can browse through Sarah Palin's inbox as if you were, well, Sarah herself. You can click on "sent" to see which emails she sent, you can use Gmail's label function to read the emails on topics of interest to you and you can star particularly important emails to go back to. It's crowd sourcing in a way that is very natural to the crowd because it's using a format they interact with everyday.

The Conclusion:
Good design ideas don't have to be complicated. They have to be functional, simple and easy to understand by the end user. In this case, by creating a website similar to Gmail, Sunlight solved a very difficult problem: How to get people to go through all this information (emails in this case) and make sense of it. And more importantly, how to get people engaged in a relevant way so, they can effectively become a relevant source (crowd source) for solving a problem that otherwise could take months to solve.