Staff Blog
Crowdsource This: Broken Stamp Machines?
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Some time back, while I was still living in Miami, I popped into my local post office to get some stamps. The machine was broken. Fast forward to a month ago: I walked into the Fishtown post office, on Frankford near Norris, to get stamps. Again, the machine was broken. Today, I popped into the post office at Sixth and Chestnut and lo — the stamp machine was broken.
Now, this is just a hunch: I suspect those machines (paid for, presumably, out of our federal tax dollars) break more frequently than they should. But maybe I just have bad luck with them.
The only way to find out is to collect data — a job hard for one person to do, but a fairly simple task for a community of readers. So I’m going to propose a little "crowdsourcing" experiment. To participate, just answer this question:
Does the stamp machine at your local post office work?
If not, tell us below and be sure to include the location of the office and the date you last knew the stamp machine to be out of order. Let’s see what we find.
Granted, this is a modest — or worse — little project, but hopefully the first of more attempts to bring you, Dear Reader, and the City Paper closer together in journalistic collaboration. We can do bigger and better experiments — perhaps even accomplish a little collective investigative reporting — but to do good crowdsourcing, we’ll need a crowd.
So here we go. Project 1: does your stamp machine work?
Well, I haven’t been by to check lately, but I do know that on April 15th, the stamp machine at 13th and Market was busted so even if you just needed one stamp to mail your taxes, you had to wait in line for 45 minutes.
[...] - bookmarked by 4 members originally found by TgirlQueensland on 2008-10-26 Crowdsource This: Broken Stamp Machines? http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/clog/2008/07/14/crowdsource-this-broken-stamp-machines/ - [...]