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| © Kuensel Corporation |
Congratulations to NSB Dzonkhag officers who will be using a new "price collection" app, developed by Athang Training Academy, to enter food prices around the country. The purpose of the price data is to measure quarterly inflation rate. The new system replaces the pen-and-paper system, thereby reducing errors and speeding up data transfer. According to the
Kuensel article,
"The application is loaded with the number of ‘sample’ shops in each of the 23 urban centres, and the items contained in the market basket used to index inflation."
Mobile apps are a powerful data collection mechanism. With the increasing number of smartphones and tablets in Bhutan, there are opportunities for taking the mobile data collection idea one step further to what is called
crowdsourcing. The idea behind
crowdsourcing is distributing a task to the general public. Each person then does some small part of the task and gets rewarded in some way. In the food price collection, for instance, crowdsourcing would mean that not only the NSB officers would be able to enter food prices around the country, but the application would be available for free to anyone with a smartphone. This would allow collecting a lot more data, in many more locations, and at much faster rates. Of course, the quality of the data might be lower, but with sufficient entries, some data cleaning is possible.
