Opening a New York Times platform for crowdsourcing projects will enable the publisher to learn from developers.

Nieman Lab's Justin Ellis has reported that code for the open-source Hive framework is now on GitHub, following work with early implementations. With one of these, Madison, readers could help identify advertisements within the NYT's archive.

Hive allows projects to be assigned, defined and monitored, and can handle a variety of user-submitted contributions.

Executive director of the NYT R&D Lab Matt Boggie told Nieman that while Madison had been based on a print archive app, they had realised its potential was much greater: "The big thing was we realised the problem we were solving was one particular manifestation of a common problem lots of organizations have."

A benefit of making Hive open-source is that the R&D Lab sees how people are using it, and can learn from "others who are doing good things".

Hive manages crowdsourcing by breaking operations into smaller tasks, with more than 14,000 people sharing tasks on Madison to complete more than 100,000 assignments so far for ads dating back to the 1970s.