Roanoke City Council used up $34,000 in expenses last year. Maybe you heard.

And if you got curious enough about it, maybe you found your way to the DataSphere at www.roanoke.com/datasphere and did some poking around to see just what that $34,000 bought.

Telling taxpayers how their tax dollars are spent is a major concern of journalists. Has been for years and years and years. We like to think you count on us for stuff like that.

We submit a Freedom of Information Act request, get the receipts and vouchers, see what the story is and tell you about it. But these days, with online data libraries such as the DataSphere, we can do more.

We'll still filter that stuff for you and tell you in a newspaper story what our judgement tells us is most important.

But on top of that, we invite you to troll that data for yourself. And that's what you can do right now with the city council expenses. Go in and look at each individual expense, see who council members had lunch with, how much they paid, where they traveled, and why. We could never print all that in the paper, but on the Internet, we can give you every morsel in a searchable form.

Think of what that means for keeping our government officials honest. Maybe you've heard former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' famous statement about the benefits of openness in government: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

So, for example, if you want officials to think twice about ordering the lobster with your money when they could do just as well with a hoagie, just make sure they know you're watching.

Well, with all that data out there for not only reporters to see, but also any taxpayer with Internet access, that sunlight just got a lot more intense.

Maybe even enough to make some people sweat.

But here's the catch. I like to think that with that information comes a little responsibility and a chance to help.

If you know any reporters, you've probably seen us puff out our chests and go all Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, talking about our sources, the people who either share information with us, or at the least, tell us where to look. "According to MY source..."

We like to think we're special because we have super-secret sources. We want to believe we not only know it all, but we know it first.

But really, we're sometimes the last to know because, well, when we know something, we tend to want to put it in the paper. So people don't always tell us stuff.

Plus, we don't always see the connections between events and people we need to see, not without help.

Which brings us back to sources, the Internet, and the newest word on sources: "crowdsourcing."

The idea is, we enlist the help of the reading public to help understand information we have. We call on people in the community to see if they recognize things we've overlooked. Maybe you have background we lack. Maybe you'll see a relationship between people or events that we don't recognize.

And when you do, tell us about it. Maybe it's the answer to why a council member and a certain member of the community had lunch a few times. Maybe you look at our crime maps and notice a pattern to the crime in your neighborhood.

One reader, identified in a post to the DataSphere blog as "Mrs. E," is already helping out. She noticed that a section of Salem some say is blighted and therefore a good location for the controversial intermodal rail yard being discussed is, on our Salem crime map, free of felonious crime. So, she asks, how blighted could it be?

You get the idea. So, as you peruse the DataSphere, make a few mental notes, and then shoot me a message and tell me what you see.

One source helped expose Watergate. Imagine the power of a crowd.