Welcome to
Assignment Zero. It's pro-am journalism in the open style made possible by the web. This is a collaboration among
NewAssignment.Net, Wired and those who choose to participate.
I hope you will. Because we're trying to figure something out here. Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?
We're going to start with something closer to home, a story tangled up with the birth of NewAssignment.Net. I suppose some people consider it a "techie" subject. I do not. But it's definitely web journalism about something happening in the wider world because of the web. As I understand it, that is Wired's beat.
We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist.
Collaboration in the open-source diaspora and why it works when it does (plus what it can't do ...), that's a sprawling and nuanced story with lots of locations. It lies in pieces -- and in people who know the practices. There's also a little mystery at the core of it: Why are these people willing to work for free?
We'll give assignments to anyone who can complete the mission, and donate quality work. Anything you know that will help us track the spread of crowd sourcing and peer production can (if we do this right) be filed at the Assignment Zero site. Anyone you know who participates in "wisdom of the crowd" projects is a source for us. We're asking those with real experience in open-source or crowd-driven projects to take our survey of volunteers. The more we get the better a survey it is.
The site we built for Assignment Zero is "open platform." Anyone can wander by and check out what we're doing. And if we do this right, anyone can find within minutes something useful to do. We're betting that openness has editorial advantages bigger than its well-known weak points. (Which include trolls, fools, spam, sabotage, edit wars and the inflow of "crap.")
Assignment Zero works like this:
- We're going to take one big, moving story -- the spread of crowdsourcing and peer production methods across wired society -- and with your active assistance break it down into reportable parts. Some of these parts we already have. More of them is what we need.
- Then we're going to develop those parts -- in the open, at the site -- into pieces we can formally assign to contributors. Each piece is a part of a larger puzzle we are putting together. We don't know yet how many pieces there will be. It's open-ended.
- We'll set deadlines for those pieces, and with your help find contributors who are motivated and qualified to complete them. Not for pay (we're not at that stage yet) but for public benefit and some byline glory in the final results. An "author" in our system can be an individual writer, a two- or three-person team. A class could get an assignment. A blog, plus users, could do one. In an agreement with Calvin Tang and Mike Davidson, the founders of Newsvine, we are going to ship to them a "box" of assignments for people at that site to complete. It will then be up to Newsvine to figure out how to get those pieces done. They have plans.
- We'll edit what comes in and with the crowd's help verify it to the best of our ability. (Our director of verification is Craig Silverman from Regret the Error.)
- Final results? That will probably take a couple of months. We plan to publish in a package at NewAssignment.Net all the pieces that came in and made the editor's final cut. Could there be video? Some, yes, but we have to think about it. Could there be audio? There could be. Photos, of course. Wired will run a piece by Jeff Howe drawing off Assignment Zero. Wired will be free to pick and choose from tour final package and publish any portion of it, in print or online. What doesn't run at our site or at Wired.com can appear elsewhere on the net. (We won't own your content. A Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License will apply.)
Pro-am means just that: a mix of professional and amateur talent. Some formatting, some freestyling. Some things decided by editors, others left to participants. We don't know what the optimal mix is yet. Assignment Zero started when Evan Hansen, editor in chief of Wired News, wrote to me shortly after NewAssignment.Net was announced in the summer of 2006. He said he wanted to experiment at Wired's site with some of the same ideas.