Today marks the beginning of our publishing phase at Assignment Zero.

Anyone involved in Assignment Zero will tell you it was no small endeavor. Over eighty interviews (see directly below this post) were scheduled, rescheduled, transcribed, edited and formatted.

Research, writing, re-writing, fact-checking and more have gone into our feature stories.

New friends made, lessons learned and we hope, the potential for networked journalism will shine through it all.

Today Wired has published five pieces.

1. An intro from Jay Rosen

2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
by Anna Haynes with additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore. Edited by Vivian Martin

3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book Reported by: Celestina Adams, Dan Charles, Orlando Dozier, Yvonne Allison Eriksen, Jack Frost, Kristin Gorski, Gerrit Janssens, George Karimalil, Raul Larson, Gregorio Magini and Yasmin E. Voglewede
Written by: Kristin Gorski
Illustrated by: Namir Ahmed
Edited by: Michele McLellan

4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
Reported by Gregg Osofsky, Nancy Feraldi, Leah DeVun, and Daniella Zalcman
Written by Daniella Zalcman
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Hillary Rosner

And more to come... Stay tuned. And don't forget to visit NewAssignment.Net for updates on future projects.

Wired is looking over the content we gave them and is thinking about how to package it all right now. We will ring bells and whistles the second we know anything. It should be the week after July 4th.

Jeff Howe has read the entire interview package and had great things to say:

With shockingly few exceptions, the interviews are compelling, thought-provoking and chock full of insights both philosophical and practical. The final package represents, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge base on the various ways the Internet has given rise to collaborative forms of production. I've been researching these issues for 18 months, and the collected information handily exceeds my own knowledge base—that itself is a testament to the wisdom of the crowds over the wisdom of the expert.

We have also recieved our first review from outside our circle.

Cheers to Randy J. Hunt, who actually contacted World Changing to do an interview for his blog at Citizen Scholar, but ended up being interviewed himself about his experinece at Assignment Zero.

Hopefully after we publish there will be more reviews like this one -- and you will all be the sources! How's that for a change of pace!

A few quick notes on what's still going on with Assignment Zero:

Tagging: So far, you've all been doing a super-terrific job of tagging our interviews! All our content is becoming much more keyword searchable with each new tag. We can still use some help with that--so, if you're interested, read this post for a quick explanation of tagging, and then check out the directory to help us out.

Wired.com has our package! That's right: all your hard work has been delivered to the editorial team at Wired.com, who will be going over it in the next days. So far, the word is that they're pretty impressed! way to go!

And if we haven't told you already.... you guys rock!

It's time for a celebration, a big pat on the back, and - yes, it's true - a little bit more work.

We've finished pulling together the interviews for publication, but now we need to tag them. Tagging means that we add a word - or a few - to the end of the entry so that the interview is pulled up when people search for related topics. For example, we added the words - Amazon, crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, and Peter Cohen- to Sean Richardson's interview of Peter Cohen. When someone enters a search with one of those words, this interview will come up.

Can you help out? Just pick out an interview from the directory. Click through and look for a pink box on the left reading "Tag this." Then insert words for tags into "my tags" and click "add."

Perhaps you've been wondering what's going on with Assigment Zero--everything's been a bit quiet lately.

But the Editorial Team has been working overtime pulling together all the various editorial elements we will need to have in place for our June 5 deadline.

Here's a quick glimpse of what we've been up to behind the scenes. . .

Interview editor Angela Pacienza has been working with contributors to get their Q&As in on time. She's also been co-ordinating the Q&A editing efforts with a great group of voluteers from the Online News Association (and doing some of the editing, too.)

Senior editor Hillary Rosner has been co-ordinating efforts of the editors and contributors on our seven feature articles--keeping everyone on track and making sure everthing is completed and filed. From Hillary's constant attention to what's happening with our features, we will, on June 5, see full stories from Crowdsourced Journalism, Film, Social News, Architecture, Photography, Religion and Novels.

Amanda Michel, our Director of Participation, has switched hats just a bit, and has been working on editing the html and pitching in with the Q&A editing. She's also been fielding questions from contributors about the status of AZ and of their submissions.

Tish Grier's been helping Angela track the Q&A submissions and fine-tuning the html where needed. She's also been creating posts for the Scoop, and spending quality time with her email, contacting contributors and tracking down pics to accompany the Q&As.

And David Cohn's been monitoring Q&A and Feature status, matching up contributors with interview subjects, editing the html, doing some Q&A editing, answering email from every quarter of the project, never sleeping, formating and posting pictures--you name it, he's been doing it....

So, as you can see, it's been a pretty busy "newsroom" over here--except that we're not all in the same space, nor are we all working at the exact same time. At times it has the feeling of a 24-hour newsroom with a staff of five--copious emails at all sorts of times of day. Then there are times when it's as if no one's around at all (and there are metaphorical crickets chirping in the background.) Yet even in those moments, one of us, somewhere, is busy with some particular task that will help all those bits and pieces and efforts coalesce into something pretty darned amazing. . .

Stay tuned....

--tish grier

The term "crowdsourcing" might be new to our lexicon, but the concept, as some of our subjects from Interview Week note, has a past as much as it has potential. . .

In politics, Utah representative Steve Urquhart recalls how another Utah representative "crowdsourced" before the Internet: "One of the best examples I can think of is when a member of the Utah Legislature from a rural area, Tom Hatch, would call down to Foy's Diner. They'd put him on speaker, and he would let them know what the Legislature was considering and ask for their feedback. So the folks that were sitting at the coffee counter, they would interact with him and tell him what they thought and how they thought it might affect their area. That was early crowdsourcing."

Among fundraisers, Kiva.org co-founder and CEOMatt Flannery was influenced by "sponsorship" programs : "I grew up sponsoring children and connecting to children all over the world with $20 a month. I had a good experience with that as a kid. Growing up, I visited a lot of people across the world and was deeply affected -- witnessed people having to make choices of buying medicine for one child and feeding the rest of their children, choices no one should have to make. This intimate exposure gave me a reason to care and think about that. But, when I would come back to my comfortable world, there was no way to act on that. I wanted to create a more lasting connection between me and my family and my friends and the people I met in East Africa. I wanted there to be a dignified way to partner with people in the developing world to help them get out of poverty. I was attracted to the idea of lending to people. There’s a mutual respect. You can connect of over ideas for business over making improvements. Progress over poverty is an idea we like to emphasize. I personally was exhausted and desensitized by the emphasis in America and on images of people in poverty and suffering and people dying and babies starving. I think people are overwhelmed and exhausted by that. I was hoping that we could create something a more positive. I was hoping we could focus on doing something that we can succeed in and track, like a business plan."

Thinking of the potential of crowdsoucing, Lionel David founder of Crowdspirit, believes having new means to communicate will spur on more co-develpment and collaboration towards the invention of new consumer electronics: "I think crowdsourcing or more co-development in our case is definitively not a "transitory" phenomenon. The basis of this trend was identified many decades ago by researchers like Eric Von Hippel. The word crowdsourcing could be "transitory," but the trend itself is on its way. [Wired Contributing Editor] Jeff Howe was clearly visionary by inventing this word and by raising it to the public at the perfect time to market. What is more important is the fact that, thanks to the internet, we finally have the means to communicate to the masses, in order to really engage that new industrial revolution which was predicted a long time ago. It's now just a question of time before we see the deep impact that it will have in our society. Moreover, we can look at the macro-economical aspect of this revolution. In the last century, several nations tried various economic systems like capitalism and communism. In this century, crowdsourcing could be seen as a new way of thinking for our future society."

For a business to successfully tap into the crowd, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer for Threadless suggests keeping ego out of it and shifting from money-making to community-building :Any business that doesn’t already exist that has people running it that aren’t egomaniacs. That’s it. You hear community as a buzzword, but some people can’t handle it. If you have 50 million dollars available to advertise a business and tell the world how great your product is, the last thing you want to do is have an open forum where customers can tell each other that its not. It’s bad business. It’s a totally different foundation for running a business. Businesses are about making money—but we tend to look at threadless as a project. We rarely talk about threadless as a business. We tend to talk about it as a project. At the heart of it, its not about making money, its about the community. It’s a simple concept—when people tell you what they want, you give it to them. It’s totally open—you can’t have secrets, executives, and a bunch of bureaucratic levels in a top down business hierarchy. It has to be completely transparent, and anyone can do it. Anyone. As long as you can be a good leader while keeping your ego out of it, you can do it.

--tish grier

Author, NYU prof, and longtime scholar of the internet Douglas Rushkoff, and Oxford/Harvard prof and digital rights guru Jonathan Zittrain both dislike the term "crowdsourcing," though they've got differing levels of optimism about the phenomenon's potential. See what they told AZ contributors Sarah Cove and Craig Walker.

Here's Rushkoff...

Sarah Cove: What is crowdsourcing for you?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I haven't used the term crowdsourcing in my own conversations before. Every time I look at, it rubs me the wrong way.

Q: Why is that?

A: I understand crowdsourcing as kind of an industrial age, corporatist framing of a cultural phenomenon. There's human energy being expended here. A company can look at that as either a threat -- to their copyrights and intellectual property or as some unwanted form of competition – or, if they see it positively, then they see it as almost this new affinity group population to be exploited as a resource. And I guess what I'm undecided on and debating internally is whether this is fine. In other words, am I naïve to think this isn't the death nail for a community-oriented, collaborative, Open Source ethos? Has corporate America finally figured out the way to arrest this shift in the balance of power? Or do we let them believe they are doing this when actually it is human participation and collaboration going on, the kind of thing I would promote.

And here's Zittrain...

Craig Walker: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit its true potential?

Jonathan Zittrain: I think the phenomenon -- I actually hate the name "crowdsourcing" -- is just getting ramped up. For example, I think the privacy debate will be completely upended by social activities made possible by new technologies. The traditional sources of privacy invasion -- government and big corporations -- will be dwarfed by an army of the world's tourists, taking pictures, uploading them, and tagging them -- or having them automatically labeled. Soon we'll be able to ask the Net, "Where was the person in this photo otherwise seen for the past two weeks," and billions of casual photos can provide some answers. Or, "Who are the people attending this protest?" Further, the kinds of systems that allow us to aggregate our behaviors or ratings so that Amazon can recommend books and music or eBay can say whether we're sketchy sellers will be applied to judging people more fundamentally -- "Whom should I meet? Whom should I ignore?"

--hillary rosner

Suppose you'd like to find a some smart folks to do some thoughtful yet uncomplicated work for you--like paraphrase a paragraph or create a couple of trivia questions. Contributor Sean Richardson spoke with Peter Cohen, head of Mechanical Turk, a new project at Amazon.com designed to help find those needle-in-a-haystack thinkers:

Q: What about the development of the Mechanical Turk project has surprised you in the 'beta stage' of its development, and in the application/usage of it by participants?

A: We were very surprised by how quickly Mechanical Turk grabbed the popular imagination right from the time it was launched. Since launch we have seen a steady increase in the number of Requesters who are using Mechanical Turk for an ever broader set of applications. When we were developing the product we certainly had ideas about how it could be applied but also made sure that we weren't creating artificial restrictions on how it could be used. We intentionally wanted to be surprised by the kinds of problems people used Mechanical Turk to solve. For instance, early on one Requester used Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 people to submit hand-drawn pictures of sheep. More recently, someone used Mechanical Turk as a way to generate collaborative content to generate a book. Other applications include everything from cleaning up product data by identifying duplicate data, identifying images in pictures, finding specific content in documents, transcribing audio and video content, gathering data from diverse sources, and authoring original content. We were also pleased that Mechanical Turk had broad appeal to Workers. We have participants from over one hundred countries making this a truly international marketplace.

--tish grier

Ever wonder how crowdsouced projects find their respective crowds? Or how the crowds find the projects? Lots of our contributors were curious about that, too. Contributor Leah DeVun asked Andrea Grover, founding director of the Houston-based Aurora Picture Show and curator of several crowdsourced art projects about selecting the crowd:

Q: You put together a group of artists using crowdsourcing for the show “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing” at Apex Art last year. What can you tell me about the show and how you selected the artists in it?

A: I think all of the artists had this genuine interest in involving the general public in the production of the work and then sharing ownership of the work with the public, with the exception of Aaron Koblin, whose “Sheep Market” was a comment on the unwitting participation of people in corporate crowdsourcing and the lack of creative jobs available to the crowd. His particular contribution was more of a prank, while the others were more interest in exploring whether the crowd could create a greater work than the individual.

Q: How did Koblin solicit participants?

A: He used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a website that uses humans to do things that people do better than computers. It’s mostly used by corporations for tasks like taking surveys, transcribing things, or sorting things. But now that Koblin used it for “Sheep Market,” it’s being used for other purposes. Other people are using Ebay to create artwork, such as John Freyer’s “All My Life for Sale,” which used Ebay to catalog and sell everything in his house, down to the Vidalia onion in his refrigerator. Then he followed his belongings to their new owners in their new locations and then wrote a book about it.

--tish grier

It's true: We’ve got 50 interviews in so far.... And they just keep coming! I think at this point we can safely declare Interview Week a success.

The transcripts are all collected here. Some appear at that link in full, others you’ll see are abbreviated; just click on the headline to link to the topic page where the full transcript appears.

We can barely keep up with the pace at which the interview transcripts are coming in. Just when I think I’m almost up to speed reading them all, there are more. But we wanted to start highlighting some of the fascinating things our experts are saying about crowdsourcing.

Subvertandprofit.com “operates a black market for votes on social networking sites,” in the words of its 19-year-old founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar told AZ contributor Derek Powazek that while some users of Digg.com “cling to democracy as the final ideal,” others “understand that their community is a wild anarchy...and I believe they like it that way.”

How does Ragnar buck the system and ensure that the people he pays to Digg—who typically make $5 per week for five minutes of work per day—aren’t caught and ousted by Digg? Here’s what he told Derek:

In general, we try to keep our users' activity subtle. This is accomplished by a myriad of techniques and algorithms. Initially we began with the obvious: selecting users to Digg a story based on how unrelated they are in terms of their history with us, interspersing a paid story with a few random ones, and verifying activity through proxies. Since then we have thought of some less intuitive, craftier methods, such as implicating uninvolved Digg users. Ideally, this makes Digg hesitant to ban users for fear of banning the uninvolved. A few of our techniques work in proportion to the size of our userbase. As we gain more users, we become less detectable.

Meanwhile, in the more mainstream world of crowdsourcing, media scholar Henry Jenkins talked to AZ contributor Bernardo Parrella about participatory culture. Who are those folks using Digg for more accepted purposes? Here’s what Jenkins said about participation in crowdsourcing:

I have argued that what we are calling web 2.0 is fandom without the stigma. By that, I mean that fans, among many other groups, have a long history of living in virtual communities and embracing participatory culture. They have long taken resources drawn from popular culture and transformed them into raw materials for their own creative expression, expression which is understood in shared rather than individualized terms. As they have done so, they have been an innovative force on popular culture -- generating new meanings, focusing attention on emerging trends, educating the public for new approaches, creating models for alternative cultural practices -- and thus have created new kinds of value. Fans appreciate the work in the double sense that they like it and they increase its value through their emotional investments in it.

There’s lots, lots, lots more in the dozens of interviews we’ve got and those coming in over the next few days. Stay tuned... and read it all on the Interview Week blog.

--hillary rosner