Morphing Assignment Zero: Interview Week and Beyond

Assignment Zero is, in many respects, a learning process: what works and what doesn't. What is the flow of participation? How do we complete "x" number of stories in this length of time? We're slowly learning about all these aspects; and in order to complete the last, some adjustments to AZ's original model were necessary. Jay Rosen's outlined some of these changes and adjustments--these "morphs"--to Assignment Zero

So far, our first morph was to spin off Citizendium as a stand-alone article at Wired.com. That task was completed and published last week.

Our second morph, Jay explains:

Instead of trying to do what we were earlier trying to do--investigate 22 separate cases where wisdom-of-the-crowd efforts are going on and ten specific places where it seems to be happening--we're going to scale back to five topics that have drawn the most interest from our contributors. These we will try to develop into pieces for Wired.com, as Abell, Howe and Sandler did with Citizendium. They are...

* Open source religion with editor David Crumm, Religion writer for the Detroit Free Press.
* Journalism-by-the-many with Vivian Martin, a journalism professor and freelance writer in Connecticut.
* Crowdsourcing the novel with Michelle McLellan, former newspaper editor, now at Northwestern. (And a PressThink author.)
*Social news sites with Christine Riedel, a senior producer at AOL News in New York.
* Crowdsourced film with Jarett Martineau, a freelance producer, writer, cultural critic, and artist based in Montreal.

After a further review of participation patterns, the Team determined that the best way to take the rest of our topics was towards Q&A interviews. From Jay:

We struggled to lay out a clear path to participation, emphasis on the word clear. "Bring back a Q and A with a key player in our story..." is our answer to that: it's an extremely clear task because participants already know the Q & A form and can easily see the results in their mind's eye before they sign up. (Clarity in this sense is more important than the simplicity of the task. Doing a good Q & A isn't simple, but it is easy to grasp what we're asking you to do.) The 70 or so names on the list emerged from our earlier reporting for Assignment Zero. They are, in a sense, its result.

With a bit of addtional background reporting and editing, our "raw" Q&As will written up, fact-checked, and fashioned into completed works by our June 5 publishing date. We will be assisted in this process by members of the Online News Association.

And so far we're doing pretty well, with most of our interview topics assigned, some already completed, and information being gathered and reported by other individuals on the topic teams. Over the rest of Interview Week, we'll have updates on the status of various interviews, where we still need your participation, and some quick checks on the background reporting, too. And let us know if there's anyone else we need to talk to about crowdsourcing. After all, "we" sometimes knows more than "me."