As heard on The Scoop, during the interviews we're conducting during I week, we're asking contributors to ask three common questions, with an optional fourth if there is time. They may have to be adpated slightly, but they are self-explanatory in the context of Assignment Zero.

1. What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit it's true potential?

2. What do you think motivates your (the project's) contributors? Is it money or some other incentive?

3. Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds? If so, what's the clearest example you know of?

(optional)
4. What surprised you the most with your project?

By asking a few common questions across lots of interviews (the current number of assigned Q & A's is close to 80) we have a simple way of illustrating the range of thought in our sample of key players. By piling up good answers we make it possible to drill down on some critical issues: the question of "cheap labor," the issue of motivation, the very idea of crowd wisdom.

So that's the logic of what we're doing. If an interview has been completed at an earlier stage and these particular questions were not asked, that is no crisis, and we're not going to worry about it.

The first published results from Assignment Zero are in, as we announced at the Scoop last week. They ran on the front page of Wired.com in the form of an article, Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness. "The creators of expert-led collaborative encyclopedia Citizendium hope to eclipse the cacophonous success of Wikipedia," said Wired. The by-line read "by NewAssignment.net." Then it was broken down further under "credits."

Principal reporter and writer, Michael Ho
Sidebar reporter and writer, Randy Burge
With reporting from Anna Haynes, Robert William King, Steve Petersen, Sean Richardson, Muhammed Saleem, J. Jack Unrau, Paul S. Wilson
Additional research by John Eisched, Carl Collins, Matthew Kress-Weitenhagen
Discussion and editorial guidance from Francine Hardaway, Ken MacNamara, Derek Poore
Art by Mark Selander
Fact-checking by Craig Silverman, Ian Elwood, Christopher Nystrom
Edited by John C. Abell, Jeff Howe, Lauren Sandler

We published this piece as a preview of fuller results due out in June. So that was our first morph, and our first result-- journalistically speaking: Assignment Zero editor Lauren Sandler, with volunteer contributor John C. Abell and Wired's Jeff Howe sharing the load, took Citizendium and twenty of our contributors onto the front page of Wired.com.

Here's a small sidebar that went with the story. Here's the topic home page at Assignment Zero where work came together. And here's my explanation at the AZ site for why we decided to publish a preview piece ahead of a larger body of work.

Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief of Wired.com, wrote in introducing the article, "The team's research and reporting are up on the Assignment Zero site for you to see -- or even use to write your own article, if you don't like this one." That's because a Creative Commons license applies. "While keeping the reporting and much discussion of the piece transparent, Assignment Zero edited and fact-checked through e-mail. Ho filed his preferred draft to the site as well; you can decide for yourself which one works better."

We've made some other decisions, leading to a new idea, Interview Week, which I will explain in a minute.

Second morph: 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.

The rest of the project will be folded into interview week. It works like this: Picking from our people-of-interest list, contributors volunteer to do one interview and post it as a clean, readable but otherwise raw Q and A-- like this one by Len Witt (done via Instant Messenger.) My idea is to try to interview in a concentrated one-week period (May 8-14) as many of the key figures in our story as we can.

By posting the list, we give the people we need to talk to a public heads-up about our editorial interest in them. (It's working, as this Google search shows.) Simple links to their sites and projects tell contributors why we have this interest. The "raw" Q & A's can be material for multiple writers to develop into finished pieces during the following week. (See, for example, this one with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.) The best of those we will publish at NewAssignment.Net and submit to Wired.com.

When Assignment Zero launched I wrote: "We're going to report on the spread of what's called crowdsourcing and the larger practice it's part of: peer production on the new information commons, in all of its forms. Collaboration online -- and why it works when it does -- is an expansive and nuanced story with lots of locations." Interview Week is a chance to visit those locations, through the eyes of the people trying to make things happen.

The current list of interviewees numbers about 70. But we're still adding to it, so leave your suggestions here. Contributors have responded well to our call. Fifty of the interviews are already taken. Here's a few names that give you a feel for what we're doing:

* Matt Flannery, co-founder and CEO of Kiva, "loans that change lives." Kiva is a micro-finance community that lets you directly fund an entrepreneur in the developing world. It's crowdsourced funding, or crowdfunding.

* Jonathan Kuniholm, a founder of the Open Prosthetics Project, a community of people who design prosthetic limbs. Kuniholm lost part of his right arm while serving in Iraq, and wants to use open source principles to lower the cost of prosthetic devices.

* Peter Cohen, director of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, crowdsourcing's odd-job marketplace, where tasks that need real people instead of computers -- called Human Intelligence Tasks -- are outsourced.

* Andrea Grover, one of the first curators of crowdsourced art. In 2006, Grover curated a group show at Apex Art in Manhattan, designed to explore the question: can networked communication "make the crowd more artistic"?

* Chris Messina, an unconference organizer. Unconferences such as BarCamp, modeled on the hacker confab FOO Camp, are events where participants create and drive the daily agenda.

We were criticized for starting with a geeky and self-referential story. "Man, you could have tackled health care, education, immigration, race relations, religion - or any number of real news topics," said Tom Watson, whose instincts I respect. "And the thing is, even if this thing rocks, it will only prove the concept to a bunch on insider head-nodders anyway."

It's a fair point, and I replied to it here. Jeff Jarvis, a friend of the project, said we started with something too hard. "I think they actually bit off a big bite for their first story," he wrote, "because it's more qualitative than quantitative, more about interviews and views than numbers and facts." He was more right than I thought at the time.

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.

Hillary Rosner, senior editor for the final month (and formerly tech editor at the Village Voice) will work with Associate Editor David Cohn, Director of Participation Amanda Michel and her deputy Tish Grier to bring the final package in and submit it to Wired on June 5.

At the moment it looks like five feature stories, and the best of the writing we will do from the 50-plus Q & A's. I'm hoping that many more than 50 will come in. The interviews will also feed into Jeff Howe's final essay for Wired.com. For how he plans to use them, see Assignment Zero: What's it All For? at his blog, crowdsourcing.com.

By an agreement with the board, members of the Online News Association (ONA) will help us complete the remaining work. They will oversee the pages where we coordinate our interviews during I-week-- pros assisting ams. ONA will also do an evaluation of Assignment Zero after its over. Board reps Jon Dube of Cyberjournalist.net and the CBC, and Ken Sands, online publisher of the Spokesman-Review are coordinating for ONA, along with Angela Pacienza of the Canadian Press, who is matching contributors to interviewees.

Whether Assignment Zero worked or not is ultimately in the journalism. Right now I'd say about 28 percent of what we did worked. But there's time to push that figure up. If you want to help join one of the five topics I listed above, pick up an assignment during I-week and make it sing, or suggest someone we really need to talk to.

You've been clamoring for it and you've been right. I worked out with Evan Hansen a schedule for completing Assignment Zero. It calls for the final product to appear on both Wired.com and NewAssignment.Net on Tuesday, June 5. Deadline for completed drafts is May 21.

Each week is named for a different editorial action. In reality, action would not be restricted to that week, but concentrated there. There is some artificial neatness here, but it is more than offset by the gains in clarity and transparency. We're also going to try something novel: a special week devoted to interviewing en masse.

This week has been about announcing a slight fork in the project, introducing our re-designed topic pages, debuting some new topics (like crowdsourced music) and signing up editors to oversee them. We also reorganized the story so that its parts can be displayed on a single page.

From here to June 5 the schedule looks this this:

Week One, April 24-30: Hunting and gathering
As we continue to recruit participants to join teams at topic pages, we'll be doing web research and background reporting on all topics, especially aimed at figuring out whom to interview in I-week, May 8-14. Those names will go on a master list, the beginnings of which are visible here.

Week Two, May 1-7: Lining up interviews
Assignment Zero's experiment with a week of intensive, all-project interviewing is a two-step process. First comes a week of set-up. It's not that we only do interviews during I-week, or that we don't do any after. Rather we try to make a big push and line up sources, who will have to set aside time during four key days, May 8-11, and contributors, who will need to absorb a lot of background on those sources. That prep work happens May1-7. Meanwhile hunting and gathering (and recruiting) can go on.

Week Three, May 8-14: Interview Week
I figure that if we do a lot of interviewing at once, our chances to guide and creatively inspire those interviews go way up. We can try to make sure that certain questions are asked across AZ interviews. We can hope for some viral effects, where word of our interviewing project spreads and people ask to be included. Having I-week is itself an experiment and of course it may not work, but it's worth a try. Participants conduct interviews and post them at the Assignment Zero site in Q and A form, as contributor Len Witt did for his interview with Eric von Hippel.

First checkpoint, May 14: At the end of week three comes an initial Editors Cut. Two weeks of hunting and gathering and a big week of interviewing will allow us to close down down topics that aren't developing. We can then call for final pieces based on recommendations from page editors looking at what they have in hand. We'll settle with editors on a target length, and what we want the final results to look like, so they know what they are expected to bring in. A (simplified) example could be: "Overview of 1,200 words with links on crowdsourced film and a close up treatment on two interesting projects." After the first checkpoint we'll have a simple description line for each piece-- which is really writing instructions for the team. Which in turn leads to...

Week Four, May 15-21: Writing Week. With background gathered and interviews posted, the actual writing (which could itself happen in parts) is completed during week four. Here it's possible we can draw some additional pro journalists in by asking them to be available for a specific time period to work with ams and help shape material.

Second Checkpoint, May 21: All completed drafts are due Monday, May 21. If you expect to be in the final package this is when the work must emerge.

Week Five, May 22-28: Editing
Editors are in back and forth with writers. Pieces get stitched together and remaining reporting holes are plugged.

Final Checkpoint, May 28: Now we have edited drafts. We look at what came in, what didn't and decide by May 28 which parts of the investigation will make the final cut. Only those pieces proceed to...

Week Six, May 29-June 4: Fact-checking and production for the Web
Craig Silverman, AZ's director of verification, will know what's coming. While he and his team are fact-checking the work, we'll be making it look nice.

Tuesday, June 5: Pub Date
Presenting Assignment Zero. A big package of features runs at NewAssignment.Net and Jeff Howe's piece on Assignment Zero runs at Wired.com.

(Final note: our weeks are funny. They start on Tuesdays and end on Mondays.)

Assignment Zero launched on March 14. Evan Hansen and I consulted at the four-week mark and determined that the project should run about seven more weeks but that we couldn't wait until everything was done to show some initial results. So here's what we decided to do, as explained by Evan in this letter to Assignment Zero participants. For contributors, there's news in it about getting published and about a new role for AZ editor Lauren Sandler.

It's been a month since the launch of Assignment Zero, and it's amazing to see how much has been accomplished so far.

As editor-in-chief of Wired News, and a co-founding member and editorial advisor on AZ, I'm thrilled with the results to date.

We've got some 900 participants and 40 or so topic pages that will soon have dedicated editors. We've already produced a new and improved version of the AZ platform, incorporating insights based on the experience of running an open source journalism site.

The last leg of this collaboration is approaching. We have a strong site and a big enough community; distributed research is starting to come in. Now we need to take this raw material and turn it into something. Clearly, the final results are still wide open.

Given the breadth of our efforts so far, and the work yet to be done, Jay and I sat down in the past week to discuss what we need as a group to cross the last mile. And it occurred to us that one thing that might help everyone would be to have a concrete example of what we're doing: a completed piece of writing.

It's one thing to generate raw material. But what is all of this going to look like as a finished work of journalism? We don't really know at this point. And that could be a problem as 40 separate topics lurch to completion all at once.

In my role as editorial advisor, I suggested it might be useful to know what's required to take AZ reporting and publish it on pro news web site like Wired.com.

Jay agreed.

If we were to fork the project at this point, and select some small piece of it for a "first wave" or trial run to completion, we could discover a lot about what we had. And that could help the rest of the group as we shift gears from the hunting and gathering phase to the writing and editing itself.

We came up with a plan to execute exactly this: a publishable article, based on AZ reporting, completed with the help of the AZ community, to appear on Wired.com by the end of the month.

The plan is to use an existing topic area, and expand the existing team to produce the bulk of the work. We will also look for supporting material in other related topics, and open the door for new team participants.

To combat all forms of fuzziness, we're setting a clear scope for the project and firm deadlines. We will identify reporting holes and create new assignments aimed at filling them in days rather than weeks. We're also setting a clear date to complete all of the research and putting one person in charge of overseeing the final product, with full editing authority.

When I raised this proposal with Assignment Zero editor Lauren Sandler, it became obvious that she was the right person to do it. She's a pro journalist, a gifted writer and editor, with tremendous reporting instincts. She also knows the AZ community intimately, having been with it since its birth.

I asked her to take on the job, and she agreed. Lauren has done outstanding work organizing the site and getting the project off the ground. Now she'll be stepping away from those tasks, and her role as the writer of The Scoop, in order to guide this new project to completion.

I've also asked Wired contributing editor Jeff Howe to join this project to help report and write it, and he agreed.

The topic we hit on was Citizendium. There was a lot of material here to work with, and broader themes to tease out. Our goal: To publish an AZ article about Citizendium on Wired.com, based on your contributions, by April 30.

Lauren has already approached AZ's Citizendium editor, John Abell, with our idea. He agreed to participate along with power-contributor Michael Ho, who's taken on many of the Citizendium reporting assignments to date.

Today we're making this new project public, and inviting your participation. Lauren and John are updating the Citizendium topic page to reflect the new assignment. They have lots of work to do, and lots of very specific tasks that need to be completed. Visit that page for more details and to sign up.

From now on the path to participation in Assignment Zero is clear: join a topic or two.

We believe this work will help crystallize the goals of AZ, while creating an original piece of journalism that shares the bylines of all on the team who make a contribution.

Yes, this is your chance to get published on Wired. It is also a chance to show the online world what pro-am journalism can do.

Sincerely,

Evan Hansen
Editor in Chief, Wired News

This means that for the rest of our investigation--everything other than Citizendium--I will be the editor-in-charge. Lauren Sandler will have her hands full bringing the Citizendium piece in on time. Topics will be overseen by editors assigned to individual topic home pages. Associate editor David Cohn will be assisting me, joined by Amanda Michel, director of participation and Tish Grier, deputy director of participation, who will be coordinating The Scoop.

Steve Fox, who was project manager for the launch phase of Assignment Zero and then editor-at-large, will be leaving that role. He sent this letter:

Just to update you all, my consulting contract with New Assignment lapsed at the end of March. After eating and breathing New Assignment/Assignment Zero around-the-clock since December, I've decided to cut back my AZ time commitment in order to focus on some other projects. I'm starting a new job in the fall (Director of Convergence at the University of Massachusetts journalism program.) The next two months will involve wrapping up several consulting gigs, selling our house in Maryland and buying a new one in Massachusetts. So......yeah, just a coupla things going on :)

Anyway, good luck to everyone. I've learned a lot about the possibilities behind "pro-am journalism" but I think we're only at the tip of the iceberg here. I will be following AZ developments closely and will try and drop in and blog from time to time.

Thanks for all your hard work in getting us this far, Steve.

UPDATE, 1:00 pm. The rest of the reporting will continue with a longer time frame (early June publication) and a better chance of success, because we now have a better site with the introduction of the topic home pages--like this one on unconferences--and the appointment of editors to oversee them. We have also overhauled the Assignment Desk and the way we are displaying the different parts of the story. We're timming and combining topics to get down to a more manageable number, but we're trying not to lose any posted reporting. If you have questions about something you have filed contact David Cohn.

The Citizendium project is one piece of several dozen. But it's the one we are finishing first (April 30.) Work will continue on the others, but we hope to have a more focused plan for doing it, starting with the new overview on the Assignment Desk. As you can see, it organizes the big story into cases of crowdsourcing we're checking into ("unconferences" and their spread would be one case, crowd predictions another...) particular people we want to talk to (like Yochai Benkler, leading scholar of peer production) and places important enough to the story that we probably need a separate report on them, such as a company like Threadless.com or a non-profit like Creative Commons.

Jeff Howe, the writer from Wired, will--as planned--be writing a big feature on all this for Wired.com. Says Jeff, "I will be relying heavily on our AZ contributors, and giving them due credit in the process. Not only will I be linking to the articles that run on NewAssignment, but I'll be linking to the original research and reporting on the AZ site as well. That's one of the reasons we've created home pages with their own URLs for each and every topic we're covering."

NewAssignment.Net will, as planned, publish a package of its best work on the same day. See my earlier post, What does the final product look like? But we are shifting into phase two, which will be the topic of tomorrow's post.

This question has come up several times: what will the final, published product of Assignment Zero look like? Is it just a Wired magazine article or will there be more?

The short answer is "there will be more." This is the way I described it in my introductory essay at Wired.com:

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."

So there are two final products we envision appearing in two domains in the Net-- one (the article) will be published at Wired.com, and the other (the package made up various articles, features and interviews covering different topics, which could include a limited amount of video and some audio) will appear at NewAssignment.Net. Jeff Howe's piece, we anticipate, will link to (and credit) some of the individual pieces that are published in the "editor's cut" package at NewAssignment.Net. We cannot say at this point how many separate pieces there will be, because we don't know how many of the topics we have open now (75 plus) will come to fruition and make the cut. But it will be more than a handful and fewer than 75. We also don't know yet if Wired.com will run any of the pieces in our final package, but we certainly hope that happens.

Our plan is for the Wired article and the NewAssignment.Net package to debut on the same day. And as I said in the same Wired essay, "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.)"

I went to see Asa Dotzler because I was told that he was the one in charge of worrying about the user community that had grown up around Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which I use. It was a story I wanted to hear in person since I am creating a similar position for NewAssignment.Net.

Different names for it surface all the time. The original was David Weinberger’s: “The network needs a wrangler,” he said. Thus, network wrangler is what we called the job at first. Later: producer. It’s the person in charge of making participation in the site happen, and solving the problems that arise when it does. In the pro-am style NewAssignment.Net intends to practice, the volunteers need their champion (and visionary). Openness must itself have an officer.

Asa Dotzler is that person at Mozilla. So on my last trip to the Bay Area I went to see him at the Mozilla Foundation offices in Mountain View, CA, which is Silicon Valley if any place is. Two things I noticed about the offices: It was impossible to tell what anyone did by looking at what they were doing; and the space itself could be vacated in a few hours without a trace.

We took a conference room. I scribbled notes on a legal pad, he talked. I asked him for his title. “The community guy” at Mozilla, he says. He says “there’s about seven of us” from different software companies or projects who have a similar job. They get together sometimes and compare notes. It’s a very limited universe of people who have done this kind of work, he says. (Later that night over Indian Food my nephew Zack Rosen and I calculated that it’s probably under 25 who have experience at it.)

“Actually, I have several different communities I’m supporting now.” The makers and users of Firefox are one. Thunderbird (a mail client) is another. Mozilla with 70 employees on all its projects has to compete with Microsoft with more than 70,000. Asa lets the numbers sink in. He smiles when he says there is no way to do that without the assistance of volunteers— and good tools that make it possible for volunteers to add value. They’re what make Mozilla competitive, even though it is a tiny fraction of the user base who become active in the communities Asa tends to.

Back in 1998 when he started, open source software “was a very exclusive club.” Only a limited pool of programmers could participate in the allegedly “open” part. Asa is not a programmer himself. His degree is in architecture. (I would call him an artist of the practical.) It’s a point of pride that he set out to broaden the mix to people who were not hackers or coders. The key to it, he says, was ramping down the skills required to contribute and add value.

What’s the next level down from programming? Bug catching. Programmers were already doing that in distributed fashion, but others could do it too. With thousands of users reporting bugs to Mozilla you need volunteers to manage the volunteers. It’s the kind of necessity that leads to invention. “The old open source management structures didn’t work.” The scale of participation was too big when you broadened it beyond the initial participants: hackers. That’s how bugzilla.org came about. (“The bug-tracking tool of choice for many projects, both open source and proprietary…”)

Rules for open source bug catching were “anyone can play.” This is a key principle for Asa. The most basic sense in which a system can be “open” is: anyone can report bugs. But along with that a system of merit: best contributions rise to the top, top contributors get rewards. A group of about 150 “who had been around long enough to know what’s possible and what isn’t…” sort through the reported problems, deciding which have merit. Then a group of about 20 “drivers” take the reports of the 150 and determine what really needs to be in the next version of Firefox. But the 20 are a cross-section— some programmers, some regular users, some employees of Mozilla, some volunteers.

“Distributed project management.” That’s how it scales. He said that as you get closer to the release date you get more and more restrictive about what’s going to make it into the next version of Firefox.

Mozilla couldn’t pull off updates of the Firefox browser without using volunteers and the gift economy they are a part of. Universities contribute the servers necessary to release updates of a product with millions of users all over the world. Volunteers staff the help forums for Firefox; otherwise, it couldn’t afford a help system that good. The “community ecosystem” (Asa’s term) around Firefox includes users who create their own extensions and applications of the browser. Mozilla hosts these, even though they are not Mozilla products per se.

It all makes sense under non-profit conditions, almost no sense in a commercial system. Would you volunteer to staff the help forum for one of Dell’s latops?

Some of the most interesting stories Asa Dotzler told were about volunteers for something new in the making of open source software— marketing by people power. Thus grew the “help spread Firefox” campaign. Again, the key was thinking through the “anyone can…” part. Because once you have that the system is an open one at that point.

One answer: simple button on your blog to help spread Firefox. Mozilla added a little tool that would tell the user (and Mozilla) how many referrals were generated from the button, then listed the top referrers at the Mozilla site, which drove some traffic back to them. They featured not only the top referrers by volume but the fastest climbing ones to give newcomers a little love.

The game: Open source adoption curving. Anyone can play. Object: “Help spread Firefox.” It’s meritocracy with a metric (referrals). You reward the top contributors by pulling them on stage. That’s Asa’s science, as required by his art.

Volunteers came up with the idea of an newspaper ad for Firefox in the New York Times, designed it, wrote it and paid for it with user contributions. They also came up with the idea of making a crop pattern in the shape of the Firefox logo in an actual farm field, and pulled that off too, complete with aerial photographs, which I saw. (Astounding.)

Those projects—the ideas and the execution—came from spontaneous discussions in forums. Asa said it’s hard to know when discussions will take off and become something he has to get behind. “I just do my work in public,” he said; sometimes people react and there are lots of comments. Other times it’s just him… doing his work in public. Follow the forums carefully, he said. You have to “live in the fishbowl” and continue to be transparent in your decision-making, he said. Anything that is opaque breeds mistrust. People don’t feel they are “just doing manual labor” when they can see how things are coming together. Your view of nail and hammer changes when you can see the house and its plan of rooms.

Each of the communities he has built requires “care and feeding,” Asa says. Part of it is matching rewards to level of contributions. If a tester is doing a great job testing a product on a PC but doesn’t have a Mac, he’ll ship him a Mac. He has a budget from which he can spend on various goodies for exceptionally valuable volunteers, but also to support ideas that come up in the forums. When they are good enough for development or meet with Mozilla’s strategic goals, Asa will put assets behind them.

Which is simply to say that there is no volunteer system unless there is also a system for putting a value on what all volunteers do, while identifying the most valuable people in a pool of contributors. You have to know who they are and bring them into your network somehow. Tools that help you do that are critically important.

A lot of what Asa does amounts to cheerleading for people who are doing things that add value, and even though it might seem corny to some it does not feel that way to those who are cheered. He also makes sure all Mozilla employees have the tools and tricks they need to use the open source methods that are key to the Mozilla way of competing. Trying to document what he does: another part of the job. The more who use these methods, the better they will become. For this reason he is interested in my project, NewAssignment.Net. “And I may be a lot more involved than you would think.” He said he would watch carefully how the project unfolds.

He said one of the biggest challenges for NewAssignment.Net is “you can’t architect all this up front,” meaning that it’s impossible to know what tools the community guy will need until you get in there and start dealing with the actual people who show up. “It requires the human touch.” You can try to equip the network wrangler (a term he loved, incidentally, for the accuracy of the image…) but the most valuable tools are those developed to solve problems that arise in the doing of the projects you set out to do. Made sense to me. That’s exactly why NewAssignment.Net is doing projects in open source journalism.

The biggest problem all “community guys” have, he said, is the kooks. But they’re not like trolls at blogs. They’re people who lack a sense of realism, and who want to help but don’t know how or can’t see why their actions are not helping. There are difficulties that come about because some people who are intensely involved want open source projects to be “ideologically pure.” The working ones never are. Sometimes you get major leadership problems, as when a key volunteer who is organizing other volunteers goes missing. Dispute resolution among people with ego invested is a time-consuming headache too.

“The more open you are the more noise there is compared to signal” in the communications you get. One should be prepared for this, he said. He gets 1,000 legitimate (non-spam) emails a day sometimes.

I asked him what the New Assignment site would need to succeed with volunteers. He said:

* Regular flow of new content.
* Tools that let users see what’s happened since last visit.
* An easy way to highlight exceptionally valuable contributions and the people who make them.
* Some automated system to track how much and what kind of work each contributor is doing. He said the failure to build this into his projects was one of his key mistakes because he has to try to follow it all by hand.
* A way to know when key contributors stop contributing. You have to contact them right away and find out why.

Finally, he said the most important factor by far in getting volunteers was to “have a great product.”

This is part two of my interview with John McQuaid, formerly an investigative reporter for the Times-Picayune. Part one is here. McQuaid is a contributing editor for NewAssignment.Net.

Jay Rosen: You talked about the emerging array of technologies and the people able to use them because we have the Web. Which of those technologies and which of those people seem most promising to you as writer and journalist looking for a new assignment, if I may put it that way? Which ones are you most excited about?

John McQuaid: Ten years ago, when I began researching our series on fishing, I signed onto a listserv called Fishfolk, for people involved in the study, management and practice of fishing. This was a great introduction to journalism via the digital community. I would post messages asking for advice on issues, seeking sources of data, offering up ideas for discussion. I'd get rapid, smart feedback. That sparked threads that led to other questions. (I also met my wife, who was one of the founders of the list.) By today's standards, it was a very simple tool, but it was very powerful one – a community with both book knowledge and practical knowledge, at my fingertips. So the ability to access and mobilize communities and social networks -- whatever the technology --is obviously the most important. Journalists are in the business of assembling and refining knowledge -- not just facts, but ideas -- and we need allies of all stripes.

Jay Rosen: Fishfolk is a good example of a smart mob. Clearly, it worked for you as a reporter. They're not "new" but now we have much greater means for putting such a network to work.

John McQuaid. With connectivity anywhere and everywhere, journalists tapping into networks can have eyes on the ground in a lot of places simultaneously. That has all kinds of potential -- for assembling a broad picture of what's going on nationally, for individual tips and stories. During election season, for example, we theoretically could find out what's happening today, in every congressional district, on some issue. We can have photo or video (remember "macaca"?) of campaign events. We can track political ads and the reaction to them. Political blogs, like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, are doing some of this already.

Jay Rosen: You said too many projects stop at "something about the FDA." They don't go on and try to say something no one has ever said before. What I meant by innovation is that without intending to do this, perhaps, enterprise journalism in the metropolitian press stopped at a certain point in what it could tell us about the world. It exited the explanatory game, letting readers fend for themselves. When we complain about he said, she said journalism we're complaining about a tired and formulaic version of this exit strategy.

Most likely, they will valorize the missing answers as an act of principled restraint. "We let the readers decide." "Hey, this is news, not opinion." "You're asking us to come to a judgment, and we don't do that." And yet they won't ask whether their authority is diminished by going a certain distance and stopping, whether greater innovations are necessary to maintain public confidence, and a given level of truthtelling. There is nothing newspapers are more proud of than their investigative reporting. But wouldn't real pride have brought more advances in this art?

John McQuaid: Correct me if I've got you wrong, but one good example of the kind of reporting you're talking about is the team of Donald Bartlett and James Steele. They worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, then Time (where they were forced out due to budget cuts), and recently moved to Vanity Fair. They dig, dig, dig, assembling vast amounts of statistical data, documents, on-the-ground reporting, etc. and it leads them to expose patterns and take a position -- typically, a broadly populist one. You don't get a lot of newspaper series posing, then answering the question, "America: What Went Wrong?" I liked that, even if I didn't always agree with what they were saying. But as we've been discussing, their technique brings research to bear on national issues and makes an argument. And look at their career path -- it's taken them away from newspapers, where it's impossible to imagine them working now, to newsweekly, to glossy monthly. VF is a great platform, but it’s a shame to think that a handful of high-end magazines – and, of course, books – may be the last refuge for this kind of journalism..

To return to your point, I agree that investigations should be bold, draw conclusions, make judgments. What's the use of digging otherwise? It can be clarifying, say something new, and it makes interesting reading. That's what journalism is all about.

But there's a lot of skittishness in the newspaper industry now because the old "objectivity" model is under assault. There are legions ideologically committed bloggers and commenters ready to slice and dice anything you put out there, especially stuff that has an edge. But there are also individuals and online communities that will take a more considered approach, take your findings and expand upon them, offer feedback. Maybe I'm being naive, but I think it's all good -- if the work is sound and you're ready and able to defend it.

We could go off on a tangent about whether newspapers and newsmagazines should cast off the objectivity cloak altogether and wear their politics on their sleeves, like the British press – or political bloggers. I'm open to the idea, but still like the American model. Reality is always more complex and surprising than the crimped ideological formulas that define our political debates.

Jay Rosen: Bartlett and Steele are an excellent example, yes. I take it you don't like my suggestions for Answer Journalism all that much?

John McQuaid: Divvying up the blame up for Katrina is interesting. I like it: Let's go ahead and play the blame game! I'd say it sounds more like a starting point for the inquiry than the conclusion, though. What if the feds take 45 percent of the blame – or 10, or 80? What does that say, beyond finger-pointing? If it's 80, why, and what does that mean for the next time something breaks, blows up?

John McQuaid"Did the President Mislead Us Into War?" is on some level too facile, maybe unanswerable (never mind that at this point, it's also nearly beside the point -- whether we were misled or not, we're now stuck there and have to figure out what to do). It depends on what was going on in the president's mind, which we'll never find out. Even if we could, what if the president was sincere, but exaggerated his case? Is that misleading us, or is it just what politicians do all the time -- albeit in a far grander scale than we're used to?

To return to the main idea: If you make a provocative idea your assignment, you'll be led down an interesting path. Maybe the research leads in a completely different direction than what you thought. But the idea should be to challenge people. In a society where people are raising walls to argument, tuning into media sources they agree with, tuning out those they don't want to hear, journalism needs to cut across the barriers, not hide.

Jay Rosen: When I say, organs of the press could have tried to answer the question: did the president mislead us into war? what I mean is treat it as an urgent but also an open question, a matter unsettled and in need of calm, clear-headed investigation. Then investigate. Answer the question. Then defend the answer. True, you might discover something else is "the story," leading in a different direction. I'd argue the nation still deserves an answer to the question.

John McQuaid: I agree. There’s no weightier decision than going to war, and the public traditionally places a lot of trust in the president – and the presidency itself – to make those choices wisely. Now Iraq is a giant mess. It would be great to unravel what went wrong back at the beginning, arrive at some kind of bottom line as to whether that trust was abused. What you describe is more like interpretive history than journalism – though that’s in some ways an arbitrary distinction, another barrier we might want to blow up.

What I worry about is: the issue is still very divisive, so that even a cool, probing account would get chewed up in the public square by those with strong feelings and lots of bandwidth. It may take more time/distance to be able to spark a more serious debate, history rendering a verdict, etc. (Though everything moves so much faster these days, it may be that historical verdicts are now reached in months, not decades.)

Jay Rosen: Your principle of follow the story where it leads is basic. I think you're right about that. As a reporter, what kind of "distributed social network" or "smart crowd" would be most valuable to you, given the kind of stories you want to tell?

John McQuaid: Depends on the story, right? As I mentioned above, communities of experts are especially valuable. The world is complex, and increasingly run by subcultures of people with very specialized knowledge. In most cases, they're already wired together – fisheries specialists, scientists and engineers, federal regulators, political operatives. If you make an entree into these groups via listserv, blogging, website, and they'll work with you in either an organized or ad hoc way, you're halfway there.

The other half of the equation is volunteers -- interested people who are drawn into your work somehow. In the course of their day, maybe have some time to do some digging on their own, providing data, tips, photos, video, ideas, feedback.

How do you put all this stuff together? That's what we're trying to find out now. I imagine you post your intentions, the questions you're trying to answer. You persuade affected and interested communities to contribute. You pursue their leads and your own, post on your progress. At some point you put it all together and unveil the "findings." Then the discussion takes off, maybe users drive it somewhere else.

But there are a lot of unknowns. Like other open-source projects, the ever-evolving organism of the story may grow in unpredictable ways. How does the transparency issue affect that trajectory? There's a value in assembling information privately, then unveiling the findings. It's straightforward. It can pack a big wallop, make news. If you're doing everything out in the open, that may draw sources to you but scare others away, maybe those you really need. And what if you reach a conclusion that some community you're working with collectively disagrees with?

Jay Rosen: I addressed some of those items here, but I don't mean to say that fully answers the questions. Can you recall any stories you have worked, or let's say run across, where an army of volunteers would have made a big difference?

John McQuaid: Environmental stories are ideal for this type of pursuit. Over the past generation, the desktop computer revolutionized local environmental activism, and Bush administration policies have stimulated it further. There are hundreds, thousands of local environmental organizations routinely accessing state and national databases on pollution, regulations, companies, lawsuits, etc., and many are starved for media attention. (I recently spoke at the meeting of one of them, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.) Debates about growth, sprawl and gridlock have produced a similar explosion of activism -- on all sides.

Jay Rosen: I have been telling people that NewAssignment.Net is not trying to equal or duplicate what the established I-teams in professional newsrooms have done, but to report stories that the news media would find impossible or impractical to do. Do you think this is plausible, or should I stop saying it?

John McQuaid: It's plausible, but I don't think we know the answer to this yet. Certainly on the kind of short-term story mentioned above, the windows-on-the-world, real-time pulse of the Internet cannot be matched. On something more long-term, the form will be different from what you get in a newspaper, the experiences of reporting and reading or viewing will be different. But will the basic subject matter be different? Sometimes, yes. If your information sources are numerous and widely dispersed, you'll get a bigger, brighter pallete of raw material to work with. In theory, you'll be able to more easily identify below-radar trends or connections between things that don't appear to be connected.

On the other hand, you've still got to shine the light in that same cobwebbed closet.

This is John McQuaid. And this: Path of Destruction, a book about what Hurricane Katrina did to the Gulf and why. In 1997 he won, with "Path" co-author Mark Schleifstein, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the highest award in the craft of enterprise reporting. It was for Oceans of Trouble, a series on the decline of global fisheries. Washing Away is also McQuaid. That's the famous 2002 series for the Times-Picayune on Hurricane preparations (again with Mark Schleifstein.) It predicted the floods and failures of 2005.

John McQuaidMcQuaid is a proven craftsman in a demanding form: explaining a big, complicated story that is hidden from normal view. In this two-part Q & A, (the rest is tomorrow) he explains how it became impossible for him to remain at the Times-Picayune and continue to practice his craft. "My investigative job was eliminated, and I was told that the focus was on everybody pulling his or her weight to put out the daily paper."

But he left the newspaper world with a new ambition: "Find a way to do investigative and explanatory journalism via the web." This in turn led him to NewAssignment.Net. It's part of his determination to re-invent himself, after newspapers. Our interview is about this series of events.

As a contributing editor, McQuaid will be writing for the New Assignment site and researching possible pro-am projects as he takes his own crash course in networked journalism on the open Web.

Jay Rosen: When you contacted me about contributing to NewAssignment.Net you mentioned that you were "looking at the ways that the kind of in-depth journalism I have specialized in can migrate to the web." Tell me what brought you to that point. And why, as a reporter, have you recently grown so interested in the Web?

John McQuaid: I was with The Times-Picayune for 20-plus years-- my entire career. I'd moved to New Orleans after college and loved it: both the town and writing about it. I was later the paper's single foreign correspondent (covering Latin America) and worked in the Washington bureau. Over the last 10 years, I worked on a bunch of big investigative and explanatory projects for the paper. This was a tremendously rewarding and successful collaboration. Working with highly talented reporters, photographers and editors, I was able to probe deeply into topics of great concern to people in Louisiana and elsewhere--declining fishing communities, environmental racism, even--it sounds like a joke, but in New Orleans it's not--voracious termites. We got recognition: The fishing series won a Pulitzer in 1997, and others won a bunch of national awards. A series that I wrote in 2002 with Mark Schleifstein, Washing Away, analyzed the growing danger to New Orleans to hurricanes and anticipated much of what happened when Katrina struck.

Before Katrina, The Times-Picayune was doing some serious cost-cutting. In the spring of 2005 I was ordered back to New Orleans. My investigative job was eliminated, and I was told that the focus was on everybody pulling his or her weight to put out the daily paper. I was given a choice of daily beats or an assistant city editor's job. Given the overall shape of the newspaper business, this was certainly not a bad offer, and I gave it some serious thought. But it wasn't really the direction I wanted to go in, personally or professionally. Ultimately, though, the bottom line was … the bottom line. My wife has a federal civil service job in Washington that she would have been forced to give up had we moved to New Orleans; the choice between that and a newspaper job was no contest.

I was still on the staff when Katrina hit, at which point I made use of my previously useless knowledge of the levee system from the "Washing" series and pursued the "why did the levees fail?" story. It was a great privilege to work with the TP's heroic staff on one last, important story. Then I took my leave, and Schleifstein and I wrote a book about Katrina.

At some point before the storm, I had begun searching for another newspaper job. But this quickly proved absurd. Several of the openings I applied for vanished before they were filled. Reluctantly, I gave up on the newspaper industry as a possible employer. There's no clear endpoint to the restructuring now underway, nobody knows what newspapers are going to look like when it's done, and in-depth journalism is in particular peril.

I arrived at the same pass that many have: You can keep plugging away, trying to do the same damn thing; or you can reinvent yourself. I'm flexible; a journalist and writer, not a newspaper person through and through. And there were a lot more opportunities in reinvention.

One ambition was to find a way to do investigative and explanatory journalism via the web and digital media.

Jay Rosen: But if you've given up on the newspaper industry as a possible employer, what is the future of your craft, and of explanatory journalism that reveals what the news cycles miss?

John McQuaid: This is one of the burning media questions of the moment. Newspapers remain key venues for probing, public service-oriented journalism. While the format has its problems--too many dull, interminable series see print mainly as Pulitzer bait--at their best, newspaper series can not only reveal terrible problems and injustices, but also be lively and engaging reading.

Big papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post retain the staff and resources to do these kinds of things. But no matter how important or interesting they are, investigations don't pay the bills, and in a lot of other places there's neither the capacity nor the will to delve deeply into both local and national issues. That's a serious problem, in keeping politicians and other officials honest and in the functioning of democracy itself. So I'd like to help new, Internet-based forums, emerge locally and nationally to do investigative or explanatory journalism. And of course we need readers, advertisers and financial backers to go with them.

This is a great era for news-- government accountability has all but disappeared. Doubtless, there are dozens of government meltdowns -- on top of the ones that we already know about -- already underway or about to happen.

That said, I'm not sure what this new form will look like. The newspaper investigation is basically a static form: journalists work for weeks or months on a story. For the most part, nobody in the wider world even knows what they're doing. Then they publish it. It makes a splash (or not). Maybe it has a broad impact. After the publication date, on some basic level, it's over.

But the web is so dynamic -- an ever-unfolding conversation. So I was intrigued by NewAssignment.Net, which offers an opportunity to figure out how to harness that dynamism in the service of journalism.

Jay Rosen: That's the idea, yes. We're still trying to bring it into vivid practice. I think you are on the money when you said that in its classic, paper-bound form the investigative work is "over" after publication. The story has repercussions or doesn't. This may be a major difference for investigative journalism on the Web. Maybe in the newer styles, the work starts with publication, and builds from there.

Traveling back a bit to 1996-2004, can you recall what you initially thought about the Web, what you knew of it, and what you thought it would mean for your newspaper, for journalists like yourself? What was the state of mind back then?

John McQuaid: Newspaper journalists watched the revolution unfold on their desktops along with everyone else, and rejoiced. But, of course, without knowing it, we were also watching our own relevancy decline.

When I started out, we got "the wires" on our office computers, and I thought that was pretty amazing back then -- AP dispatches and updates in real time! When news broke, you could watch the coverage unfold, see depth and context added into stories. You could compare the dispatches from rival publications. Later, my office got modems, then broadband. The web was a great reporting tool -- you could connect with infinite ease to sources and colleagues, get documents, read websites, find important details posted publicly.

But of course, a great tool for us was equally great for everybody else. Readers now have access to almost all the information that journalists do, and they began sharing it, commenting on it and picking apart the stories. Hence many problems bloomed for the mainstream press, which declined in relevance and lost some credibility.

But a lot of that loss was refreshing. I never much liked the "Voice of God" emanating from the NYT and other influential institutions. It was entertaining -- and often useful -- to see platoons of bloggers pick it apart and puree the pronouncements (sometimes fairly, sometimes not). Reading some of those critiques made me increasingly dissatisfied with newspaper conventions. In a highly partisan landscape, straight newspaper accounts of political fights that dutifully parroted "both sides" or interviewed a bunch of talking heads offering differing perspectives often did a bad job of capturing what was really happening. But a single blogger could often get to the nub of an issue in a single paragraph (usually, of course, by analyzing the journalism).

My most immediate concern with Internet journalism was how to make the Times-Picayune's website better and more easily navigable, so as to better present our work, which was suddenly being read not just in New Orleans but in Washington and around the country. The idea was pretty simple. It was basically just getting newspaper stuff up on the web in a presentable, findable form -- not changing the form itself to fit the medium, or making use of the emerging array of technologies and people able to use them. I didn't appreciate how profound the Internet-driven changes were until they reared up and bit me in the you-know-what.

Jay Rosen: If you don't mind I want to press on that last statement: what you didn't realize about the Net, first time ' round. Why did you initially miss how deep the changes were to your craft? (You were not alone!) What were the concealing facts?

John McQuaid: Part of it was, I worked for a slow-moving institution that covered other, even slower-moving institutions -- school boards, federal agencies. And such institutions, by their nature, aren't good at detecting revolutionary changes bubbling up from below.

It also took a while for various changes to percolate and reach critical mass -- and when they did, they all did at once. One was the rapid decline in the traditional newspaper (or, more generally, dead-tree) business model. In the 1990s, we heard the Internet would change everything, telecommunications companies sank billions into broadband networks of various kinds, and web businesses bloomed all over the place. Then the dotcom bubble burst. Everybody biting their nails about the looming end of paper publications breathed a sigh of relief. We were still there -- there was life in the dead tree biz yet! That's what we thought the Internet bust meant.

But of course, the technological and social transformations proceeded apace, and kaboom! The model began to collapse. Second, those transformations didn't always appear to be a single phenomenon. They were happening everywhere -- politics, blogging, music and video sharing, Google, eBay, global supply chains, to name a tiny fraction -- but to most people, journalists included, they appeared to be a bunch of different things, tangentially related by their reliance on digital technologies and the web. In other words, many of us were aware of a whole world unfolding online -- and participated in it in our off-hours in various ways -- but didn't put it together with what we did at the office.

Jay Rosen: The missing dots are interesting.

"I'm flexible," you said earlier, "a journalist and writer, not a newspaper person through and through." I think that's a wise attitude. As a journalist and writer, a public explainer, what does the Web offer you that's genuinely new in your professional experience? That will force you to stretch?

John McQuaid: The main thing, I think, is to wade into the conversation. Like many journalists and writers, I relish mixing it up, debating. The web means flexible, open-ended exchanges, instant critiques and feedback, more transparency, a more informal, conversational style of writing. But newspaper reporters are encouraged to remain in the background, let their stories speak for themselves. I understand the reason for that -- after all, you don't want to step on your own message -- and at times I found it useful. But it was also frustrating.

Jay Rosen. Meaning, I think, that you welcome the chance to open it up, mix it up, drop the lecture, be part of the conversation. I think your opinion is becoming the majority, John. The voice needs to be renovated.

Investigative journalism in the Pulitzer tradition has a distinct voice. How would you characterize its record on introducing innovation in the craft? And having stepped away, how would you evaluate the native strengths and weaknesses of the genre-- enterprise reporting at the American newspaper?

John McQuaid: If you go and read the Pulitzer site, which is naturally very text-centric, you'll probably miss one of the biggest changes: the growth of storytelling through photos and graphics, something which is a natural to migrate to the web. It started in the 1980s with the advent of color printing, USA Today, flashy redesigns etc. -- events most tie to the dumbing--down of newspapers. They weren't. At the Times-Picayune, to use the example I know best, photos and graphics became powerful tools for investigative projects. Photographers were assigned early in the project lifecycle in order to explore the issues and get to know the principal sources and subjects. Graphic artists would come in early on as well (sometimes not as early as we wanted) and develop their own take on the story too, creating illustrations that integrated data, maps, and photos. Ever-more-powerful mapping and database programs were great for both reporting and for presentation. (For me, working with people coming at a story from these different angles was tremendously helpful in figuring out how to organize ideas and reach an audience.)

But the digital element has evolved slowly. Maps and graphics are migrating online like everything else. Starting in the 1990s, many newspapers, the TP included, began websites where people could discuss stories -- especially big series. Sometimes you'd publish something and there'd be a huge response. Other times, not so much. But such features were usually sort of tacked on, after the fact -- not used proactively to stimulate a discussion or guide the coverage.

Jay Rosen: It's true: graphic display has advanced a lot, and that's innovation in explanation. What about the stories themselves?

John McQuaid: Like you, I don't know that there has been much innovation. On some level, there doesn't need to be. Some subjects are perennials -- politicians and businesspeople are always going to engage in illegal or questionable shenanigans, bureaucracies are always going to break down, wars and natural disasters are going to erupt, poverty and exploitation aren't going away. And people want to know about these things (well, some people, anyway). You have to keep shining the light into those cobwebbed closets -- new things are always flying out.

But you also risk falling into a "formula" -- bureaucratic failures, victims of one kind or another -- that can be worthwhile, but isn't very interesting reading. Institutions covering other institutions. You can miss what's really going on -- locally, nationally, globally -- if that's your approach.

Some of these big stories lack a clear point of view. A big investigation is an opportunity for journalists to become as expert on a subject as the experts themselves -- or rather, less so in some ways, more in others. A journalist covering the FDA won't get to a Ph.D in chemistry, but she or he can learn a hell of a lot about how the system works, without the prejudices of people who are part of the system and know a single slice of it really well. That level of expertise and perspective means that, depending on what you find, you can say something nobody's said before, about the agency in question, about politics today, America today, the world too. But too many projects stop at "something about the FDA." They figure exposing a snafu is enough. This is a big problem, because the "product" tends to be pretty dry and heavy going.

For a while, Mickey Kaus had a feature on his blog called SeriesSkipper, in which he'd sit down and read a long, boring newspaper series for you, summarize the key points, and then recommend whether you should actually sit down and spend hours reading it. In most cases, he recommended against.

Personally, I'd like to see more ideas in the storytelling. One series I loved, to give an example, was the 1997 Baltimore Sun series The Shipbreakers, about how giant ships are dismantled abroad in extremely hazardous conditions. It told you something surprising about the world -- what was going on down on the docks in Baltimore and how it was tied to what was going on the other side of the globe.

In a digitizing, globalizing world, there are a lot of opportunities to expose problems and explore the connections linking what's going on in Washington, at the community level, and around the world -- problems NewAssignment.Net is particularly well-positioned to explore.

(Part-two will run Tuesday. This post also appeared at PressThink.)

When Americans vote on November 7th, what will it look like?

Among my own baked-in images I find: Lines outside polling places, stretching. Politicians just after they vote, smiling. File footage of voting machines. (Boring.) Interviews with random voters, exit poll style. (Semi-interesting.) And a lot of nightmare images left over from Florida in 2000. (Disturbing.)

And that's the picture, if I have any picture of what it looks like when Americans go to vote.

But what if we wanted to improve that picture and add accuracy, nuance, poetry, meaning? Could we do it ourselves, without waiting for the news media to transcend its election day cliches? These are the starting points for an open source photo essay that I'm involved in. It launches today. We call it exactly what it is: Polling Place Photo Project. Your assignment: "Photograph your polling place. Document democracy." (Here's a description.)

Anyone can play. Without violating the law, you take pictures when you go to vote and upload them at the site, along with some other information. (Including suggestions for improving the act of voting.) There's a Creative Commons license (type by-nd) meaning others can use them but cannot monkey with the images or claim ownership. What you are supposed to take pictures of is Americans exercising their sovereignty: the facts on the ground when you go to vote.

The project's goal, according to its designer and prime mover William Drenttel, is "an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America." A second aim is to "encourage research into how voting happens and how voting can be made easier, clearer, less confusing, more reliable."

Call it political ergonomics. The art and science of lowering barriers to democratic participation.

That's what drew the interest of AIGA, the professional association for graphic designers. They built the Polling Place Photo Project site and they're hosting it on their servers as part of AIGA's Design for Democracy initiative. NewAssignment.Net is a co-sponsor and consultant to PPPP.

The idea for an open source photo essay that would attempt to capture what it looks like when Americans go to vote in 2006 emerged from a conversation I had with Bill Drenttel in September. Three years ago he designed PressThink, my blog. Later he started a successful blog of his own, Design Observer. We both like to do things that aren't being done. When he read about my experiment with NewAssignment.Net, Drenttel wondered: could the design community do "social network" journalism? Was there a demo project for Design Observer?

Bill and I discussed something simple that "anyone" in the Design community could do. I told him about a suggestion posted at Mark Glaser's Media Shift by Russ Walker, an editor at Washingtonpost.com. "Let's build a database to identify what voting machines are in use in every precinct in the nation," Walker wrote. "That will be our baseline data set, from which we can attempt specific reporting projects after the 2006 midterm elections." (I am still pursuing that.)

What if we start this year, just with pictures? Bill said. I said we would need partners, preferably people who are already organized and connected peer-to-peer because they share certain interests. He immediately thought of AIGA (he's a past president). Through his efforts AIGA agreed to take it on and that's how PPPP was born.

AIGA was founded in 1914. NewAssignment.Net is three months old and in its "test" or knowledge-gathering phase. (Launch is the first quarter of 2007.) This is a good test project for two reasons:

1.) The Ergonomics. A lot will be learned from the attempt to set-up a user-friendly system whereby anyone with access to the Web can do the assignment (photograph the places where Americans exercise their sovereignty) and upload the results. Open means anyone can play. But the statement--anyone can play--becomes a lie unless the forms we invent are easy to use, the instructions clear, the design democratically good. If this goes well, we'll learn about the ergonomics of open source data collection.

2.) The Network. Here is one of the ideas NewAssignment.Net is testing: To do social network reporting that relies on volunteers it's wise to find existing social networks with willing and able people who might indeed volunteer. By means of such partnerships pro-am projects can be organized at relatively low cost over the Net. The Polling Place Photo Project is testing this method. The existing social network, AIGA membership, is connected peer-to-peer already. It already has a participatory wing. Therefore the costs to connect it for this action are low. AIGA members become the core group (and most know how to handle a camera). It's pro-am because the designers can be joined by anyone else we reach with word of this project. Lots of people know how to handle a camera and it isn't that hard to take pictures of your polling place.

Is it legal? Well, um, ah. There actually is no good answer to what's by law allowed. We have to urge participants to obey all laws but we cannot tell them with reasonable certainty what the law says about the taking and sharing of photographs. They have to check with election officials but that is not much help. (Okay, here is a list of election officials by state, with websites and phone numbers; here's a place you can ask questions about the law, thanks to Dan Gillmor and Lauren Gelman's operations.)

This is not a NewAssignment.Net project in the strictest sense because we're not executing it; AIGA and Drenttel are. We're consulting on it, and we'll do evaluation. The Photo project is testing the use of existing social networks to yield a "core" group of participants. NewAssignment will help explain the project, and follow up by getting a journalist--a writer or critic--to assess the results.

Here are the sponsors:

AIGA, the professional association for design, is the leading member organization for people engaged in the discipline, practice and culture of designing. Its mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and global cultural force. The Polling Place Photo Project lives at the AIGA site.

Design for Democracy is a strategic program of AIGA, its consulting and teaching wing. It tries to increase civic participation by making the experience clearer, more understandable, easier to accomplish and more trustworthy. As a non-profit, Design for Democracy consults with federal, state and local government agencies about better design in public settings.

Design Observer. The Polling Place Photo Project was conceived as a national initiative in citizen journalism by William Drenttel and Design Observer. Design Observer is the largest webblog about design and visual culture and is edited and authored by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.

NewAssignment.Net tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. Still in an early stage of development, New Assignment.Net has support from the MacArthur Foundation, Reuters, Sunlight Foundation and Craig Newmark. (An introduction is here.)

Thirdwave. Thirdwave is AIGA's development partner and responsible for supporting the technology of the Polling Place Photo Project, as well as countless other AIGA online intitiatves.

William Drenttel and Winterhouse Institute. William Drenttel is president emeritus of AIGA, a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Drenttel is a partner with Jessica Helfand in Winterhouse Institute, which supports writing and publishing projects that further an understanding of design and visual culture.

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Asa Dotzler: "Anything that is opaque breeds mistrust. People don't feel they are 'just doing manual labor' when they can see how things are coming together."I went to see Asa Dotzler because I was told that he was the one in charge of worrying about the user community that had grown up around Mozilla's Firefox browser, which I use. It was a story I wanted to hear in person since I am creating a similar position for NewAssignment.Net.

Different names for it surface all the time. The original was David Weinberger's: "The network needs a wrangler," he said. Thus, network wrangler is what we called the job at first. Later: producer. It's the person in charge of making participation in the site happen, and solving the problems that arise when it does. In the pro-am style NewAssignment.Net intends to practice, the volunteers need their champion (and visionary). Openness must itself have an officer.

Asa Dotzler is that person at Mozilla. So on my last trip to the Bay Area I went to see him at the Mozilla Foundation offices in Mountain View, CA, which is Silicon Valley if any place is. Two things I noticed about the offices: It was impossible to tell what anyone did by looking at what they were doing; and the space itself could be vacated in a few hours without a trace.

We took a conference room. I scribbled notes on a legal pad, he talked. I asked him for his title. "The community guy" at Mozilla, he says. He says "there's about seven of us" from different software companies or projects who have a similar job. They get together sometimes and compare notes. It's a very limited universe of people who have done this kind of work, he says. (Later that night over Indian Food my nephew Zack Rosen and I calculated that it's probably under 25 who have experience at it.)

"Actually, I have several different communities I'm supporting now." The makers and users of Firefox are one. Thunderbird (a mail client) is another. Mozilla with 70 employees on all its projects has to compete with Microsoft with more than 70,000. Asa lets the numbers sink in. He smiles when he says there is no way to do that without the assistance of volunteers-- and good tools that make it possible for volunteers to add value. They're what make Mozilla competitive, even though it is a tiny fraction of the user base who become active in the communities Asa tends to.

Back in 1998 when he started, open source software "was a very exclusive club." Only a limited pool of programmers could participate in the allegedly "open" part. Asa is not a programmer himself. His degree is in architecture. (I would call him an artist of the practical.) It's a point of pride that he set out to broaden the mix to people who were not hackers or coders. The key to it, he says, was ramping down the skills required to contribute and add value.

What's the next level down from programming? Bug catching. Programmers were already doing that in distributed fashion, but others could do it too. With thousands of users reporting bugs to Mozilla you need volunteers to manage the volunteers. It's the kind of necessity that leads to invention. "The old open source management structures didn't work." The scale of participation was too big when you broadened it beyond the initial participants: hackers. That's how bugzilla.org came about. ("The bug-tracking tool of choice for many projects, both open source and proprietary...")

Rules for open source bug catching were "anyone can play." This is a key principle for Asa. The most basic sense in which a system can be "open" is: anyone can report bugs. But along with that a system of merit: best contributions rise to the top, top contributors get rewards. A group of about 150 "who had been around long enough to know what's possible and what isn't..." sort through the reported problems, deciding which have merit. Then a group of about 20 "drivers" take the reports of the 150 and determine what really needs to be in the next version of Firefox. But the 20 are a cross-section-- some programmers, some regular users, some employees of Mozilla, some volunteers.

"Distributed project management." That's how it scales. He said that as you get closer to the release date you get more and more restrictive about what's going to make it into the next version of Firefox.

Mozilla couldn't pull off updates of the Firefox browser without using volunteers and the gift economy they are a part of. Universities contribute the servers necessary to release updates of a product with millions of users all over the world. Volunteers staff the help forums for Firefox; otherwise, it couldn't afford a help system that good. The "community ecosystem" (Asa's term) around Firefox includes users who create their own extensions and applications of the browser. Mozilla hosts these, even though they are not Mozilla products per se.

It all makes sense under non-profit conditions, almost no sense in a commercial system. Would you volunteer to staff the help forum for one of Dell's latops?

Some of the most interesting stories Asa Dotzler told were about volunteers for something new in the making of open source software-- marketing by people power. Thus grew the "help spread Firefox" campaign. Again, the key was thinking through the "anyone can..." part. Because once you have that the system is an open one at that point.

One answer: simple button on your blog to help spread Firefox. Mozilla added a little tool that would tell the user (and Mozilla) how many referrals were generated from the button, then listed the top referrers at the Mozilla site, which drove some traffic back to them. They featured not only the top referrers by volume but the fastest climbing ones to give newcomers a little love.

The game: Open source adoption curving. Anyone can play. Object: "Help spread Firefox." It's meritocracy with a metric (referrals). You reward the top contributors by pulling them on stage. That's Asa's science, as required by his art.

Volunteers came up with the idea of an newspaper ad for Firefox in the New York Times, designed it, wrote it and paid for it with user contributions. They also came up with the idea of making a crop pattern in the shape of the Firefox logo in an actual farm field, and pulled that off too, complete with aerial photographs, which I saw. (Astounding.)

Those projects--the ideas and the execution--came from spontaneous discussions in forums. Asa said it's hard to know when discussions will take off and become something he has to get behind. "I just do my work in public," he said; sometimes people react and there are lots of comments. Other times it's just him... doing his work in public. Follow the forums carefully, he said. You have to "live in the fishbowl" and continue to be transparent in your decision-making, he said. Anything that is opaque breeds mistrust. People don't feel they are "just doing manual labor" when they can see how things are coming together. Your view of nail and hammer changes when you can see the house and its plan of rooms.

Each of the communities he has built requires "care and feeding," Asa says. Part of it is matching rewards to level of contributions. If a tester is doing a great job testing a product on a PC but doesn't have a Mac, he'll ship him a Mac. He has a budget from which he can spend on various goodies for exceptionally valuable volunteers, but also to support ideas that come up in the forums. When they are good enough for development or meet with Mozilla's strategic goals, Asa will put assets behind them.

Which is simply to say that there is no volunteer system unless there is also a system for putting a value on what all volunteers do, while identifying the most valuable people in a pool of contributors. You have to know who they are and bring them into your network somehow. Tools that help you do that are critically important.

A lot of what Asa does amounts to cheerleading for people who are doing things that add value, and even though it might seem corny to some it does not feel that way to those who are cheered. He also makes sure all Mozilla employees have the tools and tricks they need to use the open source methods that are key to the Mozilla way of competing. Trying to document what he does: another part of the job. The more who use these methods, the better they will become. For this reason he is interested in my project, NewAssignment.Net. "And I may be a lot more involved than you would think." He said he would watch carefully how the project unfolds.

He said one of the biggest challenges for NewAssignment.Net is "you can't architect all this up front," meaning that it's impossible to know what tools the community guy will need until you get in there and start dealing with the actual people who show up. "It requires the human touch." You can try to equip the network wrangler (a term he loved, incidentally, for the accuracy of the image...) but the most valuable tools are those developed to solve problems that arise in the doing of the projects you set out to do. Made sense to me. That's exactly why NewAssignment.Net is doing projects in open source journalism.

The biggest problem all "community guys" have, he said, is the kooks. But they're not like trolls at blogs. They're people who lack a sense of realism, and who want to help but don't know how or can't see why their actions are not helping. There are difficulties that come about because some people who are intensely involved want open source projects to be "ideologically pure." The working ones never are. Sometimes you get major leadership problems, as when a key volunteer who is organizing other volunteers goes missing. Dispute resolution among people with ego invested is a time-consuming headache too.

"The more open you are the more noise there is compared to signal" in the communications you get. One should be prepared for this, he said. He gets 1,000 legitimate (non-spam) emails a day sometimes.

I asked him what the New Assignment site would need to succeed with volunteers. He said:

* Regular flow of new content.
* Tools that let users see what's happened since last visit.
* An easy way to highlight exceptionally valuable contributions and the people who make them.
* Some automated system to track how much and what kind of work each contributor is doing. He said the failure to build this into his projects was one of his key mistakes because he has to try to follow it all by hand.
* A way to know when key contributors stop contributing. You have to contact them right away and find out why.

Finally, he said the most important factor by far in getting volunteers was to "have a great product."