News About Assignment Zero's Next Phase-- And Some of its People

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.