A fast month and a half has blown by in Assignment Zero time since the first mention about the AZ experiment hit Wired.com.

Started with little more than a big idea and commitment from a core group of visionaries at Wired magazine/online plus the NYU journalism crew (I am not real sure about who came to whom first), the leadership team put out a call on Wired to attract the curious professional or amateur journalist to participate. I was one of the people who responded.

The effort was self-organizing internally as well as externally, and confusing to behold at the beginning.

However, in the few short weeks since raw start-up, an amazing progression of events have happened, leading to the first crowdsourced story on Citizendium published on Wired.com.

I am struck by the meaning and ownership that a random virtualized crowdsourced group can take on so quickly and do so well, all things considered. Something tangible has happened.

Hats off to Michael Ho, primary writer on the Citizendium story, and to the other people on the crowdsourced crew. The editorial staff, Lauren Sandler, Jeff Abell, and David Cohn kept the enthusiasm and effort up, on track, and going forward. (I did have a dream one night during the process about how the editors were herding cats)

It is fun with much more to come. Confusion still remains but in a friendly, roll-up-your-sleeves way.

Outsourcing, telecommuting, offshoring, and opensourcing are cousins to the crowdsourcing phenomenon – a major trend in emergent internet-enabled impacts to revolutionize the workforce. The pace of crowdsourcing activities and applications for non-profit or for-profit purposes is creatively diverse and robust, or in another word, breathless.

Assignment Zero crowdsources crowdsourcing journalism, a double entendre of sorts. AZ also provides motivation to explore and research the many facets of this quickly changing landscape.

Participating in this frothy crowdsourcing surf reminds me of the first time I stood up on a surf board and experienced, fleetingly, the raw power of an ocean wave. I realized that fluid ocean motion solidifies into a surface capable easily supporting me and propelling me forward – and off the board altogether soon enough.

Swimming in the crowdsourcing sea is daunting if not drowning in its fluidity. The best way, keeping with this analogy, to comprehend the force of the crowdsourcing movement, for me, has been getting on an Assignment Zero surfboard and catching a wave or two.

The adage, "If you want to teach, learn. If you want to learn, teach (or write in this case)" is appropriate.

My recent Burge Eye View column published in the Albuquerque Tribune reflects my first attempt in a traditional media way to describe surfing the many powerful crowdsourcing stories to the general masses.

InnoCentive is a shining example of the valuable crowdsourced business application making everyone on the planet capable of being an inventor if not an innovator – and getting paid for it. As a bonus, in my research on InnoCentive for the column I learned that InnoCentive was borne of an idea coming to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht from a public lecture at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, my home base. InnoCentive was formed in 2001 and has matured into a very worthy venture, impactful far beyond a mere research and development lab or company.

Much is owed to Jeff Howe for coining the term and congealing the awareness of "crowdsourcing," based on his observations writing The Rise of Crowdsourcing for Wired.

Of particular note for people trying to grasp or quantify the crowdsourcing reality (myself included), I recommend the sidebar to Howe's article Five Rules of the New Labor Pool (titles excerpted):

1. The crowd is dispersed
2. The crowd has a short attention span
3. The crowd is full of specialists
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
5. The crowd finds the best stuff

Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams is an excellent crowdsourcing surfers guide discussing the variety of crowdsourcing solutions applied in a wide mix of purposes.