You can browse our 80 interviews in blog format here, or go to our directory for an overview.

In addition to these interviews, you should feel free to scour our various reporting topics: where the wisdom-of-crowds is supposed to be going down. There are little golden nuggets of reporting scattered throughout. Just click into the topic and go to the tab "team reporting" to see what has already been filed.

Once you are ready to submit your story -- click into the assignment on the left titled "write the big crowdsourcing feature" and click on the tab marked "report here."

Before you can do submit your essay, you need to "join the team" with the orange link on the left.

Note: Whenever you use reporting from an Assignment Zero reporter, make sure to link down to it.

To make a link

<a href="http://www.digidave.com">Word Go Here</a>

<a href=" begins the link

http://www. designates where the link goes

"> ends the url designation

</a> tells the computer when to stop highlighting words in blue.

End Resut: Digidave

If you have problems or questions: you can reach David by clicking his username above and using the contact form on his userpage.

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Since we started Assignment Zero far more people have signed up to do interviews than to write features or help with research. This clued us into the potential of interviews - whether by aim, phone, or in person - for our project. Our goal is to submit to Wired for publication a set of interviews examining key questions and concepts.

Finished Interviews. We still have to format what's coming in. And we will edit them lightly. Your original reporting will remain untouched in the "Team Reporting" tab. But this is the package we will send to Wired in terms of Q and A's.

Let us know how things are going. If you have any questions or hit any snags along the way -- the Assignment Zero editors are here for you. We got your back 100 percent. Nervous about your first interview? We are here to pump you up. Having trouble getting in touch with an interview subject -- we will kick down doors for you. Just let us know. We work for you!

We have almost 80 interviews lined up which is great. But we don't want to let any of them slip away. So stay on it -- and let us know how things are going.

If you want to submit questions to the rest of the team -- check out our discussion threads (the tab above that says discuss).

To participate, you need to guarantee that you'll be in a position to donate at least five hours during the week of May 8 -14. Why five hours? You'll need to select an interviewee with the help of Angela and then prepare for the interview by discussing with other contributors what questions should be asked of all our interviewees and which, in particular, should be asked of yours. The interview itself shouldn't last more than an hour, but then you'll need to type it up and, if you've got the interest, write an intro.

After you've submitted your interview, an editor will take a look at it and help polish it up (with your help) for Wired.com.

If you're not sure or don't care who you interview, just 'join the team' on the left and an editor will get in touch with you. If you see the name of a person you'd like to interview on the list to the right, visit their page by clicking through the assignment and then submit your request through our 'apply' feature (second tab from the left just below the assignment description).

The majority of assignments have a "background section" (first tab on the left when you click into them) where you can learn more about why they are important to our story on crowdsourcing.

If you want to suggest someone we should interview leave a comment here, or click on the discussion tab above.

In the meantime, feel free to send your questions to Angela Pacienza at angela.newassignment@gmail.com

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The internet makes it possible for those in power to have an ongoing conversation with constituents. Let's listen very closely to these conversations and see how well they're going. And let's start a conversation of our own: How can the depth of communication between leaders and constituents influence the work of polticians?

Zephyr Teachout, who worked on the Dean campaign,
has some advice for any political leader who wants to be more responsive to constituents. By using her standards, and others, we can judge, and rank our leaders in terms of interactivity and responsiveness.

THE ASSIGNMENT ZERO CHALLENGE:
In most cases, if you go to the website of a senator, there is no chat, no discussion groups, no real online outreach.
Let's identify the leaders who ARE listening, who have garnered input from citizens, and used it to take action.

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Political campaigns are almost by definition adventures in crowdsourcing. The Dean campaign reinvented campaigning for a digital world, using social networking to build and organize support. Fast forward four years. How has the technology and the thinking evolved? Let's find out.

CROWDSOURCING CANDIDATES

We want to track campaign developments over the next six weeks and back to the beginning of the year so that we can assess the situation. How are candidates using the internet to pull in ideas from supporters? How are campaigns harnessing grassroots support and creativity? What are the trends? Who’s doing what? Is this an aberration or the norm for major candidates?

If you want to get involved, we need you to first pick a candidate and then pick a beat. Is it monitoring their email? Reading their blog? Googling for YouTube videos and other grassroots media?

By signing up, you agree to take on the beat and tip us off to new developments. By the end of May we hope to co-write a piece that details the ins and outs of online organizing among today’s presidential campaigns.

We’re also looking to produce some smaller retrospective pieces that identify that lessons learned from prior campaigns. For example, Amanda Michel will write “What I learned from crowdsourcing on the Dean campaign.” Did you work on a presidential campaign Internet team last cycle? If so, sign up to write a piece documenting your experiences.

CAMPAIGNS WIKIA
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, launched a new site devoted to net driven participatory politics:

From his gem of a mission statement:

One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.

Wales’ experiment, like others, argue that a decentralized politics – independent of campaigns – can exist and better the system. Other than campaigns wikia, what else exists? How are these efforts doing? What are they doing?

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Political Journalism 2.0 is here. Professional political journalists are breaking stories by breaking down some of the research and outsourcing it to citizen journalists. Some of these adventures in crowdsourcing are not just reporting projects; they are political acts. Who is practicing this sort of journalism, and what are the results?

This is in fact a new, burgeoning genre of journalism. We need to identify the major players in this space, learn what they're doing, and look at the larger picture of where Political Journalism 2.0 fits into journalism and politics.

Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com and muckracker.com has become a living blogosphere legend for his use of crowdsourcing. The most prominent example: In one fell swoop, the Department of Justice released 3000 pages of documents related to the Attorney General scandal. Marshall put the word out for his readers to help comb through the documents, and overnight hundreds rose to the task, unearthing the juiciest, and newsiest parts.

Another great example is Firedoglake. Firedog regularly puts out a call for reader participation, and regularly gets great results. You can read about their ambitious crowdsourcing effort, the Roots Project here

We need more examples and more reporting on crowdsourcing in Political Journalism.

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New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki wrote a book called “The Wisdom of Crowds—Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few And How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies And Nations.”

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The Ride of Your Life project aims to innovate car design using open source principles.

The founder, Markus Merz, told NewAssignment.Net reporter Erik Krangel. "I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view. There is space for innovation in this field.” The project has moved along since Krangel reported on it. Let's find out what is going on and how close they are to a real, practical and efficient open source car design.

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Crowdsourcing information reached new heights with Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales.

His Wikipedia entry can be presumed accurate. It can be found here. His blog is here.

Newsweek has the freshest profile:

Jimmy Wales describes himself as a pathological optimist. He’d have to be. The 40-year-old former options trader is the founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit any entry—a by-the-people-for-the-people approach that Wales describes as a bid to give everyone free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

The Wikipedia phenom currently has more than 5 million entries in multiple languages and draws an estimated 7 billion page views a month. Now Wales—known to Wikipedians worldwide as the “God King”—is embarking on a new venture: a new wiki-inspired search engine than plans to rely on human intelligence “to do what algorithms cannot.”

For Wales’, a “wiki-inspired” venture conforms to these principles.

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Yochai Benkler is one of the big voices on peer production, as the author of The Wealth of Networks. His Wikipedia entry claims that he coined commons-based "peer production" to describe collaborative efforts.

For more information on Benkler, check out his biography. Here’s one excerpt:

Benkler's research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. His particular focus has been on the neglected role of commons-based approaches towards management of resources in the digitally networked environment.

Benkler isn't without controversy. He and Nicholas Carr, a business writer, laid down a bet last year on whether social media sites like Flickr and YouTube will eventually be driven by volunteers or by professionals. They set a deadline of 2011 for what's come to be known as the Carr-Benkler wager. It has prompted plenty of discussion such as this Guardian article.

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Thomas Malone directs the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT.

From their site: “Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?' The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together.”

Under Malone’s direction, CCI is publishing a book, “We Are Smarter than Me,” which will crowdsourced its authors. Just after the project was announced in October, more than 300 individuals signed on to participate – as well as the Wharton Business School, Shared Insights and Pearson Publishing. See the reporting on that here (LINK).

Malone is a management professor and the author of a book called “The Future of Work.” And here are his remarks when the Center for Collective Intelligence launched.

Muhammed Saleem has already interviewed Stephen Buckley from CCI. He wrote up his findings on NewAssignment.net. Let's interview Thomas Malone to expand on what Muhammed has already learned about CCI--its founding concepts and goals.

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