Evening Post

A few quick notes on what's still going on with Assignment Zero:

Tagging: So far, you've all been doing a super-terrific job of tagging our interviews! All our content is becoming much more keyword searchable with each new tag. We can still use some help with that--so, if you're interested, read this post for a quick explanation of tagging, and then check out the directory to help us out.

Wired.com has our package! That's right: all your hard work has been delivered to the editorial team at Wired.com, who will be going over it in the next days. So far, the word is that they're pretty impressed! way to go!

And if we haven't told you already.... you guys rock!

Perhaps you've been wondering what's going on with Assigment Zero--everything's been a bit quiet lately.

But the Editorial Team has been working overtime pulling together all the various editorial elements we will need to have in place for our June 5 deadline.

Here's a quick glimpse of what we've been up to behind the scenes. . .

Ever wonder how crowdsouced projects find their respective crowds? Or how the crowds find the projects? Lots of our contributors were curious about that, too. Contributor Leah DeVun asked Andrea Grover, founding director of the Houston-based Aurora Picture Show and curator of several crowdsourced art projects about selecting the crowd:

Q: You put together a group of artists using crowdsourcing for the show “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing” at Apex Art last year. What can you tell me about the show and how you selected the artists in it?

A: I think all of the artists had this genuine interest in involving the general public in the production of the work and then sharing ownership of the work with the public, with the exception of Aaron Koblin, whose “Sheep Market” was a comment on the unwitting participation of people in corporate crowdsourcing and the lack of creative jobs available to the crowd. His particular contribution was more of a prank, while the others were more interest in exploring whether the crowd could create a greater work than the individual.

Q: How did Koblin solicit participants?

A: He used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a website that uses humans to do things that people do better than computers. It’s mostly used by corporations for tasks like taking surveys, transcribing things, or sorting things. But now that Koblin used it for “Sheep Market,” it’s being used for other purposes. Other people are using Ebay to create artwork, such as John Freyer’s “All My Life for Sale,” which used Ebay to catalog and sell everything in his house, down to the Vidalia onion in his refrigerator. Then he followed his belongings to their new owners in their new locations and then wrote a book about it.

--tish grier

We're almost done! But we need one last thing from you: a short bio of the person you interviewed.

We just need a few sentences--a paragraph at most. Just so readers know who they're reading about and why they should care. Here's an example: http://zero.newassignment.net/filed/martin_wattenberg_interview

There's one catch: We need this ASAP. It's the last step of the process! As we move into the final stages of Assignment Zero (more on this shortly), we're going to be compiling all the interviews together in one spot, cleaned up and with these intros on top. So we're asking you to please, if at all possible, do this today (Monday, May 21) or tomorrow.

If you can't get it done in that time frame, please let us know so we can assign the task to someone else.

If you haven't already posted your Q&A, just post the whole thing at once (transcript with intro on top). If you've already posted your Q&A, please email your intro to David, dcohn1at gmail.com.

Thank you, as always....

Hillary Rosner, Assignment Zero's senior editor, gives some important advice on what to do when recorded interviews don't sound quite right...

It's the reporter's nightmare: You conduct the world's best interview, with the subject of your dreams--only to find that your batteries died, you recorded nothing but static, or your recorder "disappeared" your file. And trust me, it's happened to every reporter you've ever read. So if you've had a technical difficulty while conducting your Assignment Zero interviews, you are probably not alone.

Salon's Scott Rosenberg recently completed his interview with Howard Rheingold for Assignment Zero. We asked him to share with us his process for prepping and interviewing:

(1) I'd already interviewed Howard Rheingold, back in 1994, and one
of my ulterior motives for signing up to interview him was to follow
up on that. So I reread the piece I wrote for the SF Examiner in Jan.
1994 and wrote some questions about predictions he'd made then.

(2) I reread parts of his books, particularly VIRTUAL COMMUNITY and
SMART MOBS, that seemed most relevant to the crowdsourcing topic.

We're at the mid-point of Interview Week! So far we've seen our editors and contributors working closely to pull together their Q&As, and in some cases, move them to the next level. But we still need you to take up some key interviews. Along with looking for musicians who crowdsource their music, you could interview anyone the following short-list of crowdsourcing citizen journalists, scientists, politicians and activists:

from Tom Hogue , editor for Open Source Car Deisgn: Ride of Your Life

I drove to work today and, if I don't get carried away in this blog intro to Open Car Design (or whatever ever we eventually call it), I'll be driving back home in about a half hour. I enjoy the hour ride through rural farmland in Niagara to my home in Fonthill. I like cars. I know people who know a lot more than I do about cars, and I've been told I should wash it more often, but, sure, I think you could call me an above average consumer in terms of my knowledge.

from Jarrett Martineu, our editor at Crowdsourced Film and Crowdsourced Music

In 1987, a pair of young producers/radio DJs, known as Coldcut, stormed the UK dance music scene with a pioneering, sample-based style that featured a barrage of reworked rhythms and sound collages, set to a live accompaniment of synchronized film and video clips.

Who could have anticipated that, twenty years later, this hybridized aesthetic would give rise to a cultural movement in remixed music, mashed-up film, and crowdsourced art?

Many of you have been wondering where this is all going, where it will lead, and when we'll see a finished product. (note: you may also want to attend this Assignment Zero meetup in NYC on Thursday)

Last week, we announced the fork in our project and Citizendium was spun off so that it could be completed sometime in mid-May. The Team also re-designed the topic pages, launched some new topics, brought on new editors, and re-made the homepage.

So, where are we at this week? According to Jay's detailed post on the next six weeks, we're still hunting and gathering: people are joining teams, doing research, and starting to report on all our topics.

Interview Week (May 8-14) will be our next milestone. . .