question for the day

Dawn does some real-time investigative work on crowdsourcing. In Saturday's NYT's article, "E-Mail Identified G.O.P. Candidates for Justice Jobs," reference was made to a spreadsheet of federal prosecutors indicating membership in the Federalist Society. Dawn backtracked through quite a few blogs, including Daily Kos and Firedoglake, to find out who was the first to post about the spreadsheet. Take a look at her work to learn more.

Reports are coming in from Brazil. RenRusso describes the crowdsourcing differences between several well-known Brazilian publications, such as Portal Estadao, iG MInha Noticia, etc.. 7sigma provides us with a list of brazilian wiki sites. Anyone want to take a closer look at what's going on?

Across the Atlantic, Peterpoe describes collective writing as a strong italian literary tradition, citing "The Zar is not dead," a futurist novel written by ten people. Anyone know if multiple author books are a tradition in other cultures? Tell us on Peterpoe's entry.

Michael Ho plans to interview Sarah Tuttle and wants to know if you have any questions for her. Sounds like a question for the day.

Sean Richardson attended "Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere" this past Friday and contributed his notes to the "Tell us about Danah Boyd and her work." This is a really creative way to contribute to Assignment Zero and to help complete the assignment. While reading someone's book or checking out their website is often our first instinct, we can learn just as much from listening to or attending a talk or lecture of theirs. If you're interested in studying new media thinkers, look online to see where they're speaking next... maybe that's the way for you.

Michael Shaw points us to a study written by consultants for Advanced Systems & Concepts that recommends the government advocate adoption of open source technologies. Shaw posted this to the Open Source Political Party page. For the purposes of Assignment Zero we want to know how the government is employing crowdsourcing techniques. Does anyone know of other examples like this one? How would you analyze this adoption?

Editor Jesse Wegman posted about the Peer to Patent project, writing: "The US Patent Office is overwhelmed by patent applications, and patent officers are not permitted to conduct outside research in the assessment of an application. The result? There's a backlog of more than 800,000 applications, and the vast majority of these get approved, simply because there's no time to conduct in-depth review. Enter the concept of "Community Patent Review," pioneered by Beth Noveck at New York Law School. The idea, in its most basic sense, is to share patent applications with people in the community who have pertinent expertise, and in this way to both speed up the review process and make it more foolproof." Is this something that interests you? If so, contact Jesse and he'll get you started. If you're interested in writing the article, send your application in here.

KG downloaded "These Wicked Games," a crowdsourced romance novel, and dishes on the details: I was only allowed to print the editorial parts of the novella. I could not print the publisher's advertisements or the copyright information. (Is this done so printed out and pirated copies could be easily identified?) When I tried to copy text from the ebook for the first time, I got a dialog box that said: "Copy to Clipboard Permissions---
You may copy 15 selections in this document in the next 7 days. Would you like to continue?" (I didn't copy the text.) Summary:
Overall, it seems like Avon is trying to let readers feel they own a "real" book (and write in it, comment in it, underline/highlight parts of it like readers would in a paper book, even though it's an ebook). Yet they have no intention of letting copies of it be reproduced and distributed without their permission and profit." Anyone else have similar experiences with published crowdsourced novels?

JSykes posts an interview with Nemesea, the dutch rock band that first met the $50,000 mark on Sellaband. He also writes that the group is currently trying to reach the founders of Sellaband and are going after Sellaband investors for interviews. Do you know anyone they should talk to?

David Cohn here with a quick wrap-up of editorial concerns and questions

Updates from the editors and our different topics:

Michele McLellan says the crowdsourced novels topic is really shaping up: "The new site design feels transformative. In the last couple of days it has facilitated a great discussion on the Crowdsourced Novels team."

Jeff Sykes, working on the SellaBand story asks "What should we ask the creators of SellaBand?" They just had a great interview with a band that used SellaBand, now they are going after the creators!

John Abell is currently editing five topics and has a challenge for the AZ team: "You're assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to pitch an angle none of the geniuses here have thought of.

Call it the ultimate crowdsource challenge: what are we missing?

Think up a sidebar, timeline, profile, scene-setter or whatever that tells a part of the story you don't think is getting the attention it deserves.
Your reward: first dibs on doing the piece and a place in crowdsourcing journalism history."

And if you have last minute questions for Eric von Hippel, make sure to share them with Leonard Witt, who is doing an interview tomorrow.

And that's what's going down. So make yourself known -- find a topic and join a team, together we can report this story out to its fullest.

To develop a comprehensive feature story on SellaBand, we need someone to get in touch with the creators of the site and ask them some questions.

What questions should we ask them? Submit yours in the comment section below.

Do you want people to contribute to your work? Do you have a specific question you're trying to answer?

You can publicize your questions by tagging your blogpost "question for the day." You can see what others need help with by going to the Newsroom and clicking on "question of the day" in the right-hand column.

To get started, yesterday's 'round-up' by Tish features the work people have been doing and ways that you can help.

Leonard Witt for example has an interview with Eric von Hippel tomorrow. Let's help him out! If we each do 10 minutes of research and add what we learn to the filed reporting here his interview will be that much stronger.

Finally. It is late notice, but If you are in New York, our executive editor Jay Rosen will be at a citizen journalism meetup. If you want to learn more about Assignment Zero why not do it in the flesh by asking Jay some questions.

Tish Grier's been following the Tracker for us today....

So much great stuff going on among our contributors, I wasn't really sure where to start (or stop) reading....

There is going to be an Uncofnerence interview tomorrow between our own Johannes Kuhn and Chris Brogan from PodCamp. If you have questions you want to ask about Podcamp, send them to Johannes.

Len Witt is looking for some help contacting Eric von Hippel. He's called von Hippel, but hasn't received a return. If anyone has a connection to von Hippel, check out Len's post or send him an email. Len would also like to know if anyone is interviewing Yocahi Benkler and asks for better contact info for Josh Marshall

The text of Neal G. Moore's interview with Jeff Jarvis is up for review.

Crowdsourcing Novels editor Michele McLellan pinpoints four areas where she believes need to focus in order for the topic to move forward: scope, theme, structures and timeline. Celestina Adams, who's been headding up the Newsvine efforts on the topic has shared her thoughts on Michele's ideas, which were most helpful to her. Michele is still looking forward to hearing from more of the folks working on this topic.

From the Crowdsourcing Novels reporting page Gerrit's write-up on the DMU blog for "A Million Penguins" Great stuff!

On Threadless editor Lindsay Gruson blogs huge props for Ed Domain along with a shout-out for some folks to give Ed a hand with the story.

On SellaBand, Jeff Sykes posed ten questions (and got ten answers) from Cubworld, "the second act to break the $50,000 mark in support from believers in their music." Michael Jahn let's us know his plans for intereviewing several heavy metal bands on their SellaBand involvement.

Information editor John Abell posts his thoughts on Reporter/Editor Relationship:

My understanding of the basic role of an AZ editor is to be a mentor to reporters: to help them with whatever they need, at whatever the stage, to begin, flesh out and finish an assignment, using whatever passes for my expertise. My own approach is to be 100% available and only slightly proactive, to allow the reporters to be the reporters.

So, be prepared to be autonomous and to show initiative -- and to ask for help when you need it. We have a pretty good Bat Signal here and I'm prepared to be as involved as necessary.

David Cohn with the morning post today.

Now we have topic home pages. They come with a slew of features, and I'm working with our developers on a few more.

So what now?

It's time to reach out our hands and ask the blogosphere for help.

After you join a team, the best thing to do is to try and find more team members. Collaborative journalism is a little different from shoe-leather reporting. Eventually we will need to really go out and do the interviews and get the quotes, but we should never feel like we are doing that alone. Luckily if we are, there is an easy solution -- ping the blogosphere.

Everything that we are covering is a hot topic in the blogosphere. There are probably dozens of blogs each dedicated to these topics. Why not point out a relevant topic home page to them? They are already informed about the subject and so are their readers -- that's exactly the community that we want to tap.

For example, I intend to email Design Observer, EyeBeam Reblog and World Changing about some of our art and design topics. Imagine if they re-blog it! Who knows how many motivated community members we could get -- and they would have knowledge about specific topics too?

Now imagine if we ALL do that. There are 55 million blogs out there. I can't hit them all.

It might have been hard to do this kind of outreach before, but now that we have topic home pages -- it's as easy as forwarding a link. So if there is a topic you've been working on and you want to see more people working on it -- be the change that you want to see. Spread the links around and I bet somebody out there will not only join the team, they'll thank you for showing them how they too can finally report on a topic that they love.

Lauren's out for the afternoon, so I'm covering today's update. - Amanda

* Cha-Cha-Changes. David's in the middle of introducing new versions of our topic pages. Take a look at this one for an example of what's to come. These pages should do a much better job at demonstrating who's working on what and what's going on. They aren't 100 percent right now, so as they say in construction, please excuse the mess.

* Tip-offs. Editor Michele points contributors to News University's online journalism classes, like "The Interview" and "The Lead Lab." Paul Spinrad, Sellaband editor, shares his 'secret ripe' for interviews.

* "Wikipedia famously declared that comedian Sinbad was dead,..." begins Michael Ho's Citizendium piece that he's posted for community review. Over the weekend several members offered feedback, or as Lauren put it, offered to "be his cat." Curious what she meant by that? Take a look at the thread here.

* From one crowd to another. Neil Moore of AZ - also the director of community relations at Indiana University's School of Informatics - interviewed Jarvis by email over the weekend. This morning Jarvis posted Neil's questions and his answers, saying "If you have better answers — or better questions — please join in." Jarvis is still open to answering more questions. A good journalist always comes with follow up questions. Is there anything in the interview that you didn't see asked of Jarvis that you think should have been? Let us know. Or perhaps you want to add to our pool of knowledge of Jarvis to better digest these answers, you can report on that here.

* Rolling out... a blogroll. We've been slow to focus on a site feature like the blogroll, that usual online staple that's responsible for demonstrating link love. Tish's finishing up putting together some links and has also been jumping into online discussions about Assignment Zero. Tell her what you think should be on the blogroll by leaving a comment on her post. Or, If you see something you think we should be aware of (or respond to!), please ping Tish at tish.newassignment AT gmail.com or comnet on her blog.

* Wikifying the news. RWilliamKing timelines the L.A. Times Wikitorial experiment. Do you know anything about the experiment? Tell him on the post.

Editor Vivian Martin is raring to get started on the crowdsourced journalism topic... but she needs some intrepid reporters to work with. This is easily one of the hottest topics we're covering.

Here's a bit of what you can look into, while being guided by the wise and inquisitive Ms. Vivian:

Inspired by the book The Wisdom of Crowds, the opinion editor Mark Tapscott has launched the Washington Examiner Community Action Network (WeCan), which makes local government databases open to the public. Within one month WeCan made four government databases available to the public and generated several leads.

Simon Reade at the Contra Costa Times relied on information from the crowd to expose dirty business practices at the local level.

Minnesota Public Radio launched an Idea Generator.

And in Ft. Myers, Florida a network of citizen journalists cracked the case on ongoing concerns over price hikes in their utility assessments.

We want to know not just how they have functioned as individual projects, but what they teach us in the aggregate about crowdsourced journalism: its possibilities, its limits, its successes and failures thus far, etc.

Check out Vivian's blog, or drop her a line at vivian.newassignment@gmail.com, and let her know you want dig in to this meaty topic.

Amanda just posted this to her blog:

Do you have questions about this? Thoughts? If so, put them in a comment on this post and I'll get them to Jay. So long as time permits (Jay's working on the post now), Jay will answer them in his post. I also started a thread in the Exchange about this. I'm going to copy and paste comments to both so that we can keep the conversation going no matter where we are.

Don't be shy. Post your questions to her blog, and we'll make sure Jay receives them.

David just sent this report about one contributor truly rising to the task at hand:

KG took on a tough assignment in the reporting topic on Crowdsourced Novels. "What is the Open Novel Smart Gene"?

An investigation!

According to BoingBoing and others there was once an open source novel called "Smart Genes." What happened to this site?

Got any leads? Let us know and if it's hot we can spin this out into its own written profile.

I wrote that assignment not having a clue myself how to tackle it. I was one scared little journalist. But that's what made it a perfect assignment for this project. Somewhere out there, somebody would know how to approach it, or would have information on it. KG dug deep, found the original author and established contact.

My kudos go flying in her direction.

So let's help her out. One good reporter deserves the help of another. If you know anything about the author of "Smart Genes," Rick Heller now is the time to share it.

Just go to the assignment and file what you know and together we can all help uncover the mystery behind what happened in that crowdsourced novel.

Rock on, KG.

Meanwhile, Conor, our liason to Newsvine has been blogging about reporting on crowdsourced novels as well. You can find links to drafts of their writing on his blog, as well as links to see how the Viners have been attacking the reporting:

Celestina and her team are figuring out how to use Newsvine's tools to collaborate most efficiently, imagining little innovations that might make their cooperation easier and thinking what they'd do different if they could start the whole process anew.

The whole premise behind Assignment Zero is that the best way to figure out how to do this kind of journalism is to just do it... and to learn from what happens.

The crowdsourced novel investigation has clearly taken off. Keep it up, guys.