topics

Lots of new assignments and related discussions are emerging at Citizendium. Now you can....

**Monitor the blogosphere for conversations about Citizendium
**Join contributor Sean Richardson in combing through the Citizendium blog
**Find out what the Big Thinkers are saying about an "expert"-led project
**Compare entries on Citizendium to those on Wikipedia
**Interview some of Citizendium's editors and authors. (see contributor Mike Ho's new topic discussion on going after those "expert" interviews.)

One of our other topics--the Jimmy Wales Interview --has some overlap with the Citizendium project. So, Wales interview editor John Abell (who's also part of the Citizendium team) sends the crowd on a quest to find quotes by Wales on Citizendium. He's not looking for gossip or prase from Wales, but for anything that Wales said about Sanger's project (hint: John suggests starting with a Goolge search)

You've got your assignments--now get going!

Hey all,

Here's a quick & fast update from the Culture corner here at AZ. After a great chat with Jay Rosen on Friday, we've decided to reign in our coverage and focus focus on two key topic areas:

• Crowdsourced Film
• Crowdsourced Music

I'm glad to see that Jeff Howe and Ruslan Kulski are on board to work on film coverage. Ruslan's been busy gathering information and doing some initial writing on the subject - and I'm sure there will be much more to come!

On the music front, David Cohn and I were exchanging a few ideas earlier in the week that have pointed us toward a few interesting sites that interpret crowdsourcing the creation, promotion, and distribution of music. We'll be putting together a topic page over the next few days and I'm hoping to get some contributors rolling on some assignments as soon as we've got our nice new topic pages decorated with some appropriate text, key links, and upcoming plans.

CP music & culture writer/editor Angela Pacienza will also be working with our emerging team as our culture crew begins to consolidate its efforts on some initial tasks. Time permitting, we may also extend our reach to include a collaborative concentration on Current TV with Media & Publishing Editor Michele McLellan...pending a bit of further inquiry into how effectively Current TV have put their crowdsourcing plans into action.

Our strategic outreach work continues too - as I've put out a call for culture contributors to AZ over at the excellent crowdsourcing news site NowPublic.com. Founder Michael Tippett is behind our efforts and site editor Mark Schneider is eager to see where we can take this cross-collaboration. With our 900+ contributors and NP's growing international roster of 80,000+ members, we're bound to find some points of shared interest. Looking forward to see what comes from it!

Please don't hesitate to contact me jarrett.newassignment@gmail.com if you're interested in getting on board - or if you've got ideas for stories within either of the admittedly large topic areas we'll be covering.

More soon!

JM

David Cohn with the evening post and a RED ALERT

Some people have been asking "what will the final product look like?"

Good question. Why donate your time to something if you don't see the bigger picture? In the grander scheme we are helping to produce a work of journalism in a new fashion. The final piece will be written by Jeff Howe and it will be published on Wired News, which has also agreed to publish any contributor stories that meet its editorial standards. But don't take my word for it, here's Jeff Howe's take on how the final story will look.

RED ALERT

Last Friday we talked about pruning the list of topics. That time has come. If you have last minute protests -- let us know, send David Cohn a note.

Why cut down? We've extended our arms through the Crowdsourced world and we have a general sense in what interests you. This is our story and we are following your lead. The goal of Assignment Zero isn't to be an all encompassing compendium of crowdsourcing. We could do that on Wikipedia if we wanted. The goal is to write a collaborative trend story. We've done our basic research and editors are in place to help. So it's time to reign in the topics and really get down the examples of crowdsourcing we want to pursue.

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.

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.

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....

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 Michelle McLellan pinpoints four areas where she believes need to focus in order for the topic to move forward: scope, ,b>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, jsykes posed | ten questions (and got ten answers) from Clubworld, "the second act to break the $50,000 mark in support from believers in their music." Michale 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.

And check out Maurice Cardinal's fine report Interrupting the Revenue Stream in an Oligopoly on the Crowdsourced Journalism/major criticisms of crowdsourced journalism page:

The following is an outline of a very complicated social matter in my city of Vancouver, BC. At first, it might not seem related to what we are trying to do here on AZ, but if you don't understand some of the details that we have had to deal with it will be hard to appreciate the challenges of crowdsourcing. To begin, I've written and published a "citizen journalism" blog since 2004, well before the term was in the mainstream. In fact, to me it was just a website that eventually was renamed a blog. Blogging, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, etc., for me and my company has proven to be incredibly challenging on a number of levels, and as time goes on, it becomes increasingly so.

There is a big difference between simply reporting news as an indie journalist, and reporting news that changes how people regard the news system. We do both, but of late, primarily the latter. Our slogan is, "We don't break the news. We fix it."

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.

After a long night of work, David Cohn posted early this morning that the new topic pages are up. You can see an example of one here.

What's new? Each topic page tells you who is editing the topic and provides a link to their blog. It also shows who is contributing to the topic and provides a key for the assignments.

You get to these topic pages straight from the Assignment Desk - just look for the orange "topic page" links.

Assignment Zero -- now with topic pages.

What this means?

Every topic we are covering has a team that takes charge of their story. Lots of these topics have editors arleady. Joining a team is as easy as clicking a button and once you join, it will be represented in your user page. Join early and join often.

Jay will be chiming in later to write about how these pages can be used to really make Assignment Zero take-off.

David has redesign news! Check out the whole new topic page description on his blog. The changes aren't complete, but they are in motion.

As Lauren has said before, the Pro-Am model that we are trying to create is a bit like throwing a party. We made plenty of appetizers and sent out the invitations. In the beginning we were just hoping people would show up.

And they did. Over 900 as of writing this!

Well, we didn't really make a dance floor that big.

We noticed that the site's interface wasn't up to the task and so we've moved some furniture around to make space. We are still in the process of getting those final chairs out of the way.

I can't tell you how excited I am about the team function that we have created. The whole idea of Assignment Zero is that a team of people can do the job of one reporter better than one. We are working on a HUGE story. Together we create one large team. But since we've broken the story down into smaller bits, it's time to break ourselves down into smaller teams -- each focusing on their piece of the pie. I think this will help foster a sense of community along with an effective means to get work done. And while it will create clarity on our work, it will also make the site much easier to navigate. Because if you know what topic you want to tackle, just join the team and the home page for that topic will end up in your bio page -- so you can get back to it quickly every time you log-in.

So our D.J., mix-master Lauren Sandler can turn up the music and now we can really get our groove on.