With Assignment Zero Editors

Today marks the beginning of our publishing phase at Assignment Zero.

Anyone involved in Assignment Zero will tell you it was no small endeavor. Over eighty interviews (see directly below this post) were scheduled, rescheduled, transcribed, edited and formatted.

Research, writing, re-writing, fact-checking and more have gone into our feature stories.

New friends made, lessons learned and we hope, the potential for networked journalism will shine through it all.

Today Wired has published five pieces.

1. An intro from Jay Rosen

2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
by Anna Haynes with additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore. Edited by Vivian Martin

3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book Reported by: Celestina Adams, Dan Charles, Orlando Dozier, Yvonne Allison Eriksen, Jack Frost, Kristin Gorski, Gerrit Janssens, George Karimalil, Raul Larson, Gregorio Magini and Yasmin E. Voglewede
Written by: Kristin Gorski
Illustrated by: Namir Ahmed
Edited by: Michele McLellan

4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
Reported by Gregg Osofsky, Nancy Feraldi, Leah DeVun, and Daniella Zalcman
Written by Daniella Zalcman
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Hillary Rosner

And more to come... Stay tuned. And don't forget to visit NewAssignment.Net for updates on future projects.

Wired is looking over the content we gave them and is thinking about how to package it all right now. We will ring bells and whistles the second we know anything. It should be the week after July 4th.

Jeff Howe has read the entire interview package and had great things to say:

With shockingly few exceptions, the interviews are compelling, thought-provoking and chock full of insights both philosophical and practical. The final package represents, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge base on the various ways the Internet has given rise to collaborative forms of production. I've been researching these issues for 18 months, and the collected information handily exceeds my own knowledge base—that itself is a testament to the wisdom of the crowds over the wisdom of the expert.

We have also recieved our first review from outside our circle.

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!

It's time for a celebration, a big pat on the back, and - yes, it's true - a little bit more work.

We've finished pulling together the interviews for publication, but now we need to tag them. Tagging means that we add a word - or a few - to the end of the entry so that the interview is pulled up when people search for related topics. For example, we added the words - Amazon, crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, and Peter Cohen- to Sean Richardson's interview of Peter Cohen. When someone enters a search with one of those words, this interview will come up.

Can you help out? Just pick out an interview from the directory. Click through and look for a pink box on the left reading "Tag this." Then insert words for tags into "my tags" and click "add."

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. . .

The term "crowdsourcing" might be new to our lexicon, but the concept, as some of our subjects from Interview Week note, has a past as much as it has potential. . .

In politics, Utah representative Steve Urquhart recalls how another Utah representative "crowdsourced" before the Internet: "One of the best examples I can think of is when a member of the Utah Legislature from a rural area, Tom Hatch, would call down to Foy's Diner. They'd put him on speaker, and he would let them know what the Legislature was considering and ask for their feedback. So the folks that were sitting at the coffee counter, they would interact with him and tell him what they thought and how they thought it might affect their area. That was early crowdsourcing."

Author, NYU prof, and longtime scholar of the internet Douglas Rushkoff, and Oxford/Harvard prof and digital rights guru Jonathan Zittrain both dislike the term "crowdsourcing," though they've got differing levels of optimism about the phenomenon's potential. See what they told AZ contributors Sarah Cove and Craig Walker.

Here's Rushkoff...

Sarah Cove: What is crowdsourcing for you?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I haven't used the term crowdsourcing in my own conversations before. Every time I look at, it rubs me the wrong way.

Q: Why is that?

A: I understand crowdsourcing as kind of an industrial age, corporatist framing of a cultural phenomenon. There's human energy being expended here. A company can look at that as either a threat -- to their copyrights and intellectual property or as some unwanted form of competition – or, if they see it positively, then they see it as almost this new affinity group population to be exploited as a resource. And I guess what I'm undecided on and debating internally is whether this is fine. In other words, am I naïve to think this isn't the death nail for a community-oriented, collaborative, Open Source ethos? Has corporate America finally figured out the way to arrest this shift in the balance of power? Or do we let them believe they are doing this when actually it is human participation and collaboration going on, the kind of thing I would promote.

Suppose you'd like to find a some smart folks to do some thoughtful yet uncomplicated work for you--like paraphrase a paragraph or create a couple of trivia questions. Contributor Sean Richardson spoke with Peter Cohen, head of Mechanical Turk, a new project at Amazon.com designed to help find those needle-in-a-haystack thinkers:

Q: What about the development of the Mechanical Turk project has surprised you in the 'beta stage' of its development, and in the application/usage of it by participants?

A: We were very surprised by how quickly Mechanical Turk grabbed the popular imagination right from the time it was launched. Since launch we have seen a steady increase in the number of Requesters who are using Mechanical Turk for an ever broader set of applications. When we were developing the product we certainly had ideas about how it could be applied but also made sure that we weren't creating artificial restrictions on how it could be used. We intentionally wanted to be surprised by the kinds of problems people used Mechanical Turk to solve. For instance, early on one Requester used Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 people to submit hand-drawn pictures of sheep. More recently, someone used Mechanical Turk as a way to generate collaborative content to generate a book. Other applications include everything from cleaning up product data by identifying duplicate data, identifying images in pictures, finding specific content in documents, transcribing audio and video content, gathering data from diverse sources, and authoring original content. We were also pleased that Mechanical Turk had broad appeal to Workers. We have participants from over one hundred countries making this a truly international marketplace.

--tish grier

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

It's true: We’ve got 50 interviews in so far.... And they just keep coming! I think at this point we can safely declare Interview Week a success.

The transcripts are all collected here. Some appear at that link in full, others you’ll see are abbreviated; just click on the headline to link to the topic page where the full transcript appears.

We can barely keep up with the pace at which the interview transcripts are coming in. Just when I think I’m almost up to speed reading them all, there are more. But we wanted to start highlighting some of the fascinating things our experts are saying about crowdsourcing.

Subvertandprofit.com “operates a black market for votes on social networking sites,” in the words of its 19-year-old founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar told AZ contributor Derek Powazek that while some users of Digg.com “cling to democracy as the final ideal,” others “understand that their community is a wild anarchy...and I believe they like it that way.”