User Profile: Amy Atkins

Contributor Dawn Coplin traces the journey of a newsworthy spreadsheet. In the course of a weekend, the chart traveled from deep inside a trove of Department of Justice documents to a “crowdsourcing” discussion board at firedoglake.com, where a contributor named "scribe" highlighted the spreadsheet. That launched the chart into the blogosphere, where it whipped around before re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, finally landing on the front page of the New York Times.

Contributor Sean Richardson is a whip smart lawyer, who reports here that the DOJ document dump is much like “online document review” in litigation:

Typically you see a mix of emails and their attachments (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, or PDF files), 99.9% of which are completely worthless in a litigation context. This would seem to make crowdsourcing of government document review a great idea, since there are far more documents out there than any media organization, be it the NY Times or 20/20, could possibly review in a timely manner. There is one problem that bedevils all large endeavors, that of logistics. Who is in charge?

That last line really got me. Because it goes to the heart of our own little endeavor here. Mercifully, we’re not dissecting legal documents, but we are looking at a very big thing, namely crowdsourcing, and looking at it with many eyes. I love the whole “many eyes” mindset, and I hope we strike the right balance between contributor freedom and editor oversight.

So who’s got the power? Right now, I would say “the eyes have it” and I hope it stays that way to the end. At the same time, Sean is right: someone needs to be in charge, and the AZ brain trust is figuring out how to bring a bit more order to the messy process of collaborative journalism.

Contributor Michael Shaw interviewed open source filmmaker Christian Einfeldt, who is making a film about open source political parties. Must have been some interview- Einfeldt posted this picture of Michael and described Michael as “the kind of guy you want to go to a ballgame with and drink a couple of beers and discuss the meaning of life.”
My kind of guy.

If it's Friday it must be... another massive document release by the Justice Department. How can a reporting team get through the reams of files? Crowdsourcing. Throughout the weekend, weekend warriors will be combing through the documents, looking for newsworthy nuggets.

Talkingpointsmemo.com started a thread here
Firedoglake's is here

It's always fascinating to watch these acts of crowdsourcing journalism in action. I would like our people to track the progress. Ideally we can trace the journey of an obscure email among the documents, to a reader post on firedog or tpm, to a blogger post, and ultimately to the MSM, assuming there isn't a breaking development in the Anna Nicole Smith case that would of course overwhelm coverage.

So check out the threads and report back anything interesting. Maybe reach out to one of the people going through the documents and ask them why they're doing it.

You can post reporting on our Political Journalism 2.0 page.

Have a great weekend,

Amy

I can't tell you how nice it is to come across a reporting post like
this. Steve Peterson reports:

I just got an e-mail about a new web 2.0 focused company that has partnered with Utah Representative Chris Cannon to do a test run of some collaborative political applications on April 11th in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Apparently Congressman Cannon is letting an outfit named Politic20 live stream an appearance and get jiggy with elements like liveblog, wiki, and digg. I have no idea how it's going to work (or not work) but I'm sure Steve will bring us a full report.

Let me just say it’s challenging to go on vacation smack in the middle of a project as weird and wonderful as AZ. Especially when you realize that your hotel room has wireless.

I am happy to report that Charles Warner will be taking on editing duties for one of my favorite topics, Political Journalism 2.0. He’ll be writing a “think piece” as well as overseeing other elements of our coverage.

Another stroke of good fortune:
William Glad, whom you may have seen atop the “featured contributors" list,will investigate citizen journalism in the Middle East. He describes the terrain as “fact, fiction and intrigue.”

We are beefing up the core team and doing some more outreach. I’ve been a bit hesitant to do that before our reporting topics are more cooked. The flip-side is that I want contributors to be shaping the coverage, not just taking orders. So I guess you could say we’re half-baked and looking for some more cooks. And shoppers to go out and get some ingredients. Oh I could extend this metaphor forever…

Amanda Michel and I have some big ideas for the Crowdsourced Campaiging topic. Stay tuned.

As always, my door is open…

Amy

I was out to dinner recently and at the next table a well dressed old man, his trophy wife, and another couple were deep into a conversation about current events. They were so shiny, so animated... it seemed so fashionable to be bantering about issues of the day! It hit me: Politics is the new black. But sadly, not everyone is wearing it well. The geezer was spitting up outdated talking points ("You know Clinton fired ALL of the US Attorneys.") and his wife was primarily interested in deconstructing how much "work" Laura Bush has done to her face. OK I've done that too. But not out loud.

I am proud to report that our own Amanda Michel is going to write a piece called “What I Learned About Crowdsourcing on the Dean Campaign.” It will live on the Crowdsourced Campaign page, which is undergoing many great changes.

Her first person account is precisely what I love about crowdsourcing journalism: in the crowd, you will find not just a contributor, but also a source. Many of the bloggers I tend to read, like Glenn Greenwald or Christy Hardin Smith at firedoglake are first and foremost, people who actually know something, specialists as opposed to generalists who blabber. Greenwald and Smith are lawyers, so when they comb through the documents of, say, the Libby case, they have valuable insights.

I’d like to add our own Sean Richardson to that list. He’s an attorney with expertise in writing complicated documents related to government. His work on Crowdsourced Legislation and Open Government is priceless. I guess that’s literal, because of course we don’t pay.

So consider this a shout out to anyone else who is informed, or perhaps inside: you are a person of value here, and we want to hear from you.

If however, you are more of a generalist with an interest in politics, we have much work for you, too:

We need a YouTube correspondent, someone to interview Josh Marshall, and a host of other contributions.

This is the current portal to AZ Politics.

Look around, follow some links, and make yourself at home.

We’re still building this thing out so if you don’t see an assignment that works for you, create one!

I will be on vacation Wednesday through Sunday. Steve Fox has graciously offered to help out on the politics beat while I’m gone.

Cheers,

Amy

Several wonderful people have stepped up to the politics plate:

Michael Shaw is tackling

Open Source Political Party

Sean Richardson has taken on Crowdsourcing Legislation

and James Tay is contributing thoughts and reporting on what all this means for traditional politics.

Of course, we're all about crowdsourcing so I'm hoping legions of people come to help them. We're always looking for original reporting, interviews to beef up existing topics, ideas for more topics, and all links related to our project.

As a side note, I'm loving the whole weirdness of this experiment. It's like Jay Rosen gave life to Planet AZ ala the "free will" concept of creation. The responses are fascinating to watch: Some people are freaking out from a lack of structure, others are trying to impose some structure, and still others are rolling around and luxuriating in that very freedom. I'm doing all three.

Props to my first contributor here, Michael Shaw.

He's taken the open source politics ball and is running with it. I'm running after him and learning a lot in the process. For instance, where is the best place to hash out the initial reporting on Open Source Politics? We started with email, where we he unleashed his findings and we discussed how to proceed. After we went back and forth a bunch I thought maybe we should take some of his good reporting public, so some of his research now appears inside the reporting pages of the Open Source Political Parties.

I'm still not sure where to have these reporter/editor back and forths; Amanda and David think this blog would be a good place, just like a desk in a newsroom, where people stop by to talk about stories and other people listen in if they want to. So I'll try that, too. It's all part of the experiment.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss, from The Lorax

Welcome to the Politics page. Pull up a chair. You’ll notice there isn’t much here yet. And yet there’s so much out there…

For starters, we’ve got two topics up and ready to be graced by your reporting:

Open Source Political Party
Crowdsourced Legislation

Looking down the road a bit--
How ‘bout traveling in the way way back machine to 2004, when the Dean campaign used social networking and crowd-funding to reinvent the modern political campaign. The Dean phenomenon is probably ground zero for crowdsourcing in politics. Small world: The architecture of this site is based on Dean’s online design. I wonder how candidates are employing crowdsourcing today. Someone want to write up something about Crowdsourced Campaigning? Just raise your hand.

Sunlightfoundation.com, a proud sponsor of Assignment Zero, is deep into crowdsourcing; and they’ve already achieved amazing results. They’ve outsourced political research to their readers and unearthed gems like how many congressmen have their wives on the payroll. Who wants to shed some light on Sunlight? Sorry, I’m a punoholic and currently off the wagon. Maybe we’ll do a big piece on Open Government.

When the Justice department recently released 3000 pages of documents related to the U.S. Attorney scandal, Josh Marshall over at talkingpointsmemo.com realized he and his small staff couldn’t rake through it quickly for juicy nuggets. So Marshall unleashed the papers on his loyal army of readers at sister site tpmmuckracker.com. Volunteers swarmed the documents, analyzed them, and came up with leads that the MSM were more than happy to follow up on days later. Is there someone who wants to do a Q and A with Josh Marshall? He’s probably the best practitioner of Crowdsourced Political Journalism.

And someone has to be up on Youtube’s campaign offerings.
For instance, Jeff Jarvis has launched something called “Prezconference” at prezvid.com. He’s inviting people to submit videos with questions for candidates.

Any other ideas? Send them over the transom. I’m at amy.newassignment@gmail.com.

I’m also looking for an assistant editor, a sort of Crowdsourcerer’s Apprentice. Contact me if you’re interested.

A little about me: I’m a broadcast, print, and online journalist, having reported and anchored for ABC, MSNBC, the Fox network, CNN, Court TV, as well as some decidedly un-MSM venues, including an experimental newscast for Barry Diller’s USA Broadcasting, and Sawyer Media, a multi-platform media and technology company. I’m also an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU, which is where I met Jay Rosen, the grand poohbah of AssignmentZero.

My goal is to aggregate and celebrate the wonderful ways crowdsourcing is changing politics. And I need help.

Apparently there are some bugs in the system, big fat hairy bugs that can prevent such things as um, posting. So bear with us, and come along. It’s bound to be a great ride.