User Profile: paulscrawl

Why else would professional journalists and big media companies care about user contributions other than to outsource their work and gain vested eyeballs?

Questions I filed a few days ago are of interest to others: expertise and real names

One of the founders of Wikipedia has started a rival online encyclopedia called citizendium. This new start-up (or should that be "upstart"?) will apparently exercise "gentle expert oversight" and will require contributors to use their real names.

Er - okay...

Obvious Question #1: Who gets to decide who is an "expert" and who isn't?

Obvious Question #2: How will they know it really is my real name?

Source: Jason Gorman, "Can Citizendium Succeed?" posted 4/12/2007 on Agile Software Process Improvement, http://parlezuml.com/blog/

http://parlezuml.com/blog/?postid=391

why the first New Assignment project is self-referential, inward-focused, and doesn't investigate outside issues

Source: Interview Technique by Paul Spinrad

This question seems worthy of bracketing with NYU journalism professor and Assignment Zero mentor Jay Rosen's proposed answer in Wired, Why We're Doing This.

Certainly, engaging the "crowd" to investigate the "crowdsourcing journalism" focus proposed may help address what appears to be a serious "pro-am" imbalance on Assignment Zero, including :

• the disproportionate economic benefit to Conde Nast vs. amateur journalists' contributions: the fine print matters mightily and not all Creative Commons licenses are created equal
• the career-enhancing benefits of abundant editorial titles on the masthead for professional journalists and academics vs. the low value of group attributions granted to amateur contributors
• the freely contributed amateur contributed research for Wired's contributing editor Jeff Howe's forthcoming book (will it be Creative Commons-licensed? which specific CC license?) on Crowdsourcing

I contribute here, both constructively, generating original reporting, as well as interview questions for others' topics, and resource links, and critically, especially a good deal of work on the website design suggestions exchange. I couldn't separate the symbiotic activities if I wanted to. When another contributor puts my concerns in what I consider to be humorous terms and gets lessons in professional journalism from a couple of professional journalists, whom I respect but who evidently didn't get it, I have to laugh.

What I take to be the point: it's not funny. For real. Others didn't think so:

If a Joke, Not Funny

Humor: Is this for real?

I feel compelled to speak up.

This is not a joke. This for real. Other sites that solicit citizen journalists do things differently. For one thing, they don't navel gaze about their profession nor do they pat each others' backs at every turn.

Lighten up, listen up, and loosen up.

Can't read those teeny screen mockups? Want to take a closer look and have your say so? Take a closer look at their anatomy and constructively critique the proposed designs while there is still time to lend the voice of the crowd -- that would be YOU -- to the Web designers via the Exchange topic specifically devoted to Website Design Suggestions.

Closeup of specific content of new Reporting Topics pages here:

http://zero.newassignment.net/website_design_suggestions#comment-1139

And closeup of new design for Assignment Page here:

http://zero.newassignment.net/website_design_suggestions#comment-1169

Fine print matters mightily. Certainly Wired's parent company, CondéNet, Inc., knows this.

Let's take a snapshot of today's privacy and copyright policy and the license that governs our contributions:

The one thing you cannot do is stop Assignment Zero from using the work and/or relicensing it so that others can use it too.

What does 'relicensing' really mean to you? Can your content be taken out of context, modified for any reason, and used by others, with no link back to your original contribution, and sold for purposes you may not support? I think so: there is no commercial exclusion, and it is not clear what 'attribution' really means in practice. What does this long-winded legalese mean to you? Will reading this inhibit your potential contributions?

Which license would you choose, if YOU had a choice?

Would being able to choose how you license your contributions enable you to participate more freely?

I'd rather conduct this discussion in public than by email. On my space here, via comments, not elsewhere, thank you.

Our Privacy and Copyright Policy

This policy was crafted for NewAssignment.Net by Lauren Gelman, Associate Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society

The goal of our copyright policy is to obtain adequate permissions from you so that we can edit and remix your contribution to add to our final edited package, and then make that package available to you and all our other contributors and readers under a creative commons license.

We’ve chosen to release the final article under an “attribution share alike” license that allows anyone to reuse and build upon the article as long as they credit Assignment Zero and license their creations under the identical terms. We think this choice of license best complements the mission of our project.

To make this possible, by submitting your work to this website, you agree to grant Assignment Zero a perpetual non-exclusive right to the work. You also agree to grant Assignment Zero the right to relicense your work.

What this means is that you retain all copyright in your work and can still do with it as you please. The one thing you cannot do is stop Assignment Zero from using the work and/or relicensing it so that others can use it too.

Edited/Unedited Content and Assignment Zero’s Liability:

The law generally holds media publications responsible for violations of copyright law, libel, and other actions of their agents (reporters). By editing the content, the publications assume responsibility for what their agents do.

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects providers of an interactive computer service against liability for speech when another user provides the content. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protects service providers from secondary copyright liability when users of their service violate copyright law as long as they provide a means for copyright owners to notify them of a copyright infringement and the website removes the content upon receiving such notice.

Assignment Zero is a unique collaboration of a media publication and a service provider, featuring both edited and unedited content on our website. To distinguish the two for our users and visitors, we created two types of signposts on the website. First, we labeled those portions of the site that host unedited user submitted content, and are therefore covered by both the CDA and DMCA “Unedited Content.” On this part of the site we link to our “notice and takedown policy” that complies with the requirements of the DMCA. Second, we labeled the portions of the site that host content reviewed by our editors “Edited Content.” The former allows us to have multiple users around the world posting content to the site at all hours of the day and night and lets our editorial team still get some sleep knowing we are not liable for what our users do. The latter is the product of our team’s hard work and professional standards and we are proud to stand behind it.

DMCA Notice and Takedown:

Assignment Zero’s website contains both edited and unedited content. The edited content is on limited sections of our website and is clearly labeled as “Edited Content”.

Most of the content on our site is submitted by our users and is not reviewed and remains unedited. That content is clearly labeled as “Unedited Content” and is subject to the notice and takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Assignment Zero abides by the DMCA by responding to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the DMCA and other applicable laws. As part of our response, we may remove or disable access to material residing on the Assignment Zero website that is claimed to be infringing, in which case we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the person who submitted the affected material so that they may make a counter notification, also in accordance with the DMCA.

The following notice requirements are intended to comply with Assignment Zero’s rights and obligations under the DMCA and, in particular, section 512(c), and do not constitute legal advice.

Notice of Infringing Material

To file a notice of infringing material on a site owned or controlled by Assignment Zero, please provide a notification containing the following details:

1. Reasonably sufficient details to enable us to identify the work claimed to be infringed or, if multiple works are claimed to be infringed, a representative list of such works (for example: title, author, any registration or tracking number, URL);
2. Reasonably sufficient detail to enable us to identify and locate the material that is claimed to be infringing (for example a link to the page that contains the material);
3. Your contact information so that we can contact you (for example, your address, telephone number, email address);
4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the material identified in (2) is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
5. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is alleged to be infringed.
6. Your physical or electronic signature.

Then send this notice to:

By Mail:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
10 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003

By Fax:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
212-995-4148
Attn: DMCA Agent, Assignment Zero

By Email:
Nadine Heintz

Counter-Notification

If material that you have posted to Assignment Zero has been taken down, you may file a counter-notification that contains the following details:

1. Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or disabled;
2. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material in question;
3. Your name, address and telephone number;
4. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for judicial district in which your address is located or, if your address is outside of the USA, for any judicial district in which Assignment Zero may be found and that you will accept service of process from the person who submitted a notice in compliance with the section (c)(1)(C) of the DMCA, as generally described above;
5. Your physical or electronic signature.

Then send this notice to:

By Mail:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
10 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003

By Fax:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
212-995-4148
Attn: DMCA Agent, Assignment Zero

By Email:
Nadine Heintz

Privacy Policy- March 13, 2007

The goal of our privacy policy is to inform you how Assignment Zero collects and uses information about you that you submit to this website (“the site”).

We believe the more information we know about you, the more we can rely on the accuracy of your submissions. Therefore, we ask for certain personally identifiable information (“PII”) including your name and a verifiable email address before you contribute content to the site. Our editorial team uses this information to contact you if they have questions about your submission or wish to assign you a different piece of the story. We will not sell or transfer your PII to third parties except as necessary to confirm the accuracy of your submissions, publish the final package, and grant you credit for your participation.

HOWEVER, WE MAKE NO GUARANTEES THAT WE WILL KEEP THIS INFORMATION PRIVATE. At this point we cannot promise to shield the identity of our contributors (though we may create a “tips” feature down the road that could have that capability). Right now, even if you submit information under a pseudonym and/or fake email address, it is possible that our technology can track your submission to your computer. And we do not have the bandwidth to legally fight to protect our sources at this stage in the process.

Therefore, you should assume that any submissions you make to the site can be traced back to you and your PII will be shared if we have a good faith belief it is necessary to comply with applicable law.

Does that mean we will give it to just anyone? NO. We will only respond to requests for PII from the government, third parties, and the court system that are properly formatted requests in the form of subpoenas, court orders, or warrants and meet all legal requirements necessary for the disclosure of the type of information requested. If we receive such a request, unless prevented by law, we will provide you with notice of the request by email and will give you three weeks to challenge the request before we comply.

We will retain the PII we collect as long as our Executive Editors believe is necessary to assure the integrity of the project and in compliance with generally accepted norms for journalistic record keeping of this nature.

We will follow industry best practices for security and internal procedures to secure your data from attack by hackers, pretexters, and other third parties.

We will post any changes to the Privacy Policy on this page. Each version of this Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date, and we will keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.

If you have questions about this policy, please contact Nadine Heintz.

RULES FOR POSTING

While this may be a pro-am project, we require all our contributors to play by the same rules. Here are five mandatory rules to follow when posting to this website (“the site”).

By contributing to the site, you agree that you have read these rules and that you will follow them or consent to be permanently banned from participating in this project, or any future NewAssignment.Net projects. Discretion in determining whether a violation of the rules has occurred is left solely to the Executive Editors.

1. No Libel: You are free to express your opinion about a person (“Joe is mean” or “Joe is an idiot,” though be careful of rule 4). However you can never assert a fact about a person (“Joe didn’t graduate from the college he claims to have a degree from”) unless you have adequate research to support your claim. Rule number one is if you attribute any fact to a person in your submission, you will submit documentation or other research to back up that fact.

2. No Plagiarism: Copyright law prevents you from using other people’s works without attribution and permission. Rule number two is that you will not submit any content to this site that is not your own original words without both attribution to the original author, and their permission if your use does not fall under the Fair Use doctrine.

3. Respect Boundaries of Fair Use: The Fair Use doctrine allows you to use or excerpt other people’s works in some situations to help make your point or to comment on their work. While there are no strict rules on what is allowed or not allowed, courts look at the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work. This means it is generally OK to quote short pieces from other’s work to comment on it as long as your use would not replace their publication of their work. Rule number three is that you will limit the amount and nature of your use of other people’s content to that which is necessary to tell the piece of the story you are contributing to the project.

4. Respect Privacy: Part of a journalist’s job is to determine when it is appropriate to inject someone who is not a public figure into a story when the individual would prefer to remain private. This judgment is even more important when the person is a minor. Rule number four is that you will not cite, quote, or include identifying details about any person in your contribution without their consent unless it is necessary to the article, and you will never disclose any information about a minor without written parental permission.

5. No Irrelevant or Gratuitous Content: While journalism may sometimes require explorations of the evil and grim parts of the human experience, there is never a place for gratuitous sexual references, hate speech, or other offensive or hurtful commentary. Rule number five is that you will not include any irrelevant or gratuitous content in any of your contributions or postings to this site.

SOURCE: http://zero.newassignment.net/privacy

Accessed Sat March 24, 2007 at time of posting, and posted under Creative Commons Atribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Licence

Now I get it. This site is built on the open source content management system Drupal. Let's go with what we've got to meet an announced 2-3 month deadline for Wired's crowdsourcing feature: what out-of-the-box functionality in Drupal is available to enable what is desired for articles in various stages of workflow: perhaps one set of functions for reporters, another for for researchers (nobody wants to be called a "fact checker"), another for copy editors, another for story editors?

A picture would be worth a thousand words here: I want to see the workflow. I also want a clearer picture of organizational hierarchy than what I see on masthead: functional descripions would help.

Like playing tennis without a net, free form content creation and idea generation has its limits. Real world constraints of a 2-month deadline and a specific content management system should be embraced now so we may move on to substantive work and away from meta work that, however fascinating, just won't matter when the deadline has passed.

The site was built on open-source collaboration software Drupal and the code has been freely licensed under GNU General Public License.

When the project concludes in two to three months, we hope to have produced the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing ...

SOURCE: Wired Meets Assignment Zero, By Wired staff 10:00 AM Mar, 14, 2007

(FWIW, I would have chosen not Drupal, mature as it is, but Django for a news content management system. I'll be taking what I learn here and comparing it to solutions already available on, or easily added to, that well-designed -- and newspaper developed and tested -- framework. Who wants to code in PHP when they can write practically executable pseudocode in Python? When it's time to move on from this experiment in doing Wired's work and writing David's masters in journalism thesis ;>, let's move there: even non-coders can benefit from working on a content management platform written in a language that appeals to what some consider better developers. For one, the lead developer of Django really gets the potential of news markup.)

testing functionality of 'File Report' link: logged in.
Testing from: http://zero.newassignment.net/assignmentzero/tell_us_about_wikis_science...
This revised test is over 25 words.

Results of first 'test': upon pressing 'Preview' error message:
"The body of your Reporting is too short. You need at least 25 words."

No option to edit 'Reporting' -- neither content nor control buttons ('Preview' 'Submit' visible. Back button did not recover content. This time I'll press 'Submit' rather than 'Preview'

----

That worked. Above text now visible as 'test2' in 'Filed Reporting' at http://zero.newassignment.net/assignmentzero/tell_us_about_wikis_science... . Poor experience with 'File Report' using 'Preview' remains unexplained. Try one more time with both: 'Preview' button and over 25 word Reporting.

I'll worry about posting this where it belongs later -- can't spare any more time right now fighting user interface: 'report here' link on assignment page didn't show any result, though it swallowed my text, fortunately saved in Open Office. Not confidence inspiring.
-------------

Wikis and blogs are powerful tools, but they are not central to crowd sourcing scientific reporting, nor the activities and products of the scientific community itself. Open Access (OA) to original scientific data and its analysis and interpretation, in the form of freely available and peer-reviewed journal articles, is the critical tipping point for greatly enabling informed participation and evaluation of scientific research, by the general public and scientists alike.

Here is a dramatic and consequential story well worth telling: what individuals, institutions, and broader social structures and forces are opposed to open access to scientific, medical, and scholarly research? Why? Who benefits? What does the general public stand to gain -- or lose -- in this epic contest of economic, political, scientific, and personal interests? For all the successes achieved so far by the international and interdisciplinary OA movement, the outcome is hardly assured: what can an individual do to create change?

I 've been tracking these developments for years via newsletters and my own explorations of SPARC, arXiv, the Cochrane Collaboration, PubMed Central, PLOS and other leading lights and welcome this opportunity to write up an overview of the various interests and roles the general public might have in opening up access to scientific, medical and scholarly research. I understand a deadline for publication is somewhere about 2 months away -- clarity needed here.

I commit myself now to interview Peter Suber and anyone else he suggests.

What questions would you like me to ask him?

A few topics I can think of off hand, more work needed to order and hone questions: suggestions and critiques welcome

To ensure fairness, one meta question:

Who else can I talk to, one with an opposing point of view on {this specific issue}? (Know anybody at Elsevier? ;)

Could OA threaten the centuries of scientific success we've enjoyed with traditional peer review published in subscription-based journals? How can the high signal to noise ratio of a well-edited subscription-based journal be preserved in an age of free blogs and easy DIY mashups?

What quality assurances might help the public intelligently navigate a vastly increased supply of freely accessible scientific research? (I'm thinking especially of medical research here). Does HON work, and does it have critical mass of content? Could public tagging of medical and scientific content work, or is the expertise needed to evaluate such work exclusively professional? Any viable alternatives to HON? What about the Cochrane Collaboration; while pioneers in allowing public participation in rigorous systematic reviews of controlled clinical trials, they are still only sharing summaries freely -- are they getting OA yet? (Definitely find someone at CC to interview, explaining their model and rationale)

What about data depositories? Any traction yet on getting OA research linked to OA research data? Statistics is basic to all the sciences: what OA projects are leading the way here?

Who can I talk to about economic costs the average taxpayer pays to subsidize research that ends up in private hands?

Won't relatively high impact factor of OA decrease as more research becomes OA?

What scholarly disciplines are lagging in OA?

Any way to quantify ratio of high impact OA scholarly research vs universe of high impact non-OA articles by discipline?

Are psychologists, economists, sociologists and other social scientists lagging natural scientists in uptake of OA because of more individual nature of their work? (Or more arbitrary nature of their methodologies? ;). Any other factors at play here? Have you seen any interest in the Campbell Collaboration as a model for engaging public participation in social science, policy, and education research? Where do you see the most promising initiatives for OA in social sciences that might involve public participation?

Humanities scholarship is also a public good in some cases, especially when it comes to its role in the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of common cultural landmarks: literary and philosophical and religious texts, art, and music. What about humanities scholars' slow uptake of OA: is the monograph the reputation maker here and so the published book, not the high impact article, is the scholarly ideal? Again, individual nature of work vs. group nature of science may be another factor. What else? Classics has the Perseus Project, but OA classics journals are few. Why is that? Same with biblical scholarship: is markup of foreign languages still a barrier to communal scholarly work in those disciplines? These two fields in particular hold broad appeal to the educated public and any barriers to public participation should be discovered and acted upon. Imagine if I. F. Stone had invited the public to help him with the research for his little retirement project, The Trial of Socrates!

Where is the art historians' database of Creative Commons licensed images -- could crowd sourcing that huge task fall under copyright law definition of fair use? Can amateur productions such as Project Gutenberg (increasingly crowdsourced via Distributed Proofreaders) be made academically respectable and citable in scholarly publications? How or why not? Canonical literary and philosophy texts in scholarly modern translations are few and yet the tools for the humanities scholar to create scholarly editions of arbitrarily sophisticated semantic markup are there with the software tools freely provided by the Text Encoding Initiative and the licensing options available by Creative Commons. Where do you see the most promising initiatives for OA in humanities scholarship that might involve public participation?

What countries are lagging in OA? What can one citizen do? Any good stories on what one citizen did in her country?

What can one person do now to help ensure more OA? What if that person were in {particular discipline} or {scientist, reporter, grad student, librarian, business person, doctor, medical patient, ...}? (this might be a good sidebar table: with a little Javascript it could be sortable by discipline and role)

What questions would you like me to ask him?

A worthy link, well worth exploring in depth, is Barbara P. Semonche's [ http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/staff.html ] well-organized Web presentation, "Smart, Safe and Efficient Fact Checking" [ http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/factcheckers2004.html ].

http://zero.newassignment.net/what_else_should_assignment_zero_investiga...