serial consign

The folks at Assignment Zero must be in high spirits as yesterday marked the first publication of their crowdsourced content at Wired. Assignment Zero is a project that evolved out of the work of citizen journalism advocate and NYU associate professor Jay Rosen. I've been following Assignment Zero from the moment it launched as Jay Rosen and editor David Cohn were both quite helpful with my thesis research.

For the uninitiated, crowdsourcing is distributed content creation. In the context of journalism, think Wikipedia meets the newsroom. The project cultivated and mobilized an instant community to produce over 80 interviews with luminaries in numerous fields. The goal was to prove that an informed, turned-on populace could produce high quality journalism.

The term crowdsourcing term was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 article for Wired. The piece concludes with the following:

Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.

Fast-forward a year to Jay Rosen's introduction to the crowdsourced content in Wired:

I wouldn't say it's easy for widely scattered people working together voluntarily on the net to report on a big story unfolding in many places at once. But we know a lot more about it now than we did when we started.

While not as overtly optimistic as Howe, Rosen is certainly allowed to be a bit more cynical now that his project has moved from speculation to logistics. It will be interesting to see how Assignment Zero informs Rosen's Off The Bus project which will deploy a community of bloggers to cover the 2008 presidential race for The Huffington Post.

I encourage you to take some time to examine the archive of material collected under the Assignment Zero umbrella. Some interviews that I've noticed thus far: David Butler's interview of Frank Piller (a mass customization expert), Marla Crockett's interview of Jimmy Wales (the developer of Wikipedia), Kristin Gorski's interview of McKenzie Wark (the author of Gamer Theory) and Malcolm Levy in conversation with Angelo Sotira (the founder of Deviant Art).