WIRED News gives citizen journalism a real, large scale, high profile test case. They’re using (what else?) open source philosophies and software to drive it. It will be interesting to see the software (and mobile?) tools created for the peer production “engine” that all the content will stream into.
This project offers any willing contributor the chance to do the work of a reporter, writer, researcher or editor in a joint investigation by Wired and NewAssignment.Net. When Assignment Zero ends, NewAssignment.Net will publish the results — articles, interviews and assorted data. Wired magazine contributing editor Jeff Howe will write a feature-length article that will run on Wired News.
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, whether that be in reporting projects like Assignment Zero, scientific research networks like Innocentive or T-shirt design companies like Threadless.com.
The subject is the crowd itself — its wisdom, creativity, power and potential.
I like their candor, if anyone in ink on paper publishing has the guts to give it a shot, these guy do and this “learn as we go” attitude helps:
Will it all work? We don’t know any more than you do. What’s clear is that journalism is changing rapidly, a prospect as exhilarating as it is terrifying to the professional news media. If we can contribute in some small way to the understanding of where we’re all heading, then this experiment will have been worth it.
It’s all about experimenting and learning, mass tools for peer production. Whatever v1.0 will be, it’s a learning process to also help inform a forthcoming book by Jeff Howe of the Crowdsourcing Blog. Raging success or bloated failure, they’ll be plenty to learn from about human behavior, the pairing of amateurs with professionals, and how to structure the best user experience for a huge collaborative project to gain thoughtful input and output.
Background is nicely covered in Howe’s original article The Rise of Crowdsourcing from June 2006.
I’d like to see crowdsourcing projects creep more into consumer product design (yes beyond T-shirt voting), what else is out there and who is doing it well? Seems anything involving physical manufacturing and global distribution is where the crowdsourced concept (dare I say consumer requirements) are harnessed and then put back into the hands of “professionals”, but how are these handoffs best managed or looked over by the crowd that created it?
Also hats of to Jeff Howe for doing the whole “my blog turned into research project turned into book” thing. Hey, it worked brilliantly for fellow WIRED chief Chris Anderson and The Long Tail. These authors are getting a whole lot closer to their audiences (in product design we’d call this “customers”, in software “users”), who help actually shape the final product for the better by being involved far upstream.
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