This week, Wired's online site is publishing the inaugural project of Assignment Zero, Jay Rosen's "pro-am" journalism project. It was an experiment in building an Internet newsroom with professionals and citizen journalists working together.
As an editor on the project, I'm probably a bit biased. Most of the heavy lifting was done by Rosen and a group of 3 or 4 people who pulled everything together. That, of course, is a danger of opening up the floodgates to anyone: Someone has to control the gates.
But, it's an interesting topic. I learned a lot about some of the "crowdsourced" projects taking place online -- from iStockphoto to collaborative stock picking.
For more information, see Assignment Zero’s site.
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2 comments:
Awesome.
Must save deeper reading for later, but awesome.
Ok, still not through reading all about this, but seems to me that the major skills needed in this effort are the same skills any nonprofit organizer needs (PTA moms with MBAs and years of experience, I'm thinking of):
"...most of the initial volunteers simply drifted away. “What we learned,” says Rosen, “is that you have to be waaaay clearer in what you ask contributors to do. Just because they show up once doesn’t mean they’ll show up over and over. You have to engage them right away.”
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