What Happened to Assignment Zero?

I thought Killfile was appointed as our voice to the project. Surely he must have an update?

I've been in touch with AZ and with the three respective project heads here at Newsvine. My role as liason, however, is limited by what the either side of the equation seeks. Once initial contact was made and the NV groups were formed, I stepped back and just told everyone involved to let me know if they needed anything from the other.

And it's been very quiet thus far.

What happens next? Well -- that's up to AZ and the community here. I'm just a facilitator.

Hi all.
Pam -- I have to be blunt and disagree with you.

Every topic now has a topic home page -- with a teamspace, the ability to comment on all those pages, see all the reporting that has come in and a few other features (more to come).

Newsvine has actually done really well with the crowdsourced novel topic.

As you can see, they have an editor, and several members of the team.

Granted, the Newsvine user interface is still better -- my hat is off to newsvine, you have one of the best user interface's out there. No doubt. But the AZ interface has improved greatly since launch. There was a lot of criticism that you couldn't see or interact with other people on the site. Well now all you have to do is join a team.

Pam, I'm not exactly sure what happened to you with our site. I understand that you were critical of the site, and we brought up some of your criticism and that upset you -- so you left. But I assure you that bringing up your criticism of the site wasn't meant to offend or be off-putting. We wanted to be transparent about everything. That's the nature of the project. When we talked with Killfile, for example, he told us that was a crucial aspect of the Newsvine community.

AZ is still moving forward. And with the new features it's easier than ever to participate. After you join a team, that link is saved in your user page, so you can get back to it in one click. At that point, you can donate 10 minutes or 10 hours -- it's up to you.

Respect comes before anything. Great ideas are a dime a dozen and your goal may be great but you have a lot to learn about when it comes to respecting the people. Especially people whom you expect to do your grunt work. Treat them like grunts and it will be a tough road to make it fly.

I don't know much about these guys because I can't figure out what they do either - but this paragraph hits on something that may be part of their corporate culture. It's almost like a few of them were sitting around thinking 'all of these amateurs are doing all of this work so why not get them to do it for us?'

Which is fine, every company loves that, except you have to be wise enough to not actually treat people like they are amateurs.

P.S. The 'Pam' thing is a style issue, not an insult. You might consider you were a little hard on him about that.

Pamela
I defintley did not mean to offend you by using a shortened name. I wasn't using it as a nickname or anything like that. I guess I'm used to be being called Dave. If it did come off as rude, I apologies -- it was not my intent.

As for Cash's point (i'm assuming it's okay to refer to you as Cash), we don't exactly come from a "corporate culture" -- right now there are about 30 or so professional journalists working on the site. Almost all are volunteers. Assignment Zero is making no money off this project. I personally work 50+ hours a week on this project. That's in addition to being a graduate student (part-time).

Why?

Because I believe in it. That's not to say that I think doing one story on crowdsourcing will change the world. But I do believe in citizen journalism, engaging people and that the Internet, as a tool, hasn't been properly used by profesional journalists.

Jay Rosen is in a unique position. He is respected by the MSM and citizen journalists. And he is trying to create a cohesive community between the two. Nobody said it was going to be easy, or without its hiccups. But it is something I believe, if achieved, would benefit what is most important to me -- The healthy exchange of information. This is similar to Newsvine's tagline -- Where people come to get smarter.

I'm not here to quibble about what did happen. All I can do is apologies to you personally (well, over the internet at least) and hope you accept that. This might be one of those times when the internet actually hinders effective communications. Things like tone and inflection are often lost. I can tell you this with all honesty -- nobody at AZ had any intention of ever offending anyone We are working very hard, for very little, to do something because we believe in it. And I still hope that you will give us a second chance.

The new site changes, in my opinion, are easy to see. From the homepage just click Assignment Desk in the navigation. We think this is a better way to get a sense of the emerging story. And if you click on any topic, try crowdsourced journalism, you'll see right away that the pages have been drastically improved. I think it would be hard to say otherwise.

There are 45 members of Newsvine interested in this project. If you all tackled a topic -- I can't imagine what could be done. It would certainly be amazing to watch from our end.

Actually, the Crowdsourced Novels topic is doing okay. They have 8 members of the team and are making good progress. It seems the other two Newsvine topics have stalled: Crowdfunding and Crowdsourced Nonfiction -- but I still have hopes and faith in the Newsvine community. Ther are 45 of you. Not bad odds if you ask me. In two clicks (logging in and joining these two teams) Newsvine could dominate them.

Pamela
I'll try to address as many of your points as possible. But it's 4am here on the east coast -- and I have a lot of work to do (for AZ) which I'll explain below -- but bear with me if it's short or a little unclear. It's been a long day.

Well thanks Dave I'm not one to hang onto the negatives, life is too short and there's too much work to be done.

Me too!

When I get a chance I'll take a look at the links you have. But to be honest...That doesn't mean you won't get snarled at if you seem to take aim at me...

1. That's all I'm asking the Newsvine community to do. Take a look at the new topic pages (which are only going to get better). If you still think it's a horrible space to work in, I can't force anyone to do anything.
2. I never intend to take aim on anyone. That's definitly not the goal.

This was pitched as a vehicle to reshape the media and to me that's a niche with critical need and the way I see the project structured you're missing the boat.

1. It is a project to try and reshape the media. Or as we say "spur innovation." The tool we are using and have already improved on thanks to your input is already lined up to be used again. We are will be working with the Huffington Post to cover the 08 elections. And we need to get that tool into shape. Also journalists need to learn how to do journalism in a different manner -- instead of being top-down, we want to find a way to do reporting with readers (or the former readers for that matter). As I like to say it (and it's hard to type, cause I often use my hands to express the point) -- we no longer put the news down on the table and say "now you are informed" -- instead this is a project to teach journalists/citizen journalists (in my mind they are the same) how to create a space through which everyone can inform themselves.

If you don't like the topic Crowdsourced Nonfiction topic, that's fine. There are plenty of topics to choose from. There is nothing to stop you from, say, venturing over to the crowdsourced campaigns topic or the Science topic. Open source is about scratching an itch. What's your itch -- we tried to spread the topics out so that there would be a fit for everyone.

It is in no way the same as building a news organization in every category from the ground up and that's what I see you folks trying to do and trying to manage volunteers in a newsroom style with sections that cover those as indepth assignments and if you're not getting credit for it as a course it is hard for me to see the incentive because I have no clue what it can create.

We are not trying to build a news organization in every category. In fact, what I intend to do tomorrow is reign in the beast that has become all our categories. The initial idea was to give as many options as possible to see where people got interested. And those topics that, excuse the pun, died on the vine, would be cut. The "editors" don't decide on the path of the story -- the crowds collective voice does. And with the new interface up -- people begining to join certain topics and get work done, we've decided to begin a new phase of the project, from spreading outselves out as wide as possible, to really focusing in on what stories can be told well.

Is there no credit? Of course not. Credit exists on several layers. For one, Wired has said that contributor stories that meet their editorial standards could be published on their site. And even if Wired doesn't pick up a story or a piece of reporting, the Creative Commons licence means that anybody else can -- granted that might scare a traditional writer (you mean your giving it away!) if the goal is to inform and spread information, that seems like the best way to do it, no?

If I were you all I'd team with someone like Congresspedia or Sunshine or Public Campaign to find what they need as initiatives

Just FYI: Sunshine is one of our funders :)
And it brings up a great point. Why Crowdsourcing? Why try to do a "trend" piece?

Let's take the Sunshine "congress as a family project" initiative -- which was a great example of crowdsourcing.

They asked "how many members of congress hire spousal members with campaign contributions?"

It's not illegal to hire a spouse. But unless you are Hillary Clinton, it might be questionable if they are qualified.

That story would take a single journalist (just guessing) 3-4 weeks to do (again memory slow -- there are 416 members of Congress).

A crowd of citizen journalists did it in 2 days.

But what did they do? They got the raw numbers. That's not really journalism, because as I pointed out above, there might be good reasons for some of the spousal hirings. Some might have been hired to do menial tasks. And somehow that information has to be boiled down to get the nut of the story -- Because if you really want to spread that information, it has to be easily digestable for mass consumption (that's just how people work -- average attention span on the web less than 10 seconds).

We are trying to figure out how to combine the efforts of the sunshine foundation (tag line I believe is: To shed light on democracy) to journalims -- to shed light, or spur innovation in journalism.

To me a "journalist" is a traffiker of information. And now that information is so easily spread (you don't need to own a printing press anymore) we have a lot more journalists -- and that's a GOOD thing. So the question is -- how can you organize that? Right now what we have are lots of indvidiual journalists (trafficers of information) spread out, all writing about different things at different times. We want to figure out how that can be done with journalism.

t a success under your belt and move on.

I agree. We want to get a success under our belt and move on to something more substantive. Personally, I want to do something with the environment as well (I am a Navigator over at Netscape with Corey Spring, and I mostly submit enviro stories). I have ideas -- and those ideas are being shaped and reshaped from what I'm learning at AZ.

So what's the point? If you feel that you have been screaming in the dark not understanding that the point of this project is to figure out something bigger than the story of crowdsourcing itself, that's our fault. (Apologies again). We knew we weren't going to get everything right the first time. But perfection is boring... right?

Learning something along a rocky road is much more interesting. And that's what I want the Newsvine community to come and do with me. Either as a community or individuals. Who knows, maybe you'll get published in Wired News along the way -- the future is wide open.

So one last apology -- for writing such a ranty comment. Sorry... but my juices got flowing -- again this is a project of passion for me. And I think it can be for you too. Maybe you just need to find your niche. Can I give one suggestion based on the limited knowledge I have of you.

Maybe you should check out the crowdsourced maps topic -- (what we learn from this topic is what I want to use to do a future crowdosurced enviro story -- which you'll see if you follow the links to this story on using Google earth to investigate the environment.

I guess another point to make with that -- this isn't just us guessing. We've taken a lot of time to think about how we can "spur innovation in journalism" -- and we realized that if we wanted to use the "wisdom of the crowds" to do just that -- we had to inform ourselves and the greater journalism community of what that means, where is it possible, where does it fail. What are the practices and principles of a succesul crowdsourced project. And how can that be adapted to journalism. And thus spakred the idea of investgating crowdsourcing as our first project. Maybe crowdosurcing is a bad name -- I am personally a fan of calling it Open Source X -- but.... okay.. now I AM just rambling.

Time to go to bed. I'll check back in tomorrow. If you want you or anyone else should feel free to contact me -- my info is on my personal blog http://digidave.org

Pamela
I've actually heard of that documentary. Now I can say I know the producer too.

Thanks for the corrections -- and yes you are right. In open source they say that all bugs are shallow -- with enough eyes on the code, every mistake will be caught. It's a fasincating thing to watch.

Well -- I've had a productive day at AZ -- more changes and clarity to come. We are hoping that by Monday or Tuesday the Assignment Desk will be radically changed to show the story itself -- and allow people to browse topics at the same time -- before it was a list, now it will be a place to begin to understand the story.

That combined with the new topic home pages should make things much clearer.

Are you still making documetaries?