Welcome to Assignment Zero. It’s pro-am journalism in the open style made possible by the web. This is a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired and those who choose to participate.
I hope you will. Because we’re trying to figure something out here. Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?
If they can, this would matter.
It’s called Assignment Zero because we needed to jump start our site somehow, and this project with Wired turned out to be it. We’re trying to create a pro-am, open-platform reporting tool that we can improve and modify later, for use in bigger, more sprawling and difficult stories down the road. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or — who knows? — the war.
Jay’s key inspiration — cut up a story into its elemental bits of reporting and assign those out.
We’re going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they’re paid to assist.
.gif)
