Institute For The Future

Assignment Zero's lessons in crowdsourced journalism

Assignment Zero, an experimental collaboration between Wired and the new media incubator NewAssignment.net, has reported back on what went right and wrong with their first attempt at "crowdsourced journalism".

 

A Wired article details the difficulties that organizers ran into when trying to funnel a crowd of volunteers into producing quality articles. I found it a relevant survey to read over, as we have increasingly used controlled crowds of experts as a funneled input into our research.

 

The first lesson learned was the need for a focused, researchable topic to attract and keep volunteer writers and editors. They unfortunately chose crowdsourcing itself as a topic, which brought up a number of issues.

 

The choice of subject was a decision we would come to regret. The topic of crowdsourcing was too nebulous — too new — to gain immediate traction. One thing any volunteer project must inspire — be it citizen journalism, an open-source programming project or simply an AIDS drive — is passion. Using the crowd to investigate crowdsourcing inspired, by contrast, confusion.

 

Another issue that arose was the need to have a process and dedicated people to manage the volunteers once they had signed up.

 

The designers built in numerous topics for contributors to colonize when they arrived. But the AZ team chose to hold off recruiting editors until after the launch, with the result that when contributors signed up, they essentially arrived at a ghost town.

 

The flood of volunteers made Ass