This link has been bookmarked by 12 people . It was first bookmarked on 23 Dec 2007, by Ted Perlmutter.
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23 Dec 08
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08 Dec 08
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23 Dec 07
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What I Learned from Assignment Zero
As some of us conference at CUNY around networked journalism, here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results.
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we wanted to track the spread of peer production and wisdom-of-the-crowd efforts across the social landscape, including the practice of crowdsourcing, which Wired had on its radar since a June 2006 essay by writer Jeff Howe.
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This isn’t because the crowd can’t handle complicated ones - they can - it’s because they haven’t decided if it’s worth doing them for you yet.” And: “People won’t do what you say because you just told them to. You have to inspire them to want to participate.”
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Dividing up the work into tasks people can and will do is among the trickiest decisions the project will have. Expectations have to be extremely clear or a crowd will generate a limitless number of honest misunderstandings.
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Derek Powazek is right: “People won’t do what you say because you just told them to.” It sounds simple, but the difference between Powazek’s Law and a command-and-control system (like a newsroom) is profound and decisive. This is one reason amateur production will never replace the system of paid correspondents. It only springs to life when people are motivated enough to self-assign and follow through. Experience suggests that will happen spontaneously for a very limited range of stories.
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At the moment of contribution, it has to be abundantly clear how the individual contributor’s piece of the puzzle is received, and how it fit into the larger narrative. If it is clear, the project has a chance of working
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Summary: hitting the coordinates
That is my attempt to map the perimeter: solutions lie within. Division of labor is the key creative decision in acts of distributed reporting. Grok the motivations or it can’t be done. Watch for ballooning coordination costs as ramp up succeeds. Where the small pieces meet the larger narrative the alchemy of the project lives. Shared background knowledge raises group capacity. Extant communities already coordinate well.
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18 Oct 07
Tuija Aalto"Here are the coordinates for the territory we need to be searching if we’re going to figure out how to do “pro-am journalism in the open style made possible by the web"
yhteistyö uutiset journalismi verkosto crowdsourcing joukkovoima
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15 Oct 07
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11 Oct 07
Steve BowbrickVery interesting, thoughtful and self-critical review of Assignment Zero's inaugural project.
Jay Rosen Assignment Zero CUNY journalism network citizen UGC
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Martin StabeJay Rosen: "As some of us conference at CUNY around networked journalism, here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results."
netj networkedjournalism citizenJournalism assignmentzero deliciousimport
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10 Oct 07
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