Course

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.

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.

From the outside, Wikipedia may look like chaos barely contained. "When
people look at these sorts of phenomenon at Wikipedia, they misread the
anarchy," Lakhani says. "All these people, thousands of people, there must be no
rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation.
One of our big learnings was to actually dive into the structure: What is the
structure that enables these guys to produce this great resource?"

An ongoing tension within Wikipedia is characterized as the inclusionists
versus the exclusionists. The inclusionists argue that one of Wikipedia's core
values is that it should be open to all ideas, that truth emerges from a variety
of directions. Better to include than exclude. The exclusionists see Wikipedia's
utilitarianism diminished if too much froth clouds the valuable information
inside.

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is
critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees
and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a
technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a
manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way
that's true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very
successful examples and some not so successful examples.