Crowdsourcing on Crowdsourcing
Assignment Zero a crowdsourced media project reporting on crowdsourcing itself has come to a close. The goal was to “have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.”
Over 80 interviews and feature stories have been produced by a crowd of voulonteer journalists, pro and amateur. They started with a list of topics, broken down in assignments: interviews, research, writing. Each assignment was either open for everyone to contribute and edit at any time or it was an exclusive assignment one could apply for.
The experiment can be judged as a “highly satisfying failure”, as crowdsourcing expert and author Jeff Howe states in a WIRED article:
In the 12 weeks the project was open to the public, it suffered from haphazard planning, technological glitches and a general sense of confusion among participants. […] A mutual embrace of experimentation runs throughout all the interviews, a cheerful admission that the kinds of collaborative efforts enabled by the internet are both powerful and also in their infancy.
