Wired

Today marks the beginning of our publishing phase at Assignment Zero.

Anyone involved in Assignment Zero will tell you it was no small endeavor. Over eighty interviews (see directly below this post) were scheduled, rescheduled, transcribed, edited and formatted.

Research, writing, re-writing, fact-checking and more have gone into our feature stories.

New friends made, lessons learned and we hope, the potential for networked journalism will shine through it all.

Today Wired has published five pieces.

1. An intro from Jay Rosen

2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
by Anna Haynes with additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore. Edited by Vivian Martin

3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book Reported by: Celestina Adams, Dan Charles, Orlando Dozier, Yvonne Allison Eriksen, Jack Frost, Kristin Gorski, Gerrit Janssens, George Karimalil, Raul Larson, Gregorio Magini and Yasmin E. Voglewede
Written by: Kristin Gorski
Illustrated by: Namir Ahmed
Edited by: Michele McLellan

4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
Reported by Gregg Osofsky, Nancy Feraldi, Leah DeVun, and Daniella Zalcman
Written by Daniella Zalcman
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Hillary Rosner

And more to come... Stay tuned. And don't forget to visit NewAssignment.Net for updates on future projects.

Here's a disturbing one for you. Sometime after publication of the Citizendium article, the following grafs were inserted into the story right after the graf noting that Wales refused comment:

(Editor's note: Following publication of this article, Wales offered the following on-the-record comment in an e-mail to NewAssignment.net editor Jay Rosen:

"'Instigator' does not mean 'founder' is the main other comment I would make. My claim in this matter is quite simple, and this is on the record:

"Larry Sanger was my employee working under my direct supervision during the entire process of launching Wikipedia. He was not the originator of the proposal to use a Wiki for the encyclopedia project -- that was Jeremy Rosenfeld. And Larry has himself publicly stated, 'To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine.'

"His role in the early days of Wikipedia was important -- he was considered the 'editor-in-chief' -- but it was not the role of founder. Larry was never comfortable with the open wiki process, and he has been critical of it from the beginning and to this day.")

I commented before about the inherent conflict of interest in our taking on a Citizendium story. I believe that the original story was as even-handed as you could get it, and thankfully, we were blissfully ignorant of Jay's involvement on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board (remember, for emphasis, that this board is advisory in nature only, not involved in the day-to-day running of Wikipedia). But now, post-publication, we've got changes being made to the story based on an e-mail from Wales to Rosen.

I have serious issues with the modification of any story after its publication, particularly when the modifications involve allegations that are central to the story itself.

It's a fact that Wales refused comment on the story pre-publication. Now re-read this sentence from the inserted copy:

"'Instigator' does not mean 'founder' is the main other comment I would make. My claim in this matter is quite simple, and this is on the record:

This is quite simply a smoking gun; by saying that he has an "other comment" that is "on the record," it is quite clear that there's more to this e-mail, and that what appeared above it was "off the record." This makes it even more obvious that there's some kind of communication going on behind the scenes.

I believe that if you don't vote, you lose your right to bitch about the government. And if you refuse to be interviewed for a story, you lose your right to have the story reflect your views. Them's my guns and I'm sticking to them.

A person involved on the project commented to me, privately, that knowing about the conflict of interest left a lingering "dirty" feeling. At the time, I knew that our team had done its due diligence. I didn't share this feeling, and replied as much. Until now. Now I feel dirty too.

A work on citizendium has been complete and will run tomorrow on Wired!

I make an early edit to Assignment Zero's entry on Citizendium; http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Assignment_Zero

What was learned?

So far, I can say this:

Originally, it looked like the first article to be produced was going to be on Crowdsourced Law Enforcement. Work was steady, and fruitful, until a few roadblocks were hit, speedbumps and tire spikes resulted in loss of momentum, and the passengers just got out of the bus and left. Mostly.

So the first piece turned out to be based on Citizendium, which is a similarly goaled project. Perhaps it made the best sense that a crowdsourcing news project would report on a.. well... crowdsourced project. Kind of like looking into a strange mirror. We'll see what the piece is like, and what the resulting fallout is.

How did the citizendium piece develop? Was there more interest? Was it easier to produce? Did it have a larger team? Were the people working on it more steadfast and knowledgable?

In some respects I am willing to both take responsibility in applying my previous post to myself in terms of not doing legwork (I think I was susceptible to my own faults), and to say that I think there was a larger steered effort to produce a piece of citizendium. After all, one chased a relatively current event that implemented a concept that was probably originated on-line with it's predecessor and the other is just a concept, that happens all the time.

Is it fact that because something is new it gathers more attention? Is crowdsourced law enforcement boring, or taken for granted?

In some ways, the two have things in common. Citizendium's success relies on minor policing of the community in order to maintain a level of quality, consistency, and accountability. Law enforcement is about policing communities to keep them crime-free; is wiki vandalism a crime or a result of noneducation? If we educate more wiki contributors, will there be less vandalism? If we educate more people, will there be less crime? Does more community self-regulation result in a lower crime rate?

There are parellels to be drawn, for sure.

What will be the next topic for reporting? Politics, Law, Art, Religion? Does it take a catalyst to motivate people to choose a topic to report on? What will be that catalyst? Synthetic or naturally occurring? Accidental or on purpose? Can it be hype-generated?

I'd like to see the editors weigh in on this one. It seems to be a curious point. How much contribution was there when the site was new versus now? If work is produced every two months will more and more users contribute over time? Will there be an explosion of existing user contribution or new user contribution following the article?

Only time will tell.

Well, after re-posting two recent Wired entries on collaborative music sites Splice and YourSpins, I scrolled a bit further down the wired music blog page to discover that they've also done brief entries on many other sites that I think are worth covering for our AZ music feature, including: NINJAM, Mix2r, JamGlue, Indaba, and eJamming.

I think we should do some further investigation and into each of these sites for AZ. Let me know if you're interested in doing a profile piece on any of them.

Outsourcing, telecommuting, offshoring, and opensourcing are cousins to the crowdsourcing phenomenon – a major trend in emergent internet-enabled impacts to revolutionize the workforce. The pace of crowdsourcing activities and applications for non-profit or for-profit purposes is creatively diverse and robust, or in another word, breathless.

Assignment Zero crowdsources crowdsourcing journalism, a double entendre of sorts. AZ also provides motivation to explore and research the many facets of this quickly changing landscape.

Participating in this frothy crowdsourcing surf reminds me of the first time I stood up on a surf board and experienced, fleetingly, the raw power of an ocean wave. I realized that fluid ocean motion solidifies into a surface capable easily supporting me and propelling me forward – and off the board altogether soon enough.

Swimming in the crowdsourcing sea is daunting if not drowning in its fluidity. The best way, keeping with this analogy, to comprehend the force of the crowdsourcing movement, for me, has been getting on an Assignment Zero surfboard and catching a wave or two.

The adage, "If you want to teach, learn. If you want to learn, teach (or write in this case)" is appropriate.

My recent Burge Eye View column published in the Albuquerque Tribune reflects my first attempt in a traditional media way to describe surfing the many powerful crowdsourcing stories to the general masses.

InnoCentive is a shining example of the valuable crowdsourced business application making everyone on the planet capable of being an inventor if not an innovator – and getting paid for it. As a bonus, in my research on InnoCentive for the column I learned that InnoCentive was borne of an idea coming to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht from a public lecture at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, my home base. InnoCentive was formed in 2001 and has matured into a very worthy venture, impactful far beyond a mere research and development lab or company.

Much is owed to Jeff Howe for coining the term and congealing the awareness of "crowdsourcing," based on his observations writing The Rise of Crowdsourcing for Wired.

Of particular note for people trying to grasp or quantify the crowdsourcing reality (myself included), I recommend the sidebar to Howe's article Five Rules of the New Labor Pool (titles excerpted):

1. The crowd is dispersed
2. The crowd has a short attention span
3. The crowd is full of specialists
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
5. The crowd finds the best stuff

Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams is an excellent crowdsourcing surfers guide discussing the variety of crowdsourcing solutions applied in a wide mix of purposes.

Fine print matters mightily. Certainly Wired's parent company, CondéNet, Inc., knows this.

Let's take a snapshot of today's privacy and copyright policy and the license that governs our contributions:

The one thing you cannot do is stop Assignment Zero from using the work and/or relicensing it so that others can use it too.

What does 'relicensing' really mean to you? Can your content be taken out of context, modified for any reason, and used by others, with no link back to your original contribution, and sold for purposes you may not support? I think so: there is no commercial exclusion, and it is not clear what 'attribution' really means in practice. What does this long-winded legalese mean to you? Will reading this inhibit your potential contributions?

Which license would you choose, if YOU had a choice?

Would being able to choose how you license your contributions enable you to participate more freely?

I'd rather conduct this discussion in public than by email. On my space here, via comments, not elsewhere, thank you.

Our Privacy and Copyright Policy

This policy was crafted for NewAssignment.Net by Lauren Gelman, Associate Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society

The goal of our copyright policy is to obtain adequate permissions from you so that we can edit and remix your contribution to add to our final edited package, and then make that package available to you and all our other contributors and readers under a creative commons license.

We’ve chosen to release the final article under an “attribution share alike” license that allows anyone to reuse and build upon the article as long as they credit Assignment Zero and license their creations under the identical terms. We think this choice of license best complements the mission of our project.

To make this possible, by submitting your work to this website, you agree to grant Assignment Zero a perpetual non-exclusive right to the work. You also agree to grant Assignment Zero the right to relicense your work.

What this means is that you retain all copyright in your work and can still do with it as you please. The one thing you cannot do is stop Assignment Zero from using the work and/or relicensing it so that others can use it too.

Edited/Unedited Content and Assignment Zero’s Liability:

The law generally holds media publications responsible for violations of copyright law, libel, and other actions of their agents (reporters). By editing the content, the publications assume responsibility for what their agents do.

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects providers of an interactive computer service against liability for speech when another user provides the content. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protects service providers from secondary copyright liability when users of their service violate copyright law as long as they provide a means for copyright owners to notify them of a copyright infringement and the website removes the content upon receiving such notice.

Assignment Zero is a unique collaboration of a media publication and a service provider, featuring both edited and unedited content on our website. To distinguish the two for our users and visitors, we created two types of signposts on the website. First, we labeled those portions of the site that host unedited user submitted content, and are therefore covered by both the CDA and DMCA “Unedited Content.” On this part of the site we link to our “notice and takedown policy” that complies with the requirements of the DMCA. Second, we labeled the portions of the site that host content reviewed by our editors “Edited Content.” The former allows us to have multiple users around the world posting content to the site at all hours of the day and night and lets our editorial team still get some sleep knowing we are not liable for what our users do. The latter is the product of our team’s hard work and professional standards and we are proud to stand behind it.

DMCA Notice and Takedown:

Assignment Zero’s website contains both edited and unedited content. The edited content is on limited sections of our website and is clearly labeled as “Edited Content”.

Most of the content on our site is submitted by our users and is not reviewed and remains unedited. That content is clearly labeled as “Unedited Content” and is subject to the notice and takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Assignment Zero abides by the DMCA by responding to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the DMCA and other applicable laws. As part of our response, we may remove or disable access to material residing on the Assignment Zero website that is claimed to be infringing, in which case we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the person who submitted the affected material so that they may make a counter notification, also in accordance with the DMCA.

The following notice requirements are intended to comply with Assignment Zero’s rights and obligations under the DMCA and, in particular, section 512(c), and do not constitute legal advice.

Notice of Infringing Material

To file a notice of infringing material on a site owned or controlled by Assignment Zero, please provide a notification containing the following details:

1. Reasonably sufficient details to enable us to identify the work claimed to be infringed or, if multiple works are claimed to be infringed, a representative list of such works (for example: title, author, any registration or tracking number, URL);
2. Reasonably sufficient detail to enable us to identify and locate the material that is claimed to be infringing (for example a link to the page that contains the material);
3. Your contact information so that we can contact you (for example, your address, telephone number, email address);
4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the material identified in (2) is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
5. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is alleged to be infringed.
6. Your physical or electronic signature.

Then send this notice to:

By Mail:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
10 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003

By Fax:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
212-995-4148
Attn: DMCA Agent, Assignment Zero

By Email:
Nadine Heintz

Counter-Notification

If material that you have posted to Assignment Zero has been taken down, you may file a counter-notification that contains the following details:

1. Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or disabled;
2. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material in question;
3. Your name, address and telephone number;
4. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for judicial district in which your address is located or, if your address is outside of the USA, for any judicial district in which Assignment Zero may be found and that you will accept service of process from the person who submitted a notice in compliance with the section (c)(1)(C) of the DMCA, as generally described above;
5. Your physical or electronic signature.

Then send this notice to:

By Mail:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
10 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003

By Fax:
Nadine Heintz
Department of Journalism
New York University
212-995-4148
Attn: DMCA Agent, Assignment Zero

By Email:
Nadine Heintz

Privacy Policy- March 13, 2007

The goal of our privacy policy is to inform you how Assignment Zero collects and uses information about you that you submit to this website (“the site”).

We believe the more information we know about you, the more we can rely on the accuracy of your submissions. Therefore, we ask for certain personally identifiable information (“PII”) including your name and a verifiable email address before you contribute content to the site. Our editorial team uses this information to contact you if they have questions about your submission or wish to assign you a different piece of the story. We will not sell or transfer your PII to third parties except as necessary to confirm the accuracy of your submissions, publish the final package, and grant you credit for your participation.

HOWEVER, WE MAKE NO GUARANTEES THAT WE WILL KEEP THIS INFORMATION PRIVATE. At this point we cannot promise to shield the identity of our contributors (though we may create a “tips” feature down the road that could have that capability). Right now, even if you submit information under a pseudonym and/or fake email address, it is possible that our technology can track your submission to your computer. And we do not have the bandwidth to legally fight to protect our sources at this stage in the process.

Therefore, you should assume that any submissions you make to the site can be traced back to you and your PII will be shared if we have a good faith belief it is necessary to comply with applicable law.

Does that mean we will give it to just anyone? NO. We will only respond to requests for PII from the government, third parties, and the court system that are properly formatted requests in the form of subpoenas, court orders, or warrants and meet all legal requirements necessary for the disclosure of the type of information requested. If we receive such a request, unless prevented by law, we will provide you with notice of the request by email and will give you three weeks to challenge the request before we comply.

We will retain the PII we collect as long as our Executive Editors believe is necessary to assure the integrity of the project and in compliance with generally accepted norms for journalistic record keeping of this nature.

We will follow industry best practices for security and internal procedures to secure your data from attack by hackers, pretexters, and other third parties.

We will post any changes to the Privacy Policy on this page. Each version of this Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date, and we will keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.

If you have questions about this policy, please contact Nadine Heintz.

RULES FOR POSTING

While this may be a pro-am project, we require all our contributors to play by the same rules. Here are five mandatory rules to follow when posting to this website (“the site”).

By contributing to the site, you agree that you have read these rules and that you will follow them or consent to be permanently banned from participating in this project, or any future NewAssignment.Net projects. Discretion in determining whether a violation of the rules has occurred is left solely to the Executive Editors.

1. No Libel: You are free to express your opinion about a person (“Joe is mean” or “Joe is an idiot,” though be careful of rule 4). However you can never assert a fact about a person (“Joe didn’t graduate from the college he claims to have a degree from”) unless you have adequate research to support your claim. Rule number one is if you attribute any fact to a person in your submission, you will submit documentation or other research to back up that fact.

2. No Plagiarism: Copyright law prevents you from using other people’s works without attribution and permission. Rule number two is that you will not submit any content to this site that is not your own original words without both attribution to the original author, and their permission if your use does not fall under the Fair Use doctrine.

3. Respect Boundaries of Fair Use: The Fair Use doctrine allows you to use or excerpt other people’s works in some situations to help make your point or to comment on their work. While there are no strict rules on what is allowed or not allowed, courts look at the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work. This means it is generally OK to quote short pieces from other’s work to comment on it as long as your use would not replace their publication of their work. Rule number three is that you will limit the amount and nature of your use of other people’s content to that which is necessary to tell the piece of the story you are contributing to the project.

4. Respect Privacy: Part of a journalist’s job is to determine when it is appropriate to inject someone who is not a public figure into a story when the individual would prefer to remain private. This judgment is even more important when the person is a minor. Rule number four is that you will not cite, quote, or include identifying details about any person in your contribution without their consent unless it is necessary to the article, and you will never disclose any information about a minor without written parental permission.

5. No Irrelevant or Gratuitous Content: While journalism may sometimes require explorations of the evil and grim parts of the human experience, there is never a place for gratuitous sexual references, hate speech, or other offensive or hurtful commentary. Rule number five is that you will not include any irrelevant or gratuitous content in any of your contributions or postings to this site.

SOURCE: http://zero.newassignment.net/privacy

Accessed Sat March 24, 2007 at time of posting, and posted under Creative Commons Atribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Licence

Now I get it. This site is built on the open source content management system Drupal. Let's go with what we've got to meet an announced 2-3 month deadline for Wired's crowdsourcing feature: what out-of-the-box functionality in Drupal is available to enable what is desired for articles in various stages of workflow: perhaps one set of functions for reporters, another for for researchers (nobody wants to be called a "fact checker"), another for copy editors, another for story editors?

A picture would be worth a thousand words here: I want to see the workflow. I also want a clearer picture of organizational hierarchy than what I see on masthead: functional descripions would help.

Like playing tennis without a net, free form content creation and idea generation has its limits. Real world constraints of a 2-month deadline and a specific content management system should be embraced now so we may move on to substantive work and away from meta work that, however fascinating, just won't matter when the deadline has passed.

The site was built on open-source collaboration software Drupal and the code has been freely licensed under GNU General Public License.

When the project concludes in two to three months, we hope to have produced the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing ...

SOURCE: Wired Meets Assignment Zero, By Wired staff 10:00 AM Mar, 14, 2007

(FWIW, I would have chosen not Drupal, mature as it is, but Django for a news content management system. I'll be taking what I learn here and comparing it to solutions already available on, or easily added to, that well-designed -- and newspaper developed and tested -- framework. Who wants to code in PHP when they can write practically executable pseudocode in Python? When it's time to move on from this experiment in doing Wired's work and writing David's masters in journalism thesis ;>, let's move there: even non-coders can benefit from working on a content management platform written in a language that appeals to what some consider better developers. For one, the lead developer of Django really gets the potential of news markup.)

Greetings Wired World,

Thanks for the invitation to put two cents in here, or maybe as not for profit, it's a penny for your thoughts. Whatever the price you're sure what you get is worth at least what you paid for it. So what are we going to do here? Truthfully, it is hard to know at the moment; that may be in part because no one really knows.

As imagined this experiment will be a collaboration of dynamic teams. Great teams, like all wonderful partnerships, are the fruit of invested trust and time. There is no way to throw random strangers together and create synergy. It is the reason corporations can never compete with small business, it lacks the emotion and synergy of a labor of love and an alliance by choice. It is chemistry and kismet and a mutual desire to reach a point that is fixed in a collective imagination.

In a very tangible way the wired world has transformed how we think and group and interact. It has been my good fortune to be part of the Newsvine community for a while. We have that je ne c'est quoi at the Newsvine. As long as I have been there it is impossible for me to define but it is rooted in a sense of community and the generally accepted principle that we want to get smarter by sharing. On that foundation seeds of thought are sown and we do grow.

All of cyberspace has grown. The information age struggled through it's early years of basic content and connectivity and now the wired world has legs. Like a filly in springtime you can feel the pulse of the legions wanting to use those legs, to run like the wind. Unlike the filly, some of us are glue factory models with energy conservation requirements and a desire to get where we're going. That's true for me anyway and in my own mind it is clear where my vision goes.

It goes to a place where the charade of Washington politics, being separate and apart from business, is ended as the myth it is. It is the point that allows the public interest rather than the corporate media to determine the balance of the news. Quite simply the benefit of the fewest has dominated the many forever. By talking with one another we are creating that end point that is really Democratic, and that is where I want to go.

There is some distance to cover, to reach a point of connectivity, that gives the the good old boy network of Board Rooms and Back Room deals the other side of the coin. It is the point in time when the adage, "It's not what you know, it's who you know.", ceases to apply. That day can't come soon enough for me and in my eyes it will not be driven by the pursuit of something altruistic, but out of necessity to survive.

We need to rethink how we think about community and leadership and the place of humans on the globe. In particular, we Americans need to rethink our role in the world and face the truth of our toxic role. We need to strip away the nameless, faceless organizations that have no consequences and go back to a place with faces and names. I will lend my efforts to whatever extent my contributions here can help accomplish that and hope as we go along the group finds a way to set some goals for these cooperative, research masterpieces, to drive social change.

Wow, this is way more serious than my usual flippant style; don't take it as any indicator of regular tone. :~)

Regina Lynn: "I could not possibly stay on top of it all if it were just me."The beat of Wired News columnist Regina Lynn is unique in several ways – not only is she using a smart mob to do her reporting, but it’s one she is also part of. And Lynn is carving out new ground in use of the Web to cover her beat.

At her own site, reginalynn.com, Lynn hosts the Sex Drive Forum, where several thousand people talk about everything from favorite sex toys to bondage and responsible STD tests while awaiting Lynn's queries. She opened the forum more than two years ago to provide people with a safe place to discuss sex and technology. Nowadays she credits her "smart mob" with helping her stay informed and up-to-date. "It's a vast subject, and I could not possibly stay on top of it all if it were just me."

I interviewed Lynn about how her forum keeps her on the beat. The Q&A is below. If you have other questions you'd like to ask of Regina, send her an email. If you know of other journalists whom we should interview, let me know.

Recently I covered an open source conference in New York for Wired News. It wasn't about Linux, Firefox or any other particular open source software. It was Barcamp, a technology conference that is defined and improved by the geeks who attend it. Anyone who comes has to contribute to making the conference work -- truly open source. I took diligent notes, pictures and interviews, but near the end of the two-day gathering the organizers looked at me and coldly asked "so when are you going to give a talk?"

I hadn't planned for that. Which technology revelation was I going to unveil to this room, which was full of programers, hackers, venture capitalists and web designers? I decided to give a talk on open source journalism.