The Assignment Zero team has conducted 80 interviews and several feature stories on the subject of crowdsourcing.

The reporting found below (which is also aggregated in a blog format) can be mixed and mashed to write your own story on crowdsourcing. Perhaps you want to write about a specific topic -- there are plenty of interviews that cover microstock photography, open source movies, unconferences, etc. Or for a real challenge, try to write a big feature that encompasses all the different aspects of crowdsourcing.

In addition to these interviews, you should feel free to scour our various reporting topics: where the wisdom-of-crowds is supposed to be going down.

General Interview Topics

Feature Stories

Long form features on crowdsourcing topics

Art: Photography, Film, Visual Arts, Literature, Design

Government, Legal Issues

Journalism

Business Theory and Practice

Thinkers and Academics

Features

1. Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness
2. Lessons From the Old School, a sidebar to the Citizendium feature
3. Profile of a Wikipedia Super-Contributor
4. Open Source Journalism, It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
5. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book
6. News The Crowd Can Use
7. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
8. Design Within Reach: Architecture for Humanity Builds the Future of Housing
9. Forty Strangers in a Virtual Room Talk About Religion

Unclassified

1. Crowdsourced Soccer in the UK
   A sports team managed by the fans
   Johannes Kuhn interviews William Brooks from MyFootBallClub
   "The "wisdom of crowds" theory suggests that many informed people can reach correct decisions, sometimes better than an individual can. The irony is, if the fans decide who plays and who is bought, the coach can blame failure on the fans!"




2. Exploring the Dark Side of Crowdsourcing with Subvert & Profit
   Can crowdsourcing be used to manipulate open networks?
   Derek Powazek interviews Ragnar Danneskjold of Subvert & Profit
   "I won't release specifics, but in general, we'll follow the crowds where they are largest and most prone to manipulation."




3. The Semantic Web, Crowdsourcing and the Future of Open Discourse
   A programmer's role in harnessing the wisdom of crowds
   Nate Olson interviews Yaron Koren
   "To me, the clearest demonstration that aggregation works is just the success of democracy as a system of government, compared to all the others that have been tried. Plenty of systems of government have billed themselves as the rule of an enlightened elite over the uneducated masses, and they've all failed, sometimes spectacularly so."




4. Dawn of the Unconference
   The history of BarCamp and the power of community
   Malcolm Levy interviews Chris Messina
   "I think the more that people recognize and realize their own potential and power in this equation the more impact it will have. The companies that really do good by their communities and go to bat for their communities and respect and become part of their communities will succeed."




5. Crowdsourcing Maps
   The Open Street Map, what's possible when geographic information is shared?
   Nate Olson interviews Steve Coast from Open Street Map
   "A free map of the world is going to be more shocking and important than almost any free dataset before it."




6. Your Online Identity Defines Your Role in the Crowd
   Identity Woman builds networks of trust, face-to-face and through Internet Identity
   Johannes Kuhn interviews Kaliya Hamlin, aka Identity Woman
   "If you use the wisdom of people that gather for certain intentions, and you make them participate with a conscious intent because you invited them, then you are really using their “wisdom.”




7. Mapping Communities of Interest
   Crowdsourcing information through collaborative maps
   John Eischeid interviews Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial
   "Base maps are not the main thing for us. The main thing is the information people are putting on top of it and how that facilitates community and discovery of the world. Communities of interest have formed around sailing, architecture, parenting and so much more."




8. The Birth of an Unconference
   Taking online communities and putting them in a physical space
   Johannes Kuhn interviews Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp
   "If something goes wrong or breaks, it is their thing to fix it. So if there are two people who want to take a session at the same time, they have to solve it; if somebody sees something on the floor, he or she has to pick it up."




9. Open Space Technologies
   Before Web 2.0, the Internet was always open
   Johannes Kuhn interviews Harrison Owen
   "Open Space Technology is always about solving something - for example a business issue or anything you care about. If you don’t care, nothing happens. The motivation behind doing an [Open Space Technology] can be just about anything that concerns people."




10. The Power Users Behind Wikipedia
    Making the Wiki Go Round
    Achilles Lake interviews Sydney Poore aka FloNight, a Wikipedia super-contributor
    "Making encyclopedic quality information freely available to the world. It is the basic idea that brings and keeps many editors." and "I've meet other users in real life. But most of the users I work with are from distant places and I have not met them in person."
11. A Band Happy to Sell Out: Take Two
    Ten questions with Nemesea, a SellaBand
    Jeffrey Sykes interviews Nemesea
    "Well, on Sellaband you get complete freedom. No one is telling you what to do or how to do it. If you created some weird sounding songs and you think that there are 5000 people out there that will dig it, well, go for it!"




12. A Band Happy to Sell Out
    Ten questions with CubWorld, a SellaBand
    Jeffrey Sykes interviews CubWorld
    "I have already earned my way to an album. The fans have spoken and it is being done. This is how music should be held. Some times it will fail and sometimes it will succeed but creating should never be discouraged and Sellaband allows this to be possible for ANYONE."

Art: Photography, Film, Visual Arts, Literature, Design

1. Deviant Artists Descend on the Art World
   An online community for artists by artists
   Malcolm Levy interviews Angelo Sotira, founder of Deviant Art
   "I think we're going to evolve to that world again in a different sort of way this time, I think it's going to be a matter of seeing the great minds moving to the top. Content will always be king, and it will be the creators of that content that get their due. So I think this is an important time for artists."




2. The Impact of Microstock Photography
   How a crowdsourced business changes the world of professional photographers and designers
   Daniella Zalcman interviews NYTimes.com Design Director Khoi Vinh
   "With microstock, it’s much more a conversation between the photographers and designers in the audience. In microstock it’s much easier to find out what images are really mapping to the needs of designers because the barrier to using those photographer’s images are much lower."




3. Wisdom of the Gaming Crowd
   Best Practices of a Crowdsourced Author
   Kristin Gorski interviews McKenzie Wark, author of a crowdsourced book
   "People have expectations from the first sentence what the second sentence is going to be like, from the first paragraph what the second paragraph is going to be like, and it helped to know what a little bit about that was to then reshape the beginning of the book so that you’re addressing where the readers are coming from. Not necessarily to give them what they want but to be able to sort of address their expectations in an effective way."




4. Making a Movie is Just Like Playing a Video Game
   MOD Films makes re-mixable films and tools for film re-use and they turn it into a game
   Morgwn Rimel interviews Michele Ledwidge
   "Crowdsourcing is essential to how we see our product developing but our key responsibility is in developing a story system that works for viewers and creators."




5. The Future of Cinema: A Swarm of Angels
   Two scripts under development in an open source film project
   Elina Shatkin interviews Matt Hanson director of A Swarm of Angels
   "One of the paradoxes of the model that's evolving with A Swarm of Angels is that by giving away a certain amount of your power as a filmmaker and opening up decisions to the community, your community becomes your touchstone, your focus group. And all you have to focus on is appealing to your community."




6. Taking Crowdsourcing to a Cultural Crossroad
   Writing a novel where everyone types
   Antonella Beccaria interviews members of the WuMing collective
   "There is nothing really new about crowdsourcing in and of itself. The technologies are new, not the attitude. Folk culture (legends, ballads, fairy tales) has always been "crowdsourced," since it was up to the crowd to create it. Today we are going towards a new, interesting mix of popular culture and folk culture."




7. Loving Miranda More
   Portrait of the Artist in the age of connectedness
   Leah DeVun interviews Miranda July
   "Ultimately our job is to make people feel free and to direct them back to themselves, and so it’s not really about crafting specific instructions. We don’t want to tell people how to assemble something that’s going to turn out exactly the same for everyone. It has to have enough holes in it so that it can be totally different each time."




8. Designing To Make A DIfference In The World
   Design Like You Give A Damn: Architects for Humanity
   Lisa Selin Davis and Jeff Muckensturm interview Cameron Sinclair from Architecture for Humanity
   "First you had 9/11 that effected a lot of people into thinking, “what on earth am I doing with my life? I’m sitting here designing hotel doorknobs when I could be doing something that actually made a difference in people’s lives.” Then just as people were recovering from the self-assessment post-9/11 world, then you had the tsunami, Katrina, Pakistan earthquake, it was just a litany of natural disasters. And the coupled with that you had the whole environmental movement maturing . . ."




9. Design Like You Give a Damn
   The future of design is in all our hands
   Suzanne Batchelor interviews Marlon Blackwell
   "[The first meeting with Biloxi residents] It was like a flea market, we had to sit in a disaster tent [with the design], people came in and asked us about it. The pre-qualified families were embedded in that group [architects didn't know who was pre-qualified and who wasn't, of those viewing the designs]. The next day they [residents] had breakfast and voted; they also had contacts with Architecture for Humanity, which felt we’d be a good fit with the family."




10. Design Like You Give a Damn
    From Kosovo to New Orleans: the Biloxi Model Home Project
    Alex Padalka interviews Kate Stohr, one of the co-founders of the Architecture for Humanity
    "Architects and designers actually really want to see their work built. Often designs go unrealized. For a typical firm something like eight or nine out of 10 projects never makes it to construcion. So, opportunities to share it and allow it to be built are exciting to them."




11. A Million Little Authors
    Piece by piece, a crowd writes a novel
    Kristin Gorski interviews Jeremy Ettinghausen from "A Million Penguins"
    "What I have learned is that it would be possible to crowdsource a novel, but I think it would have to be done in a more controlled way than we did....The point of “A Million Penguins” was to see whether it was possible. If I was going to do it again, I’d say the goal of it is to produce a novel, and that’s a very different goal, and I’ve got some ideas now about the way to go about doing that."




12. Crowd Captain: Curating the Art of Crowdsourcing
    Looking at how crowds produce and present art
    Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover
    "The idea was that we would invite artists from all over the world to submit to a photo-sharing site on a daily basis for the course of the exhibit. They were to take pictures within their own hometowns of what they thought Houston looked like based on Internet research, since none of them had ever been to Houston. We ended up with twenty international artists uploading a minimum of three photographs per week, and we ended up with an archive of about 500 photographs."




13. Dreaming of Elephants
    Talking to the director of an open source movie
    Ruslan Kulski interviews Bassam Kurdali, director of Elephants Dream
    "An interesting ongoing effect has been the degree of involvement many in the community have had with the movie- such as people who volunteered textures, help and code to the project, and the (still ongoing) stream of criticism and praise the movie gets- which I think is a healthy sign that people feel involved. . ."




14. "Smart Genes" A Failed Experiment in Crowd Novel Writing
    Writing a novel through the net
    Kristin Gorski interviews Rick Heller from "Smart Genes"
    "I did enjoy setting up the novel on a wiki. Sometimes it's fun to do something even if there is no explicit return on one's effort."




15. How the World of Cinema Strays
    Crowdsourcing moves into film -- can the crowd create a movie?
    Ruslan Kulski interviews Michelle Hughes from Stray Cinema
    "There is a political movement taking place on the Internet, which involves the democratisation of media. The idea of sharing film online derives from this movement. It allows an increasing number of people to communicate their ideals, beliefs and tell their stories to people all over the world using the all powerful medium of film."




16. Through the Pro's Viewfinder: Getty & Corbis Photographer Chase Jarvis
    Straight from the Pro: Getty and Corbis Photographer Chase Jarvis
    Daniella Zalcman interviews Chase Jarvis
    "Ultimately, I think competition is good. And if you’re a photographer and you can’t thrive in photography, you need to work smarter, not necessarily harder, and take better pictures."

Government, Legal Issues

1. Peer to Patent Project: Speeding Up the U.S. Patent Process
   Sidestepping bureaucracy through community review
   Stephen Walli interviews with Beth Noveck
   "We do not set criteria for participants to "qualify" to participate. We determined the steps that need to be taken to participate effectively and usefully for the USPTO."




2. The Creative Commons
   The great enabler of crowdsourcing
   Johannes Kuhn interviews Lawrence Lessig
   "The choice about intellectual property regimes is always a choice about content being concentrated or diffused. How we currently run it results in only one thing: Only the big players can use it because they have lawyers who figure out copyright themes. Copyright is to produce incentives to produce things – any other use to me is objected by the first amendment."




3. Crowdsourcing is Simply Good Politics
   State politicians are beginning to use the wisdom of the crowd to write legislation
   Sarah Cove interviews Utah State Rep. Steve Urquhart
   "Crowdsourcing is simply good politics. ... Crowdsourcing goes back centuries. Even before Web 2.0 came along, a good politician would involve the public and constituents in political activities, and I don't mean just campaign activities. . ."




4. The Legal Herdict: Verdicts from the Herd
   A digital rights guru joins the conversation on crowdsourcing
   Craig Walker interviews Jonathan Zittrain
   "Our challenge -- technical, ethical, political -- is how to assemble, manipulate, and disseminate that data in ways that respect the wishes of those contributing bits and the legitimate interests of those who end up exposed by the crowds' data and the algorithms that turn that data into judgments."




5. Crime Stoppers, Collectively Taking a Bite Out of Crime
   The Crowd Polices Itself
   Robert King interviews the coordinator of Crime Stoppers program in Fairfax County, Virginia
   "In some states, there are laws that are in place to protect tip line callers, but some states don't have these laws. Also, some states do not allow tip sheets, records, or conversations admissible as evidence into a court of law."




6. Project on Government Secrecy
   Open source intelligence, how the government can learn from the tools of 2.0
   Nancy Feraldi interviews Steven Aftergood

Journalism

1. Crowdsourcing in the Street, circa 1999
   How IndyMedia paved the way for the future of crowdsourced journalism
   Jay Rosen interviews Christopher Anderson of the New York City Indypendent
   "So, what the Indypendent wanted to do was to draw on the core Indymedia mission-- that ordinary folks can be journalists, especially if they learn how, and also simply raise the bar-- doing real reporting, communicating with the public, etc,"




2. We're 125,000 Strong
   Reflections from SusanG, a Daily Kos' editor and co-founder of ePluribus Media
   Anna Haynes interviews SusanG
   "There is something inherently ennobling about joining with others in a cause greater than just promoting the narrow interests of your life . . ."




3. The News is Now Public: How a Citizen Journalism Network Informs Us All
   When everyone is on the scene and reporting
   Maurice Cardinal interviews Michael Tippett, co-founder of NowPublic
   "We’re unpackaged. We’re direct. We’re to the source. We’re real."




4. Power Brokering A New Media Democracy
   Associated Content thinks the crowd should benefit, too
   Saba Kennedy Washington interviews Luke Beatty, founder of Associated Content
   "The whole premise behind AC [Associated Content] is that the public can provide information it needs. If we could make a dent in the content base, we could build one big library with everyone dumping into the bucket what they know."




5. People Power: 84 Volunteers Led To Improvements In Houston's Air Quality
   Crowdsourcing environmental coverage
   John Eischeid interviews Dina Cappiello from the Houston Chronicle
   "My aim was not to publish in a journal. It was to start discussion, and we did that. More than two years later, we're still seeing results."




6. NOLA.com gives home for grief and relief after Hurricane Katrina
   Jon Donley, editor of the New Orleans-based Web site, talks about community and online conversations
   Melissa Metzger interviews Jon Donley
   "The community wants to tell its own story. It’s an organic being. For centuries journalists have stood in the place of the people, they’ve represented the people. . .We were their representatives like elected representatives. But now it has been democratized to the point where the people have the capability. . . but there is an extra added motivation for people to have their views heard on their hometown newspaper or Web site."




7. Comments and Unruly Crowds
   When opening up too much leads to chaos
   Maurice Cardinal interviews Debbie Kornmiller from the Arizona Star
   "We tell readers that this is our house and when you come to someone’s house there are standards, whether being polite or kind. We set the standards because it is our house."




8. This Watchdog Bites
   A citizen journalist from TPMCafe stands up
   Anna Haynes interviews "Mrs. Panstreppon" of TPM Cafe
   "I'd like to see crowdsourcing become more organized and take advantage of on-the-spot reporting."




9. NewsTrust: Putting Quality News in the Hands of the People
   A new innovation in reporting just when the public needs it most
   Muhammad Saleem interviews Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust
   "The greatest potential for this new medium is likely to lie in the combination of both the "wisdom of editors" and "wisdom of the crowds." Good editors will always be needed to draw out the best information, but quality-based social news networks can be invaluable resources to extend and complement that editorial process. In an ideal scenario, established news publications and quality-based crowdsourcing / social news sites would partner closely with each other, and draw on each other's expertise to further the public interest."




10. Open Source Journalism: From Nupedia, to Wikipedia, to Citizendium
    The evolution of collaborative efforts
    Kevin Lim interviews Alex Halavais
    "The assumption...is that traditional kinds of things like academic degrees are a decent way of estimating expertise in an area. While it may exclude some ardent and informed high school students and young people, it is likely that fewer people get through who are not in tune with the state of the art.I worry about this approach for two reasons. First, a lot of people who look good on paper, and who hold positions at four-year universities, are not necessarily better encyclopedists than interested amateurs."




11. A Note on the Mass Media
    A distinguished citizen journalist shares her thoughts of media and crowdsourcing
    Jerry Firman interviews Mary Lou Fulton
    "So what can be done between now and the time that local small businesses are spending more money for online marketing? We have found that a complementary print publication can be a huge advantage both in terms of revenue and marketing and I would recommend that as a strategy, along with promotional partnerships with local organizations who can help with outreach."

Business Theory and Practice

1. Crowdsourcing to Innovate Investing
   Marketocracy: Cashing in on Collective Predictions
   Steve Petersen interviews Ken Kam, co-founder of Marketocracy
   "The other thing Marketocracy members have that Wall St. analysts, brokers, and mutual fund managers don’t is freedom - freedom to choose their best ideas from all stocks not just stocks from a restricted list given to them by the firm or defined by their prospectus."




2. Innocentive: Crowdsourcing Diversity
   What starts with the crowd ends in research and development
   Randy Burge interviews Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive
   "I can't say the company [Eli Lilly] just transformed overnight or anything. But, it took leadership commitment to recognize that there is a distinct possibility that just because we have done it this way for 120 years, doesn't mean that we continue to do it this way for the next 120 years. There may be some alternatives to the way innovation and invention occurs. Let's try it."




3. What Exists Beyond the Seen Crowd
   Taking note: the wisdom of invisible crowds
   Becky Carroll interviews Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote Inc.
   "The wisdom of invisible crowds speaks to the notion that there are people behind every website. You have already built this community; they are just invisible to each other. It doesn’t matter if your site has hundreds of people who come to read it every day or every month or if there are millions. That is a big, big group of people."




4. Helping The Crowd Put Their Money To Work
   The power of fundraising is in your hands
   Randy J. Hunt interviews John Pratt from Fundable
   "Some projects we've seen you wouldn't even try without our service. Isn't that what the Internet is intended for - to do things you couldn't otherwise do?. . . Fundable is about action."




5. Crowdfunding the Developing World
   Changing people's lives one loan at a time
   Clint Schaff interviews Matt Flannery, CEO of Kiva.org.
   "Our mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty -- the idea of connecting people, not simply to raise as much money as possible, but creating as many possibilities as possible to connect the developed and developing worlds."




6. Consumer Zeitgeist: CrowdSpirit as a Company and Community
   The sweet spot of community is production
   Andrea LaPorte interviews David Lionel, founder of Crowdspirit
   "In its beginning CrowdSpirit will be based on the same organizational structure as a classic company (R&D, marketing, manufacturing, quality, support, sales). The major difference is that the employees will also be community members."




7. A Wiki for Everyone
   Ease of use, free, what's to stop everyone from taking advantage of wikis?
   Inga Schrobsdorff interviews Ben Elowtiz, CEO of WetPaint
   ". . . The number one reason people create these sites isn’t to make money. It’s passion; they love it when their passion develops into something larger than they ever expected . . ."




8. When the Masses Collaborate…
   The company that crowdsources everything
   John W. Hicks interviews Michael Sikorsky, founder of Cambrian House
   "[One aspect] I think about when I think of crowdsourcing is the distinction between the wisdom of crowds and the participation of crowds. Not a lot of people separate these two but I try to separate them a lot. Sometimes you do not want both."




9. Crowdsourcing in Photography
   A camera in every hand - and an easy space to upload. The story of iStockPhoto
   Daniella Zalcman interviews Bruce Livingstone, iStockPhoto CEO and Founder
   "My intention was to get people to start using the site and to get used to the idea of sharing work and engaging in conversation with people all over the world."




10. A new Photo Business Rises from the Crowd
    Scoopt, stakes out a spot where the market and the masses meet
    Gregg Osofsky interviews Kyle MacRae, cofounder of Scoopt
    "It’s about the numbers, it’s about having as many people aware in the marketplace as possible. Because the potential, or the reality is, that the first person on the scene is going to be you or me or somebody like us. "




11. Tapping Citizen Photographers Around the World
    The inner workings of Shutterstock
    Nancy Feraldi interviews Jon Oringer, founder & president of Shutterstock
    "Well, it is a way to monetize their hobby. Members can finance equipment and expenses and make a little extra money on the side. Photography used to be for the wealthy; it was a luxury before the explosion of digital technology. Now, anyone, anywhere, can take photos and publish them."




12. Managing Crowdsourced Communities
    Crowdsourcing's future depends on change management
    David Butler interviews Frank Piller
    "Companies recognize that integrating customers into value creation is a new way to tap into external input. The result is not a one way street but a learning cycle."




13. Customer Relationship Management: Crowdsourcing at Work
    How a business can collaborate with customers
    Becky Carroll interviews Dr. Martha Rogers
    "Companies need to move into the area of not just “you tell me” collaboration, but into co-creation."




14. Pull This Thread As I Walk Away
    Threadless, the t-shirt company owned by nobody
    Edward Domain interviews Jeffrey Kalmikoff, CCO at the Threadless office
    "The key to maintaining a good community is honesty. Our community is like any community. We could even give away free money and someone would complain. We make changes to the site, and some people aren’t happy. The key is to stay transparent, and let the community know what’s going on. . ."




15. Crowdsourcing Your Life
    One man's chore is another man's pleasure, DoMyStuff lets you crowdsource them all
    Kathy Kattenburg interviews Darren Berkovitz, co-founder of DoMyStuff.com
    "For people that post tasks on DoMyStuff, I think it is a desire to free up time that motivates them to post. Think about it: You can clean your garage, or you can pay someone to do it and then go golfing. For the people who do the jobs, it allows them a way to make money with no time commitments. They can work and bid on as many tasks as they like."




16. Mechanical Turk: The Future of the Virtual Workplace?
    Any task, any time -- someone will do it
    Sean Richardson interviews Peter Cohen from Mechanical Turk
    "Some of the problems we generally believed computers would be able to solve turned out to be more complex than we originally thought. While computers are great at performing large numbers of complex computations and processing huge amounts of data, they still lack the cognitive and associative abilities that all human beings are born with. People can apply experience and judgment and reach conclusions that are far more accurate than computers can currently."




17. Second Life: Turning Over to the Crowd
    A virtual world created entirely by users
    Francine Hardaway interviews Robin Harper
    "One of the most successful users of Second Life is a woman in southern California who has been on since 2003, when she became housebound with a terminally ill husband for whom she was caring. In the community, she met a bunch of people who became her support network. Now she has remarried and she owns two islands and a business. She's 76."




18. Are We Ready to Trust Crowd Predictions
    A quick exchange with a predictive market guru
    Steve Petersen interviews Dr. Robin Hanson

Thinkers and Academics

1. How Broadly Can We Apply Crowdsourcing?
   A social networking theorist takes aim at crowdsourcing
   Manikant (Mani) Narayanan interviews Clay Shirky
   "The big question for crowdsourcing is whether this is a series of special cases or is this a general business infrastructure?"




2. The Wealth of Networks
   High production doesn't mean quality; distributed environments are the new quality assurance
   M. Six Silberman interviews Yochai Benkler
   "I think there's a lot of anxiety about where quality comes from in distributed environments. . . The question is: What is quality?"




3. Taking Open Source to Every Front
   From religion, novels and back again. The strength of community and the dangers of crowdsourcing
   Sarah Cove Interviews Douglas Rushkoff
   "Open source is a great model for understanding these other more participatory, collaborative, bottom-up ways of organizing our lives . . . These are all areas [government or urban planning or education or religion] that could greatly benefit from constituents realizing that there are ways for them to participate actively in the creation of the field, rather than by just passively accepting the field as it's been handed to them."




4. Innovation as Collaborative Activity
   Mass creativity when the crowd sources itself
   Lilly Evans interviews Charles Leadbeater
   "It [crowsourcing] rarely works as a free-for-all. It requires some core norms and rules of behavior, but not many. It does require leadership but of a particular, open, conversational kind. It thrives on decentralized cooperation and people taking responsibility for working together. So it needs a leadership that makes the conditions for that possible."




5. Collective Intelligence Online is Leading to a Global Brain
   Internet Collaborations Can Change How We Solve Problems
   Derek Poore interviews Thomas Malone
   "If you view all of humanity as part of a global brain, humanity has global attention. We have moods. We have states of mental health that vary over time. The more closely connected we become, the more useful it becomes to view society in that way. In the long run, the most important legacies of the Internet and collective intelligence may be the perspective of all humans as part of a single global mind."




6. Participatory Culture as a Commonplace Practice
   When the audience owns creative expression
   Bernardo Parrella interviews media scholar Henry Jenkins
   "All evidence suggests that collective intelligence is most effective when there are a diversity of inputs and where a broad array of different practices and expertise are taken seriously. This argues for the importance of inclusiveness — for bringing together people with different goals, values and knowledge and finding ways for them to collaborate together in the production of cultural value."




7. The "Arms Race" Between Participation and Control
   Early adopter says usefulness of crowdsourcing still unclear
   Scott Rosenberg inteviews Howard Rheingold
   "I think it's really not a matter of semantics or political correctness to use non-deterministic language when you're talking about technology. Technology doesn't "do" this or that, people using a tool do this or that. "




8. Visualizing Group Intelligence
   Creating a common mental model
   Steven Chien interviews Martin Wattenberg
   "There's always wisdom in crowds, just as there is always gold dissolved in seawater. The question is how to extract it!"




9. Business Expert Envisions Content Collaboration as Media Future
   The Wikinomics of media
   Charles Warner interviews Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics
   "Journalism is changing as it becomes democratized. This will change the business models of many publications and content companies. Content will not be king -- content collaboration will be."




10. The Academics of Crowdsourcing
    The "Expertise of the Periphery," a Harvard Business professor weighs in on the crowd
    J Jack Unrau interviews Karim Lakhani
    "Evidence is a major major currency in crowdsourcing where we don't pay for expectations as you might do in a traditional work setting, where I come in and say "I can do this for you" and then my employer pays me for my ability to do something in the future. What we can say in crowdsourcing, or in distributed innovation systems, is that you're getting paid for performance: Once you've shown us what you can do then we will reward you for it."




11. Open Source Journalism: From Nupedia, to Wikipedia, to Citizendium
    The evolution of collaborative efforts
    Kevin Lim interviews Alex Halavais
    "The assumption...is that traditional kinds of things like academic degrees are a decent way of estimating expertise in an area. While it may exclude some ardent and informed high school students and young people, it is likely that fewer people get through who are not in tune with the state of the art.I worry about this approach for two reasons. First, a lot of people who look good on paper, and who hold positions at four-year universities, are not necessarily better encyclopedists than interested amateurs."




12. The Prince of Wiki
    Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, offers lessons of collaboration
    Marla Crockett interviews Jimmy Wales
    "I’m here as a person who likes to mediate conflict, not to engage in conflict, and those personality types tend to be drawn into wiki more. So I think certainly within the wiki community, this idea of an increasingly friendly place — and also a place where the tools are given to the community to help deal with the bad characters — is very popular."




13. The Spread of Wikimedia Through Regional Control
    Talking to the head of WikiMedia in Italy
    Raul Larsen interviews Frieda Brioschi, head of WikiMedia Italia
    "Despite the usual criticism about its reliability and lack of an editorial board, here in Italy we have less skepticism and more vocal supporters. For example, Wikipedia has been officially included in the Education Department programs as one of the useful tools to be used at school. A university professor told us that "finally I gave up and now accept Wikipedia entries as footnotes and references in the graduation thesis." We are very happy about that. Italy's politicians pay close attention to Wikipedia."




14. Got a Great Idea? Maybe You Should Give It Away
    The business practices of doing everything out in the open
    Leonard Witt interviews Eric Von Hippel
    "Companies want well-established needs and biggish markets before they jump in. They WANT users to go first. Users also tend to form the first companies to exploit a new user innovation. For example, snowboards were developed by users -- and Burton Snowboards was a company founded by a lead user."




15. Evangelising Networked Journalism
    Jeff Jarvis on why news organizations need active readers
    Neal G Moore interviews Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine
    "The Internet is not a medium of content; it is a means of communication and making connections. And so it enables us to work together, cooperatively, pro-am—no longer serial but parallel, additively, without regard to medium, time, or location—in ways we never could before."




16. My Readers Know More Than I Do
    And How To Have The Time Of Your Life Knowing That Fact
    Francine Hardaway interviews Dan Gillmor
    "If newspapers die, and the best journalism that they do continues, then we won’t have lost anything, particularly if the journalistic ethos expands and becomes more vibrant. I care much more about journalism surviving than newspapers."




17. Just the Sum of Us: Surowiecki Explains
    The visionary debunker of lone visionaries thinks collective intelligence can take on global crises, but not Platonic truth
    Emily Gordon interviews The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"
    "I'm not sure we can expect the 'democracy' of the Net and of modern media to lead to an efflorescence of real-world activism. But that doesn't mean that participatory democracy in the wired world is unimportant. We just have to be realistic about what it can accomplish."