A collaborative project between Wired News and NewAssignment.net, Assignment Zero hoped to create a comprehensive source of information using both professional journalists and a crowd of volunteers to cover the topics of crowdsourcing and citizen media. 

Howe concludes that the crowd was too large to manage and the initial organization of the project made it difficult to communicate effectively with the volunteers.  The  Drupal-based website through which users submitted their work turned away many initial volunteers who quickly became frustrated with the lack of communication between organizers and other contributors.  According to Rosen, “…you have to be waaaay clearer in what you ask contributors to do. Just because they show up once doesn’t mean they’ll show up over and over.  You have to engage them right away.”

About halfway through the project, having already suffered losses in the volunteer base, Assignment Zero organizers revamped the Web site to facilitate more communication between managers and users.  “In the final two weeks of the project, Assignment Zero began to resemble a professional journalism outfit,” writes Howe.

In the end, Howe both admits the failure of Assignment Zero to meet its ambitious initial goals.  Nevertheless, he advocates the continuation of such projects, which he sees as crucial for innovation and development in the field of journalism.  From this experiment, the organizers learned the importance of clear communication with the contributors and a well-managed site.  “(Crowdsourcing) thrives on decentralized cooperation and people taking responsibility for working together,” writes Charles Leadbeater, author of The Pro-Am Revolution, “So it needs leadership that makes the conditions for that possible.”

“If Assignment Zero failed to clear the especially high bar it set for itself, the fact it produced so large a body of work still speaks to the considerable potential of crowdsourced journalism,” Howe writes. Although Rosen concluded a dismal 28% success rate for the project, Howe insists on the necessity of experiments like Assignment Zero to harness the overwhelming potential of pro-am journalism.

Source: Wired