Reportr.net

Wired has given its assessment of its Assignment Zero crowdsourcing project with NewAssignment.net.

The project, which launched in January, has been closely followed by many interested in developing new models of professional-amateur journalism.

The verdict by Wired contributing editor Jeff Howe is that Assignment Zero had proved more valuable as an experiment in discovering the pitfalls of crowdsourcing, rather than as an exercise in journalism.

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. Crucial staff members were either forced out or resigned in mid-stream, and its ambitious goal — to produce “the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing” — had to be dramatically curtailed in order to yield some tangible results when Assignment Zero ended on June 5.

So what went wrong? Partly it was due to the choice of topic for Assignment Zero. As Howe admits, “the topic of crowdsourcing was too nebulous”. It would have been better to have chosen a more inclusive topic, such as healthcare or schooling, which might have attracted a wider pool of contributors.

The other key lesson from Assignment Zero is that even a crowd needs some leadership to organise the masses. As Howe says:

Baffled by the overarching concept of crowdsourcing, confused by the design of the website and unable to connect directly to a manager or organizer, most of the initial volunteers simply drifted away.

Journalists may be relieved to here Wired say that as the project reached its conclusion, “Assignment Zero began to resemble a professional journalism outfit”. It seems clear that there is a still a need for news professionals to make sense of the wealth of information from the crowd.

Despite all these limitations, Wired described it as “a highly satisfying failure”. This is perhaps the greatest lesson from the project. Failure does not mean something was not worth doing. Quite the opposite, failure provides a invaluable learning process.

The lesson here for journalism is not so much whether crowdsourcing works, but that failure is not something to be scared of. For journalism to thrive in the future, there is a need for more experimentation, more failure, and ultimately, more successes.

As Howe concludes, “let the experiments continue.