"Write now is good."

Design this book's cover: Crowdsourcing continues

Crowdsourcing happens when a task usually assigned to one is opened up for a large group to solve or complete. An example of this would be A Million Penguins, the first-ever novel written online by thousands of people worldwide.

Thanks to my work with Assignment Zero's innovative online journalism project last year, I will forever be fascinated by crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe, one of the WIRED editors I worked with, has wrapped up his book, Crowdsourcing; fittingly, his publishers are crowdsourcing the book's cover:

Random House and Creative Review invite designers, creatives, and doodlers alike to submit their own designs for the book jacket. You can vote on your favourites, and the winning design will be printed on the UK edition of Crowdsourcing and win £500.

Find out more, including how to enter.

The above image is one of the contest entries.

Feel free to pass this info along. If you decide to submit an entry, drop a comment here so we can check it out and vote for yours.

It's time to get on "Off The Bus"

 

Attention, writers interested in covering the U.S. presidential elections in 2008. Read on about an opportunity to be a vital part of Off The Bus—Campaign Coverage by People Who Aren't in the Club:

Do you obsess over politics? Are you tired of the same-old horse race coverage? Do you enjoy writing or making videos?

Then you might be exactly who we're looking for.

OffTheBus, a renegade citizen media effort co-sponsored by the Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net and a nationwide network of citizen journalists, is looking for campaign correspondents. Responsible for covering and examining presidential campaign and grassroots activity, especially in their own backyards, our correspondents will provide an alternative look at the upcoming election. Correspondents will also be featured prominently on OffTheBus, as well as on the Huffington Post.

A bit more about us. Our goal is to provide the most authentic account of the 2008 presidential election contests. Unlike traditional political reportage, we make no assumption that leader boards and point ticks in the poll tell anything of value about the real stories behind an election cycle. Instead, we think you—with the unique perspective you bring that is distinctly NOT part of the journalistic machine—can provide a much better account of what this election looks and feels like...

If you're interested in signing up or have any questions, go here.

I'll be writing for Off The Bus, and I'm so excited about being part of the media coverage for what will definitely be an intense, fascinating election. When I post there, I'll cross-post here.

"...an excellent example of learning from failure."

Learning from failure is underrated. Look at your life — haven't some of the biggest, most important lessons you've ever learned come out of something that didn't work out? That didn't go the way you planned it? That failed?

That's why this Honorable Mention for Assignment Zero (the pro-am crowdsourced journalism project where I learned much) is so remarkable. From the 2007 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism:

Honorable Mention: New Assignment.net/Assignment Zero
Wired News/New Assignment.net (San Francisco, Calf.)

"Crowdsourcing looking at crowdsourcing -- One of the Web's first large attempts at pro-am journalism collaborations and an excellent example of learning from failure." [my emphasis]
--2007 Knight-Batten Judges

An intriguing open-source experiment by NewAssignment.net and Wired News to harness the collective wisdom and expertise of members of the public under the guidance of professional journalists in reporting and writing stories.

To get a sense of how other wiki communities are reporting and making news, check out the Institute for Interactive Journalism's site. The abilities and contributions of wiki communities are becoming increasingly concrete and influential. Keep watching them.

And when you find yourself deep in failure, make sure the learning you get from it — and the momentum you generate to push yourself forward — are immense.

Thanks for the heads-up, Tish!

Crowdwriting will continue

Photo: "Crowd heads home" by logicalrealist

After my stint with Assignment Zero, I'm convinced that crowdsourced book writing will continue. It seems that others think so, too. Here's an interesting perspective from SMITH Magazine's "The Wisdom of Crowds and T-Shirt Slogans":

As resident book nerd, I’d especially like to direct you to this piece on crowdsourced creative writing. Novelist is one of the most solitary professions I can think of (exceptions notwithstanding) so it’s interesting to see what large groups of strangers come up with. From fantasy (I think?) to romance, it seems like results have been mixed but encouraging. I’m definitely going to keep my eyes open for books with hundreds of contributors.

I'd especially love to see crowdsourced humor novels. After reading many sections of the random tome that is "A Million Penguins," I have to say that it is some of the funniest writing I've read in a long time. If you're up for a good laugh, click here.

A few months ago, I had no idea that The Institute for the Future of the Book even existed. The organization describes itself as "a New York-based think tank dedicated to inventing new forms of discourse for the network age." Here's their response to AZ's crowdsourcing coverage — "Perspectives on Distributed Creativity":

There are many of the usual suspects like Benkler, Lessig, Jarvis, Shirky, Surowiecki, Wales etc., but as many or more of the pieces venture off the beaten track. There's a thought-provoking interview with Douglas Rushkoff on open source as a cultural paradigm, some stuff on the Wu Ming fiction collective (which is fascinating), a piece about Sydney Poore, a Wikipedia "super-contributor," and some coverage of our work, an interview with McKenzie Wark about Gamer Theory and collaborative writing. There's also an essay by one of the Assignment Zero contributors, Kristin Gorski, synthesizing some of the material gathered on the latter subject: "Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book."

The Institute will again be involved in supporting a collaborative book, as McKenzie Wark will launch a new project later this fall. I'll post here when I find out more about it. If you're interested in contributing to it, you'll have a chance to.

Have you ever participated in a crowd-written book? Have you worked on an online collaborative project? Would you like to?

Assignment Zero: 80 interviews strong

One of the most concrete and exciting results of Assignment Zero's crowdsourcing coverage is the Interview Directory. It features 80 interviews/Q&A's from the experts of crowdsourcing and Assignment Zero contributors.

Following are links to (and short excerpts from) a couple of interviews I conducted. Both provide acute insight into the social, creative and technical aspects of collaborative online book writing:

1. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher of the U.K.'s Penguin Books:
• "A Million Little Authors: Piece by piece, a crowd writes a novel"

It ["A Million Penguins" wikinovel experiment] was anonymous, and it was a collective effort and not attributable to any particular person...The whole purpose was that it was anonymous and crowd-led, rather than ego-led.

2. McKenzie Wark, Professor at the New School for Social Research and author of “A Hacker Manifesto” and “Gamer Theory 2.0”:
• “Wisdom of the Gaming Crowd: Best Practices of a Crowdsourced Author”

In the book I use the term “gamespace” for this sense that many people have that everyday life is becoming more and more gamelike. That your job is a rat race, your pension fund is in a casino, politics is a horse race, and so on. But these games never really seem to be fair, and they don’t have very explicit rules..

There is such a wealth of information. I provide below the subdirectory links to the entire Interview Directory. If you have a little free time this weekend, surf around. You'll definitely learn something new and interesting, directly from crowdsourcing experts' own words.

• Art: Photography, Film, Visual Arts, Literature, Design
• Government, Legal Issues
• Journalism
• Business Theory and Practice
• Thinkers and Academics

Assignment Zero: Pioneer journalism in the works

On March 14th, Wired News announced an experiment in journalism in association with NewAssignment.net: an online collaborative project where professionals and amateurs worked together. It's called Assignment Zero.

I joined immediately for many reasons. On my AZ user page, I summed them up:

I believe that blogging will get stories told that media outlets cannot and/or will not pay attention to. I want to be a part of this storytelling. The more stories that are told, the more accurate a view people have about their world; they can then make better choices — be it who they vote for, where they travel, what they buy — in all aspects of their lives. This (in theory and hopefully) creates a stronger, healthier democracy because more individuals have more power in their own lives.

Today, the first results of months of work by a large pro-am crowd were published on Wired. Here are the links:

1. Assignment Zero: Can Crowds Create Fiction, Architecture and Photography?
2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book (I worked on this illustrious team and wrote this article. Go, Crowdsourced Books!)
4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules

The AZ crowd has a lot to be proud of. Overall, hundreds of contributors reported, researched, interviewed and wrote, thoroughly looking at the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. I'm thrilled to have been a part of this pioneer experiment; I think its successes could have a positive impact on the media.

So, what exactly is crowdsourcing? How did the experiment go? What did I get out of this? I'll answer all these questions in follow-up posts over the coming week.

This I'm sure of: online collaborative work will continue to play a growing role in our worlds of both work and fun. Technology has made the world too small, and made connection between people too easy, to think otherwise. This will spur great creativity and innovation, as long as people continue to reach out to each other and work together.

The rules of human engagement haven't changed; people still need to communicate, be nice, and work hard to make real and lasting progress on any project. How we will use technology to do so is what will be so interesting.

Published on Wired.com!

With many more details to follow, here's the link to my article on Wired.com:

"Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book"

I wrote this as part of my work on the pioneering pro-am journalism project AssignmentZero. Hundreds of people from around the globe tackled the topic of crowdsourcing, and Wired has started publishing the results today.

More soon!