Crowdsourcing

Meet David Cohn

I've just landed in the Catskills for a two-week vacation with Alysia and the tots. It's been nearly two years since we've had anything approaching a real vacation, and the first period of relaxation since the writing of the crowdsourcing book and the birth of our second child, so I hope you'll forgive me if I say it's well-deserved.

In the interim I've secured for your entertainment and edification the inimitable David Cohn. David and I first met through our work together on Assignment Zero, though David had actually interned for Wired in San Francisco a few years before that. David provided the grease that made Assignment Zero work, and I was so impressed with his smarts and diligence that I brought him on as my primary research assistant for the book. But David doesn't just write about crowdsourcing—he practices it too! A few months back David was awarded a prestigious Knight-Batten grant to form his own crowdfunding journalism project, Spot.us, a project I'm proud to day arose out of some of the research David did for my chapter on crowdfunding. I've asked him to devote a few blogs to Spot.us, but suffice to say I think it represents an exciting model for pursuing crowd-powered investigative projects.

If you need me over the next two weeks, check one of several small Catskill creeks. I'll be the guy trying to convince his not-quite-three-year old daughter that fish don't bite.

Updata

Despite the lack of activity on the crowdsourcing blog, there's much afoot in the crowdsourcing world. First off, the publication date of the Crowdsourcing Book is now August 26th. This is great and terrifying news. The fall is prime publishing season, the time when houses release all their biggest books. It's also smack dab between the Democratic and Republican conventions and the general election in November. Conventional wisdom holds that politics sucks all the air out of the room, so the fact Crown is confident enough to put my book up against the tide is an honor. I hope the book will perform well enough to meet their expectations.

I've spent much of the last month tying up final loose ends on the book and on the road doing more speaking engagements (Amsterdam—again—Austria and the Jersey Coast!). But at last the book is totally and completely done. I can't say I'm quite ready to write the sequel (or any other book), but it has been an immensely gratifying experience, both on personal and creative levels.

Finally, a bit of bad news. We've had to put the Crowdsourcing Appendix on hold for the time being. What this means is that we won't be running an appendix with reader comments in the first edition. We simply didn't have enough time to publish the rest of the excerpts and collect the comments into a publishable form. I'm to blame for this—I should have started the program a few months earlier. It's far from naught, however: The comments, and additional ones to be solicited following publication of the book, will be published in a subsequent edition of the crowdsourcing book, either in the form of an appendix or (as would be my druthers), in the marginalia, a la Clive Thompson's piece in Wired last March.

Assignment Zero and the New Crowdsourcing blog

For months I've been alluding to some big developments for both crowdsourcing the blog and crowdsourcing the model. Today all is revealed.

What's that on top of your blog? Crowdsourcing.com is now officially part of the Wired.com blog network. This won't obviously affect the reader experience (unless you're offended by the Wired house ad that's suddenly appeared above my banner), but it should make it more fun. For one, it will bring more readers to the blog and thus introduce more voices to our already lively comments section. Second, it should create some interesting cross-pollination with the other excellent Wired blogs in the network. From Bruce Sterling's inimitable commentary on Beyond the Beyond to our ever-whimsical, over-informed music blog, the Listening Post, Wired.com is now hosting some of the best blogs in the biz. I consider it high praise to be in their company.

What the Hell is Assignment Zero? Today Wired and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net launched an ambitious research project that will use crowdsourcing to research, report and write about, well, crowdsourcing, in all its manifestations. It's called Assignment Zero, so named because we consider it ground zero for a new, hyrbid model of open source-slash-citizen media that we're calling Pro-Am journalism. The idea is to hook a team of professional editors and writers up with what we hope will be a vast team of talented, enthusiastic amateurs. Our goal is to bring the best of both worlds—the professional standards and respect for factual accuracy of the MSM on one hand; the infinite reservoir of knowledge and reporting power of the crowd—to bear.

Obviously I'm very excited about this. It will naturally—full disclosure—inform the book I'm writing. More than that, I think it's going to reveal some important aspects of crowdsourcing, from its potential to liberate creative potential to its inherent danger to exploit the collective. But rather than explain every detail of what we're doing, let me point you to the explainer Wired.com editor Evan Hansen and I wrote for the launch, and Jay Rosen's excellent, informative essay on the project, which will tell you all you need to know.