- There are other groups of highly motivated (and wired) citizen reporters out there, certainly within the wide scope of politics and policy, but also within big cities - you could have gone local.

- And two, while I agree the mistakes would have been more spectacuar, perhaps that would have been for the best! (And have the added benefit of drawing more attention to the project).

Finally, you must have thought about the double-entendre of “crowdsourcing” in a journalistic context….some fascinating ways to read the term.

Still, I’ll be watching - I’ve been interested in community journalism since, well, I was one one.

Assignment Zero now is a beta site, and we’re learning how to use it, just as we are figuring our how to organize a big team of contributors. Starting from zero.

I made the decision that we should start with this “open source goes mainstream” story as a test of premises and platform. And I made it knowing that the choice would disappoint, frustrate, annoy some people, and would also be confusing to some. I even groaned a time or two myself: a crowdsourced article on crowdsourcing? I understand why people think that’s lame.

But. I had reasons. I don’t know if I made the right decision, but here’s my list:

* This is our first project. Maybe we will catch your interest on the next one.

* After this one our site will be a lot better, and we won’t be making dumb ass rookie mistakes.

* We are, no way around it, doing a crowd sourced story on crowd sourcing. But not to be cutesy and self-referential and “webbie.” That was not my aim. I think the rise of crowdsourcing and peer production as a social trend is a pretty good story. But also: The information we develop about the practice of collaborating online, about “good” practice, variations in it, problems with it–all the realism we can find–will be extremely valuable to future projects of NewAssignment.Net.

* Our site–an open newsroom with an assignment desk, reporter’s notebook, exchange, contributors columns–is new, rough, unfinished, in a sense just bones. Only people trying to use it can make it better. So which people do you want at that early stage, when it’s all potential but not fully “there”…? My decision was to go with people inclined to know a lot about the Web, who could see something under construction and realize what it was, people with some enthusiasm for the project of creating a way to do large, complex stories. Call them early adopters. The story we’re covering is likely to be of interest to them.

* The rise and spread (and limits) of crowdsourcing is of marginal interest to some, maybe most of NewAssignment.Net’s eventual participants. But the same subject is, without question, of journalistic importance to Wired and Wired.com– on their beat. Therefore they have an easy way to evaluate how useful our practices are. If they can effectively evaluate us, we can learn more. And that’s a win.

Where’s the news value? Where’s the impact on people’s daily lives? How does this fit into the current discussion of issues? Why so esoteric? Why a subject that will only attract cyber-geeks?

Man, you could have tackled health care, education, immigration, race relations, religion - or any number of real news topics.

And the thing is, even if this thing rocks, it will only prove the concept to a bunch on insider head-nodders anyway…Hate to say it, was excited when I first heard of the idea, but this is a big swing and a miss!

Sure there are always individuals in the know on any subject and could be this reporter, but those individuals are usually predisposed to another purpose in life and beyond that are not connected in mass to inform us on their subject.

Say the Borg control and freedom to “boldly go were no man has gone before”.