Live blogging Jay Rosen at CitMedia Session at ONA

Sharing information might transform journalism, and his AssignmentZero worked as a proof of concept (done with Wired) and he is now going over what worked and what didn't work.

DIY knitting put patterns on the web that were formerly accessible to lots of people. Studying the DIY trend was the aim of the project with funding from Wired.

The info about this project is at pressthink.org

Distributed journalism's first problem is how to get the division of labor part right, so if I have an hour or ten hours, I can contribute. I am thinking the item I posted recently about Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" has some of the keys to distributing the work, at least in terms of possible mechanisms to parse out the tasks.

Figure out why the participants want to do the work.

"Coordination costs" arise when everyone starts getting on board. Flickr is an example of a program with and interface that eliminates the coordination costs. This problem stymied them at AssignmentZero.

When the contributor makes the contrib, it must be clear how it fits, where it fits -- solo pieces fitting into the whole project is an important design question.

Josh Marshall's TPM story about the Atty Gen e-mails was his example. It worked for them, because the community was familiar enough with the data to be able to work right on the problem.

Communities that already exist have internal organization and ability to coordinate costs and if you can work with these existing ones, you will get an advantage.

Jay talks about the interview part where vols did an interview, self-editied, and sent it in. The assignment was interesting to "reporter/contributors" and it was manageble and they could see how it fit. Their story was one of many and the "many" would be more interesting together than any of the single interviews alone. Also, the coordination costs were low.

The one percent rule: 10% of people will be involved, and one percent wlll actually produce content. That is where we will draw our "portfolio" from.