How to Get Great Results from Rosen’s Experiment
As I said yesterday, later this afternoon I will be doing an IM Interview with Eric von Hippel author of Democratizing Innovation for Jay Rosen’s Assignment Zero project on crowdsourcing. An editor there keeps wanting me to do more than I want to do. She wants more depth. That’s good, that’s what editors are for, but I alone am not going to provide it. Remember this is an open source community project. I am only going to do what I want to do.
So here is my advice as I spelled out in an email I just sent back to New Assignment.net. It’s all in the spirit of together we can make this experiment work. I wrote in the email:
You want more depth: So you have to stop thinking about this in traditional MSM terms. Here is the process as I see it:
Step 1: I do what I want to do…which is an IM Interview in Q&A format with Eric von Hippel. Nothing more. I treasure this comment by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: “…the secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do, rather than trying to get them to do what you want to do.”
Step 2: This step comes right out of Jay Rosen’s PressThink success. Your team or volunteers or whoever posts my final Q&A; they do so as a kernel of an idea. A beginning of a conversation. Then just as Jay did at PressThink you reach out and try to get smart people, who know something about von Hippel or democratizing innovation to react to it. You post their reactions. You also watch trackbacks and Technorati for the blogosphere comments. You bring them to the conversation. You take excerpts, make links, you push the conversation as far as you can.
Step 3: Then once you get that going, get back in touch with von Hippel and get him to comment more. Then after all that plays itself out, you as the editor or the professional part of this project incorporate my Q&A and all the outside contributions into a more traditional story or into a well designed package.
I’m happy, you are happy and most of all the audience, who really could join the conversation and mold the final product is happy.
The result and I am using a von Hippel concept: We have a group of people freely revealing new or not well known insights that can then be used by a wider audience. That’s the secret of success.
By the way this plays off a post and a letter I wrote to Romenesko in November, 2005.
We can, together, make this experiment successful. Thanks to the folks at Assignment Zero for all the hard work they are doing.
