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Aggregating Jay Rosen Open-Source Videos

In July Jay Rosen’s pro-am project Assignment Zero will be turned into a news package by Wired.com. At the same time he is joining forces with the Huffington Post to create a pro-am presidential election coverage via the Off the Bus project.

Late last year he released an 80-minute video produced by Colin Rhinesmith.at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School, explaining the logical behind and hopes for his NewAssignment.net experiment in pro-am journalism. The object was to learn as much as possible about crowdsourcing.

I edited that 80-minute video down into seven short videos, which I am aggregating here today. If you did not get a chance to view them in the past, I recommend that you find time now. There’s lots of interesting material. The production value of my edit is not stellar, but the content is.

Part I:

In this video Jay Rosen tells us the purpose, mission and goal of Newassignment.net, his experiment in Open Source journalism.

Part II:

Jay Rosen speaks of the connection between the World Wide Web, collaboration, open source and how they all relate to journalism. The talk refers to the first use of the phrase "open-source journalism" and why the Trent Lott story illustrates the wisdom of the crowd.

Part III:

Rosen explains why having the capacity to enable people to participate is no guarantee that they will. But low costs make it possible. He also talks about two lessons learned from Dan Gillmor, one positive and one not so positive.

Part IV:

Rosen is annoyed, in fact, very annoyed by the mainstream journalists who think that blogging is only good for opinion writing. He hopes that newsassignment.net will remedy that kind of thinking.

Part V:

Rosen says that prior to starting Newassignment.net's first project, it is imperative to learn all there is about open source projects. So project 0.0 will be to report on previous open source projects and what can be learned from them. As an outgrowth of my First Monday paper on Reinventing Journalism, I volunteered to do an IM Interviews on open source for Newassignment.net.

Why volunteer? Because I am interested in open source, it will increase my depth of knowledge, build my intellectual capital, build my reputation and finally help Rosen's Newassignment.net, which in turn is all about improving journalism. Everyone wins.

Part VI:

Rosen explains how an open source news story for Newassignment.net might be reported and written. The key is having a variety of contributors, while testing for veracity. Using a specific case, he explains how a possible Newassignment.net and BBC collaborative project on the integrity of elections worldwide might be assembled. As it turns out that collaboration will be with the Huffington Post in Off the Bus.

Part VII:
Rosen tells us, in the video below, who is most apt to keep their ideas secret and who is most likely to reveal them to everyone.

See Eric von Hippel’s, freely available book, Democratizing Innovation for more on what he calls "free revealing." Here is a tiny excerpt that certainly holds true for Rosen's Newassignment.net project:

"Freely revealing users also may benefit from enhancement of reputation, from positive network effects due to increased diffusion of their innovation, and from other factors. Being the first to freely reveal a particular innovation can also enhance the benefits received, and so there can actually be a rush to reveal, much as scientists rush to publish in order to gain the benefits associated with being the first to have made a particular advancement."

I also did an IM
Interview
with von Hippel for Assignment Zero.

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