Assignment Zero

Client: Assignment Zero

Dates: May 2007 - July 2007

Scope: 45 developer days

Partners: Unified Field (design), Advomatic (clustered Drupal hosting)

Description: Assignment Zero was an experimental citizen journalism project involving New York University, Ruters, and Wired magazine. The objective was to build a platform allowing professional journalists and editors to carry out a ‘crowd-sourced’ research project: a website that could manage atomized journalism assignments and collect, vet, and verify reporting filed for those assignments by volunteers. The project culminated in a number of published articles on Wired.com.

The experimental nature of the project, coupled with intense public anticipation for results, required Chapter Three to execute on our rapid prototyping and iteration methodology as never before. We synthesized feedback from an array of partners in journalism, design, and publishing through three tight development sprints, producing a functional website in time for the project to meet its deadlines.

The site itself revolved around hundreds of self-contained research ‘assignments’ that volunteers could independently take on, such as interviewing a subject or conducting historical background research. The volunteer reporting was then posted through the website to be reviewed and edited by the professional staff for inclusion in the larger published writing pieces. The flexibility of Drupal was key in creating customized content input and aggregation pages to support volunteer groups which emerged organically through the research effort.

Features:

• Assignment Desk: The assignment desk provides an easy browsing interface for volunteers to find topics of reporting that interest them. Details of the topics, including specific assignments are loaded seamlessly inline through an AJAX interface.
• Topic Groups: Topic pages allow volunteers to sign up for research topics that interest them. All reporting filed for a topic appear on these pages and can be discussed with all members of the group.
• Assignments: Assignments are atomized pieces of research work that can be assigned to individuals or open for anyone to work on. After doing the work for an assignment volunteers file their reporting on the assignment pages.