The Online News Association is pleased to announce it will be working with NewAssignment.net on its innovative crowdsourcing project, Assignment Zero, by serving as a professional resource and helping to develop useful take-aways of value to the professional and amateur journalism community.

As part of this effort, ONA is looking for volunteers who would be interesting in helping out with this project in the next few months.

FFor those not familiar with the project, the aim is to test out the concept of "pro-am journalism," by bringing professional journalists and citizen contributors together in an act of "open platform" reporting. In the case of Assignment Zero, the subject is the whole trend toward crowdsourcing and online collaboration in fields beyond journalism, with the end result to be published on Wired.com and at NewAssignment.Net. (More on this here:
http://zero.newassignment.net/ and here http://tinyurl.com/ytma4a)

Specifically, we are looking for volunteers to help out in several key areas of the project:

1) Volunteers to help serve as guides and a knowledge resource for the hundreds of citizens who have volunteered for Assignment Zero. In particular, we're looking for people to help out immediately with an intensive week of interviewing in May, by serving as a resource for amateur contributors and overseeing key pages where the work of synthesizing the interviews is done.

2) Volunteers to help steer a summer 2007 evaluation of the project, with the goal of producing a Lessons Learned report that we hope carries lessons for both amateur and professional journalists. This might involve ONA volunteers interviewing participants and writing up their findings, for example. We then hope to discuss these findings and the project as a whole at some sort of presentation/panel at the ONA conference.

If you might be interested in helping out, please e-mail ONA Executive Director Lori Schwab.