NowPublic - crowd powered media

I discovered Now Public - this crowdsourcing site - when Ryan Nadel sent me a request to use some of my photos from the Acropolis in Greece for a story he had posted about the work on the Acropolis.

What caught my attention about Now Public were the different perspectives about the same topic captured by each contributor. Without the journalistic training and filters, these contributos add their view through their own personal lens. This gives us not only insight into the topic, but insight into the mindset of the international public's engagement with the topic.

Now Public is easy to navigate and offers a tabbed menu with drop-down menus for choices like "popular good stuff".

If you run across any other crowdsourcing sites, please share them here so we can build a resource list.

“We are Smarter than Me” Book Project

The “We are Smarter than Me” project is another form of crowdsourcing.

” Students, faculty and alumni of two illustrious institutions, as well as leaders, authors, and experts from the fields of management and technology are invited to harness the power of community.”

I’ve received an invitation from Wharton Business School to participate in writing a book in collaboration with others from MIT Sloan School of Management, Pearson Publishing and Shared Insights - with a commitment from Pearson to publish it. They are ”an ambitious community addressing a crucial shift in how businesses operate as they learn to leverage the power of "community." This American academic community and their worldwide network are uniting with publishing and IT services to create an environment where they can explore how to write a book in collaboration online. This book will document the evidence of that process.

Just check out the “We Team” to see the strength of leadership for the project.

Read the Community Proposal to understand the rationale behind this.

Crowdsourcing in Journalism

Journalism is known for its networks of sources in tracking down their stories with due diligence. That has been the point of differentiation between journalists and citizen journalists until now. Now - journalists and readers and all of their related sources and experts can contribute to stories and articles.

Assignment Zero is a collaboration between Wired and NewAssignment.net.


Assignment Zero is an experimental website set up by Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at New York University. Using the "wisdom of the crowd" and good reporting skills, this new method creates opportunities and evidence of "crowdsourcing". They are using software to build newsroom scenarios where people collaborate on specific topics. They develop them through discussions where citizens with expertise in these topics will contribute and the sourcing will be aggregated into a story by the reporter.


Though I love the open-source reporting idea, I am very curious how these contributions will be rewarded. If anyone participates, please let me know how you experience this. I've signed up to give it a try.