Citizens unite
Last July we opened up an on-line forum called ‘Open Rebrand’ where we encouraged Senokian clients to give their thoughts on the current Senokian and EGS brands and make suggestions for the new ones. Already understanding how difficult it is to build an on-line community, I was a little anxious that we would get no comments…But after sending out a mail shot and spreading the word we began to get a steady stream of well thought out comments - We had some really useful suggestions, particularly about the trademarking of EGS.
At the time I was referring to this as ‘Open Source Marketing’, the idea being that we and our clients co-create the new brands. Today the technology news site, Wired is doing something similar but on a much larger scale called, Assignment Zero where they are calling for journalists / marketers / designers / industry experts etc to pull their stories together and co-create a Citizenship Newspaper…
In their words the project is “Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate.”
I think this is a pretty cool way of experimenting with the philosophy of collaboration and many-to-many communication channels. A blog post I submitted back in July of last year explores this idea a little further.
tish grier said the following at April 17th, 2007 at 7:00 pm :
thanks for the mention of Assignment Zero! actually, though, we’re not looking to produce a citizen newspaper. Rather, Assignment Zero’s result should be an article for Wired magazing on the crowdsourcing phenomenon…
The idea behing NewAssignment.net and Assignment Zero is to see if there’s a place where citizens can help with large pieces of investigative journalism. Over the years, newspapers have cut back funding, and time, for investigative journalism. Some very influential folks, including Jeff Jarvis and Craig Newmark, feel this attitude could lead to the death of a necessary form of journalism. So, with Assignment Zero, we’re trying to guage what might happen if we the doors for citizens who would like to contribute their knowledge of various subjects to help journalists build a piece of investigative journalism. If we can get this to happen, then we’ve accomplished one of our goals.