Jay Rosen: You talked about the emerging array of technologies and the people able to use them because we have the Web. Which of those technologies and which of those people seem most promising to you as writer and journalist looking for a new assignment, if I may put it that way? Which ones are you most excited about?

John McQuaid: Ten years ago, when I began researching our series on fishing, I signed onto a listserv called Fishfolk, for people involved in the study, management and practice of fishing. This was a great introduction to journalism via the digital community. I would post messages asking for advice on issues, seeking sources of data, offering up ideas for discussion. I’d get rapid, smart feedback. That sparked threads that led to other questions. (I also met my wife, who was one of the founders of the list.) By today’s standards, it was a very simple tool, but it was very powerful one – a community with both book knowledge and practical knowledge, at my fingertips. So the ability to access and mobilize communities and social networks — whatever the technology —is obviously the most important. Journalists are in the business of assembling and refining knowledge — not just facts, but ideas — and we need allies of all stripes.

Jay Rosen: Fishfolk is a good example of a smart mob. Clearly, it worked for you as a reporter. They’re not “new” but now we have much greater means for putting such a network to work.

John McQuaid. With connectivity anywhere and everywhere, journalists tapping into networks can have eyes on the ground in a lot of places simultaneously. That has all kinds of potential — for assembling a broad picture of what’s going on nationally, for individual tips and stories. During election season, for example, we theoretically could find out what’s happening today, in every congressional district, on some issue. We can have photo or video (remember “macaca”?) of campaign events. We can track political ads and the reaction to them. Political blogs, like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, are doing some of this already.

Jay Rosen: You said too many projects stop at “something about the FDA.” They don’t go on and try to say something no one has ever said before. What I meant by innovation is that without intending to do this, perhaps, enterprise journalism in the metropolitian press stopped at a certain point in what it could tell us about the world. It exited the explanatory game, letting readers fend for themselves. When we complain about he said, she said journalism we’re complaining about a tired and formulaic version of this exit strategy.

Most likely, they will valorize the missing answers as an act of principled restraint. “We let the readers decide.” “Hey, this is news, not opinion.” “You’re asking us to come to a judgment, and we don’t do that.” And yet they won’t ask whether their authority is diminished by going a certain distance and stopping, whether greater innovations are necessary to maintain public confidence, and a given level of truthtelling. There is nothing newspapers are more proud of than their investigative reporting. But wouldn’t real pride have brought more advances in this art?

John McQuaid: Correct me if I’ve got you wrong, but one good example of the kind of reporting you’re talking about is the team of Donald Bartlett and James Steele. They worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, then Time (where they were forced out due to budget cuts), and recently moved to Vanity Fair. They dig, dig, dig, assembling vast amounts of statistical data, documents, on-the-ground reporting, etc. and it leads them to expose patterns and take a position — typically, a broadly populist one. You don’t get a lot of newspaper series posing, then answering the question, “America: What Went Wrong?” I liked that, even if I didn’t always agree with what they were saying. But as we’ve been discussing, their technique brings research to bear on national issues and makes an argument. And look at their career path — it’s taken them away from newspapers, where it’s impossible to imagine them working now, to newsweekly, to glossy monthly. VF is a great platform, but it’s a shame to think that a handful of high-end magazines – and, of course, books – may be the last refuge for this kind of journalism..

To return to your point, I agree that investigations should be bold, draw conclusions, make judgments. What’s the use of digging otherwise? It can be clarifying, say something new, and it makes interesting reading. That’s what journalism is all about.

But there’s a lot of skittishness in the newspaper industry now because the old “objectivity” model is under assault. There are legions ideologically committed bloggers and commenters ready to slice and dice anything you put out there, especially stuff that has an edge. But there are also individuals and online communities that will take a more considered approach, take your findings and expand upon them, offer feedback. Maybe I’m being naive, but I think it’s all good — if the work is sound and you’re ready and able to defend it.

We could go off on a tangent about whether newspapers and newsmagazines should cast off the objectivity cloak altogether and wear their politics on their sleeves, like the British press – or political bloggers. I’m open to the idea, but still like the American model. Reality is always more complex and surprising than the crimped ideological formulas that define our political debates.

Jay Rosen: Bartlett and Steele are an excellent example, yes. I take it you don’t like my suggestions for Answer Journalism all that much?

John McQuaid: Divvying up the blame up for Katrina is interesting. I like it: Let’s go ahead and play the blame game! I’d say it sounds more like a starting point for the inquiry than the conclusion, though. What if the feds take 45 percent of the blame – or 10, or 80? What does that say, beyond finger-pointing? If it’s 80, why, and what does that mean for the next time something breaks, blows up?

John McQuaid”Did the President Mislead Us Into War?” is on some level too facile, maybe unanswerable (never mind that at this point, it’s also nearly beside the point — whether we were misled or not, we’re now stuck there and have to figure out what to do). It depends on what was going on in the president’s mind, which we’ll never find out. Even if we could, what if the president was sincere, but exaggerated his case? Is that misleading us, or is it just what politicians do all the time — albeit in a far grander scale than we’re used to?

To return to the main idea: If you make a provocative idea your assignment, you’ll be led down an interesting path. Maybe the research leads in a completely different direction than what you thought. But the idea should be to challenge people. In a society where people are raising walls to argument, tuning into media sources they agree with, tuning out those they don’t want to hear, journalism needs to cut across the barriers, not hide.

Jay Rosen: When I say, organs of the press could have tried to answer the question: did the president mislead us into war? what I mean is treat it as an urgent but also an open question, a matter unsettled and in need of calm, clear-headed investigation. Then investigate. Answer the question. Then defend the answer. True, you might discover something else is “the story,” leading in a different direction. I’d argue the nation still deserves an answer to the question.

John McQuaid: I agree. There’s no weightier decision than going to war, and the public traditionally places a lot of trust in the president – and the presidency itself – to make those choices wisely. Now Iraq is a giant mess. It would be great to unravel what went wrong back at the beginning, arrive at some kind of bottom line as to whether that trust was abused. What you describe is more like interpretive history than journalism – though that’s in some ways an arbitrary distinction, another barrier we might want to blow up.

What I worry about is: the issue is still very divisive, so that even a cool, probing account would get chewed up in the public square by those with strong feelings and lots of bandwidth. It may take more time/distance to be able to spark a more serious debate, history rendering a verdict, etc. (Though everything moves so much faster these days, it may be that historical verdicts are now reached in months, not decades.)

Jay Rosen: Your principle of follow the story where it leads is basic. I think you’re right about that. As a reporter, what kind of “distributed social network” or “smart crowd” would be most valuable to you, given the kind of stories you want to tell?

John McQuaid: Depends on the story, right? As I mentioned above, communities of experts are especially valuable. The world is complex, and increasingly run by subcultures of people with very specialized knowledge. In most cases, they’re already wired together – fisheries specialists, scientists and engineers, federal regulators, political operatives. If you make an entree into these groups via listserv, blogging, website, and they’ll work with you in either an organized or ad hoc way, you’re halfway there.

The other half of the equation is volunteers — interested people who are drawn into your work somehow. In the course of their day, maybe have some time to do some digging on their own, providing data, tips, photos, video, ideas, feedback.

How do you put all this stuff together? That’s what we’re trying to find out now. I imagine you post your intentions, the questions you’re trying to answer. You persuade affected and interested communities to contribute. You pursue their leads and your own, post on your progress. At some point you put it all together and unveil the “findings.” Then the discussion takes off, maybe users drive it somewhere else.

But there are a lot of unknowns. Like other open-source projects, the ever-evolving organism of the story may grow in unpredictable ways. How does the transparency issue affect that trajectory? There’s a value in assembling information privately, then unveiling the findings. It’s straightforward. It can pack a big wallop, make news. If you’re doing everything out in the open, that may draw sources to you but scare others away, maybe those you really need. And what if you reach a conclusion that some community you’re working with collectively disagrees with?

Jay Rosen: I addressed some of those items here, but I don’t mean to say that fully answers the questions. Can you recall any stories you have worked, or let’s say run across, where an army of volunteers would have made a big difference?

John McQuaid: Environmental stories are ideal for this type of pursuit. Over the past generation, the desktop computer revolutionized local environmental activism, and Bush administration policies have stimulated it further. There are hundreds, thousands of local environmental organizations routinely accessing state and national databases on pollution, regulations, companies, lawsuits, etc., and many are starved for media attention. (I recently spoke at the meeting of one of them, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.) Debates about growth, sprawl and gridlock have produced a similar explosion of activism — on all sides.

Jay Rosen: I have been telling people that NewAssignment.Net is not trying to equal or duplicate what the established I-teams in professional newsrooms have done, but to report stories that the news media would find impossible or impractical to do. Do you think this is plausible, or should I stop saying it?

John McQuaid: It’s plausible, but I don’t think we know the answer to this yet. Certainly on the kind of short-term story mentioned above, the windows-on-the-world, real-time pulse of the Internet cannot be matched. On something more long-term, the form will be different from what you get in a newspaper, the experiences of reporting and reading or viewing will be different. But will the basic subject matter be different? Sometimes, yes. If your information sources are numerous and widely dispersed, you’ll get a bigger, brighter pallete of raw material to work with. In theory, you’ll be able to more easily identify below-radar trends or connections between things that don’t appear to be connected.

On the other hand, you’ve still got to shine the light in that same cobwebbed closet.

John McQuaidMcQuaid is a proven craftsman in a demanding form: explaining a big, complicated story that is hidden from normal view. In this two-part Q & A, (the rest is tomorrow) he explains how it became impossible for him to remain at the Times-Picayune and continue to practice his craft. “My investigative job was eliminated, and I was told that the focus was on everybody pulling his or her weight to put out the daily paper.”

But he left the newspaper world with a new ambition: “Find a way to do investigative and explanatory journalism via the web.” This in turn led him to NewAssignment.Net. It’s part of his determination to re-invent himself, after newspapers. Our interview is about this series of events.

As a contributing editor, McQuaid will be writing for the New Assignment site and researching possible pro-am projects as he takes his own crash course in networked journalism on the open Web.

Jay Rosen: When you contacted me about contributing to NewAssignment.Net you mentioned that you were “looking at the ways that the kind of in-depth journalism I have specialized in can migrate to the web.” Tell me what brought you to that point. And why, as a reporter, have you recently grown so interested in the Web?

John McQuaid: I was with The Times-Picayune for 20-plus years— my entire career. I’d moved to New Orleans after college and loved it: both the town and writing about it. I was later the paper’s single foreign correspondent (covering Latin America) and worked in the Washington bureau. Over the last 10 years, I worked on a bunch of big investigative and explanatory projects for the paper. This was a tremendously rewarding and successful collaboration. Working with highly talented reporters, photographers and editors, I was able to probe deeply into topics of great concern to people in Louisiana and elsewhere—declining fishing communities, environmental racism, even—it sounds like a joke, but in New Orleans it’s not—voracious termites. We got recognition: The fishing series won a Pulitzer in 1997, and others won a bunch of national awards. A series that I wrote in 2002 with Mark Schleifstein, Washing Away, analyzed the growing danger to New Orleans to hurricanes and anticipated much of what happened when Katrina struck.

Before Katrina, The Times-Picayune was doing some serious cost-cutting. In the spring of 2005 I was ordered back to New Orleans. My investigative job was eliminated, and I was told that the focus was on everybody pulling his or her weight to put out the daily paper. I was given a choice of daily beats or an assistant city editor’s job. Given the overall shape of the newspaper business, this was certainly not a bad offer, and I gave it some serious thought. But it wasn’t really the direction I wanted to go in, personally or professionally. Ultimately, though, the bottom line was … the bottom line. My wife has a federal civil service job in Washington that she would have been forced to give up had we moved to New Orleans; the choice between that and a newspaper job was no contest.

I was still on the staff when Katrina hit, at which point I made use of my previously useless knowledge of the levee system from the “Washing” series and pursued the “why did the levees fail?” story. It was a great privilege to work with the TP’s heroic staff on one last, important story. Then I took my leave, and Schleifstein and I wrote a book about Katrina.

At some point before the storm, I had begun searching for another newspaper job. But this quickly proved absurd. Several of the openings I applied for vanished before they were filled. Reluctantly, I gave up on the newspaper industry as a possible employer. There’s no clear endpoint to the restructuring now underway, nobody knows what newspapers are going to look like when it’s done, and in-depth journalism is in particular peril.

I arrived at the same pass that many have: You can keep plugging away, trying to do the same damn thing; or you can reinvent yourself. I’m flexible; a journalist and writer, not a newspaper person through and through. And there were a lot more opportunities in reinvention.

One ambition was to find a way to do investigative and explanatory journalism via the web and digital media.

Jay Rosen: But if you’ve given up on the newspaper industry as a possible employer, what is the future of your craft, and of explanatory journalism that reveals what the news cycles miss?

John McQuaid: This is one of the burning media questions of the moment. Newspapers remain key venues for probing, public service-oriented journalism. While the format has its problems—too many dull, interminable series see print mainly as Pulitzer bait—at their best, newspaper series can not only reveal terrible problems and injustices, but also be lively and engaging reading.

Big papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post retain the staff and resources to do these kinds of things. But no matter how important or interesting they are, investigations don’t pay the bills, and in a lot of other places there’s neither the capacity nor the will to delve deeply into both local and national issues. That’s a serious problem, in keeping politicians and other officials honest and in the functioning of democracy itself. So I’d like to help new, Internet-based forums, emerge locally and nationally to do investigative or explanatory journalism. And of course we need readers, advertisers and financial backers to go with them.

This is a great era for news— government accountability has all but disappeared. Doubtless, there are dozens of government meltdowns — on top of the ones that we already know about — already underway or about to happen.

That said, I’m not sure what this new form will look like. The newspaper investigation is basically a static form: journalists work for weeks or months on a story. For the most part, nobody in the wider world even knows what they’re doing. Then they publish it. It makes a splash (or not). Maybe it has a broad impact. After the publication date, on some basic level, it’s over.

But the web is so dynamic — an ever-unfolding conversation. So I was intrigued by NewAssignment.Net, which offers an opportunity to figure out how to harness that dynamism in the service of journalism.

Jay Rosen: That’s the idea, yes. We’re still trying to bring it into vivid practice. I think you are on the money when you said that in its classic, paper-bound form the investigative work is “over” after publication. The story has repercussions or doesn’t. This may be a major difference for investigative journalism on the Web. Maybe in the newer styles, the work starts with publication, and builds from there.

Traveling back a bit to 1996-2004, can you recall what you initially thought about the Web, what you knew of it, and what you thought it would mean for your newspaper, for journalists like yourself? What was the state of mind back then?

John McQuaid: Newspaper journalists watched the revolution unfold on their desktops along with everyone else, and rejoiced. But, of course, without knowing it, we were also watching our own relevancy decline.

When I started out, we got “the wires” on our office computers, and I thought that was pretty amazing back then — AP dispatches and updates in real time! When news broke, you could watch the coverage unfold, see depth and context added into stories. You could compare the dispatches from rival publications. Later, my office got modems, then broadband. The web was a great reporting tool — you could connect with infinite ease to sources and colleagues, get documents, read websites, find important details posted publicly.

But of course, a great tool for us was equally great for everybody else. Readers now have access to almost all the information that journalists do, and they began sharing it, commenting on it and picking apart the stories. Hence many problems bloomed for the mainstream press, which declined in relevance and lost some credibility.

But a lot of that loss was refreshing. I never much liked the “Voice of God” emanating from the NYT and other influential institutions. It was entertaining — and often useful — to see platoons of bloggers pick it apart and puree the pronouncements (sometimes fairly, sometimes not). Reading some of those critiques made me increasingly dissatisfied with newspaper conventions. In a highly partisan landscape, straight newspaper accounts of political fights that dutifully parroted “both sides” or interviewed a bunch of talking heads offering differing perspectives often did a bad job of capturing what was really happening. But a single blogger could often get to the nub of an issue in a single paragraph (usually, of course, by analyzing the journalism).

My most immediate concern with Internet journalism was how to make the Times-Picayune’s website better and more easily navigable, so as to better present our work, which was suddenly being read not just in New Orleans but in Washington and around the country. The idea was pretty simple. It was basically just getting newspaper stuff up on the web in a presentable, findable form — not changing the form itself to fit the medium, or making use of the emerging array of technologies and people able to use them. I didn’t appreciate how profound the Internet-driven changes were until they reared up and bit me in the you-know-what.

Jay Rosen: If you don’t mind I want to press on that last statement: what you didn’t realize about the Net, first time ’ round. Why did you initially miss how deep the changes were to your craft? (You were not alone!) What were the concealing facts?

John McQuaid: Part of it was, I worked for a slow-moving institution that covered other, even slower-moving institutions — school boards, federal agencies. And such institutions, by their nature, aren’t good at detecting revolutionary changes bubbling up from below.

It also took a while for various changes to percolate and reach critical mass — and when they did, they all did at once. One was the rapid decline in the traditional newspaper (or, more generally, dead-tree) business model. In the 1990s, we heard the Internet would change everything, telecommunications companies sank billions into broadband networks of various kinds, and web businesses bloomed all over the place. Then the dotcom bubble burst. Everybody biting their nails about the looming end of paper publications breathed a sigh of relief. We were still there — there was life in the dead tree biz yet! That’s what we thought the Internet bust meant.

But of course, the technological and social transformations proceeded apace, and kaboom! The model began to collapse. Second, those transformations didn’t always appear to be a single phenomenon. They were happening everywhere — politics, blogging, music and video sharing, Google, eBay, global supply chains, to name a tiny fraction — but to most people, journalists included, they appeared to be a bunch of different things, tangentially related by their reliance on digital technologies and the web. In other words, many of us were aware of a whole world unfolding online — and participated in it in our off-hours in various ways — but didn’t put it together with what we did at the office.

Jay Rosen: The missing dots are interesting.

“I’m flexible,” you said earlier, “a journalist and writer, not a newspaper person through and through.” I think that’s a wise attitude. As a journalist and writer, a public explainer, what does the Web offer you that’s genuinely new in your professional experience? That will force you to stretch?

John McQuaid: The main thing, I think, is to wade into the conversation. Like many journalists and writers, I relish mixing it up, debating. The web means flexible, open-ended exchanges, instant critiques and feedback, more transparency, a more informal, conversational style of writing. But newspaper reporters are encouraged to remain in the background, let their stories speak for themselves. I understand the reason for that — after all, you don’t want to step on your own message — and at times I found it useful. But it was also frustrating.

Jay Rosen. Meaning, I think, that you welcome the chance to open it up, mix it up, drop the lecture, be part of the conversation. I think your opinion is becoming the majority, John. The voice needs to be renovated.

Investigative journalism in the Pulitzer tradition has a distinct voice. How would you characterize its record on introducing innovation in the craft? And having stepped away, how would you evaluate the native strengths and weaknesses of the genre— enterprise reporting at the American newspaper?

John McQuaid: If you go and read the Pulitzer site, which is naturally very text-centric, you’ll probably miss one of the biggest changes: the growth of storytelling through photos and graphics, something which is a natural to migrate to the web. It started in the 1980s with the advent of color printing, USA Today, flashy redesigns etc. — events most tie to the dumbing—down of newspapers. They weren’t. At the Times-Picayune, to use the example I know best, photos and graphics became powerful tools for investigative projects. Photographers were assigned early in the project lifecycle in order to explore the issues and get to know the principal sources and subjects. Graphic artists would come in early on as well (sometimes not as early as we wanted) and develop their own take on the story too, creating illustrations that integrated data, maps, and photos. Ever-more-powerful mapping and database programs were great for both reporting and for presentation. (For me, working with people coming at a story from these different angles was tremendously helpful in figuring out how to organize ideas and reach an audience.)

But the digital element has evolved slowly. Maps and graphics are migrating online like everything else. Starting in the 1990s, many newspapers, the TP included, began websites where people could discuss stories — especially big series. Sometimes you’d publish something and there’d be a huge response. Other times, not so much. But such features were usually sort of tacked on, after the fact — not used proactively to stimulate a discussion or guide the coverage.

Jay Rosen: It’s true: graphic display has advanced a lot, and that’s innovation in explanation. What about the stories themselves?

John McQuaid: Like you, I don’t know that there has been much innovation. On some level, there doesn’t need to be. Some subjects are perennials — politicians and businesspeople are always going to engage in illegal or questionable shenanigans, bureaucracies are always going to break down, wars and natural disasters are going to erupt, poverty and exploitation aren’t going away. And people want to know about these things (well, some people, anyway). You have to keep shining the light into those cobwebbed closets — new things are always flying out.

But you also risk falling into a “formula” — bureaucratic failures, victims of one kind or another — that can be worthwhile, but isn’t very interesting reading. Institutions covering other institutions. You can miss what’s really going on — locally, nationally, globally — if that’s your approach.

Some of these big stories lack a clear point of view. A big investigation is an opportunity for journalists to become as expert on a subject as the experts themselves — or rather, less so in some ways, more in others. A journalist covering the FDA won’t get to a Ph.D in chemistry, but she or he can learn a hell of a lot about how the system works, without the prejudices of people who are part of the system and know a single slice of it really well. That level of expertise and perspective means that, depending on what you find, you can say something nobody’s said before, about the agency in question, about politics today, America today, the world too. But too many projects stop at “something about the FDA.” They figure exposing a snafu is enough. This is a big problem, because the “product” tends to be pretty dry and heavy going.

For a while, Mickey Kaus had a feature on his blog called SeriesSkipper, in which he’d sit down and read a long, boring newspaper series for you, summarize the key points, and then recommend whether you should actually sit down and spend hours reading it. In most cases, he recommended against.

Personally, I’d like to see more ideas in the storytelling. One series I loved, to give an example, was the 1997 Baltimore Sun series The Shipbreakers, about how giant ships are dismantled abroad in extremely hazardous conditions. It told you something surprising about the world — what was going on down on the docks in Baltimore and how it was tied to what was going on the other side of the globe.

In a digitizing, globalizing world, there are a lot of opportunities to expose problems and explore the connections linking what’s going on in Washington, at the community level, and around the world — problems NewAssignment.Net is particularly well-positioned to explore.

(Part-two will run Tuesday. This post also appeared at PressThink.)

And that’s the picture, if I have any picture of what it looks like when Americans go to vote.

But what if we wanted to improve that picture and add accuracy, nuance, poetry, meaning? Could we do it ourselves, without waiting for the news media to transcend its election day cliches? These are the starting points for an open source photo essay that I’m involved in. It launches today. We call it exactly what it is: Polling Place Photo Project. Your assignment: “Photograph your polling place. Document democracy.” (Here’s a description.)

Anyone can play. Without violating the law, you take pictures when you go to vote and upload them at the site, along with some other information. (Including suggestions for improving the act of voting.) There’s a Creative Commons license (type by-nd) meaning others can use them but cannot monkey with the images or claim ownership. What you are supposed to take pictures of is Americans exercising their sovereignty: the facts on the ground when you go to vote.

The project’s goal, according to its designer and prime mover William Drenttel, is “an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.” A second aim is to “encourage research into how voting happens and how voting can be made easier, clearer, less confusing, more reliable.”

Call it political ergonomics. The art and science of lowering barriers to democratic participation.

That’s what drew the interest of AIGA, the professional association for graphic designers. They built the Polling Place Photo Project site and they’re hosting it on their servers as part of AIGA’s Design for Democracy initiative. NewAssignment.Net is a co-sponsor and consultant to PPPP.

The idea for an open source photo essay that would attempt to capture what it looks like when Americans go to vote in 2006 emerged from a conversation I had with Bill Drenttel in September. Three years ago he designed PressThink, my blog. Later he started a successful blog of his own, Design Observer. We both like to do things that aren’t being done. When he read about my experiment with NewAssignment.Net, Drenttel wondered: could the design community do “social network” journalism? Was there a demo project for Design Observer?

Bill and I discussed something simple that “anyone” in the Design community could do. I told him about a suggestion posted at Mark Glaser’s Media Shift by Russ Walker, an editor at Washingtonpost.com. “Let’s build a database to identify what voting machines are in use in every precinct in the nation,” Walker wrote. “That will be our baseline data set, from which we can attempt specific reporting projects after the 2006 midterm elections.” (I am still pursuing that.)

What if we start this year, just with pictures? Bill said. I said we would need partners, preferably people who are already organized and connected peer-to-peer because they share certain interests. He immediately thought of AIGA (he’s a past president). Through his efforts AIGA agreed to take it on and that’s how PPPP was born.

AIGA was founded in 1914. NewAssignment.Net is three months old and in its “test” or knowledge-gathering phase. (Launch is the first quarter of 2007.) This is a good test project for two reasons:

1.) The Ergonomics. A lot will be learned from the attempt to set-up a user-friendly system whereby anyone with access to the Web can do the assignment (photograph the places where Americans exercise their sovereignty) and upload the results. Open means anyone can play. But the statement—anyone can play—becomes a lie unless the forms we invent are easy to use, the instructions clear, the design democratically good. If this goes well, we’ll learn about the ergonomics of open source data collection.

2.) The Network. Here is one of the ideas NewAssignment.Net is testing: To do social network reporting that relies on volunteers it’s wise to find existing social networks with willing and able people who might indeed volunteer. By means of such partnerships pro-am projects can be organized at relatively low cost over the Net. The Polling Place Photo Project is testing this method. The existing social network, AIGA membership, is connected peer-to-peer already. It already has a participatory wing. Therefore the costs to connect it for this action are low. AIGA members become the core group (and most know how to handle a camera). It’s pro-am because the designers can be joined by anyone else we reach with word of this project. Lots of people know how to handle a camera and it isn’t that hard to take pictures of your polling place.

Is it legal? Well, um, ah. There actually is no good answer to what’s by law allowed. We have to urge participants to obey all laws but we cannot tell them with reasonable certainty what the law says about the taking and sharing of photographs. They have to check with election officials but that is not much help. (Okay, here is a list of election officials by state, with websites and phone numbers; here’s a place you can ask questions about the law, thanks to Dan Gillmor and Lauren Gelman’s operations.)

This is not a NewAssignment.Net project in the strictest sense because we’re not executing it; AIGA and Drenttel are. We’re consulting on it, and we’ll do evaluation. The Photo project is testing the use of existing social networks to yield a “core” group of participants. NewAssignment will help explain the project, and follow up by getting a journalist—a writer or critic—to assess the results.

Here are the sponsors:

AIGA, the professional association for design, is the leading member organization for people engaged in the discipline, practice and culture of designing. Its mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and global cultural force. The Polling Place Photo Project lives at the AIGA site.

Design for Democracy is a strategic program of AIGA, its consulting and teaching wing. It tries to increase civic participation by making the experience clearer, more understandable, easier to accomplish and more trustworthy. As a non-profit, Design for Democracy consults with federal, state and local government agencies about better design in public settings.

Design Observer. The Polling Place Photo Project was conceived as a national initiative in citizen journalism by William Drenttel and Design Observer. Design Observer is the largest webblog about design and visual culture and is edited and authored by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.

NewAssignment.Net tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust. Still in an early stage of development, New Assignment.Net has support from the MacArthur Foundation, Reuters, Sunlight Foundation and Craig Newmark. (An introduction is here.)

Thirdwave. Thirdwave is AIGA’s development partner and responsible for supporting the technology of the Polling Place Photo Project, as well as countless other AIGA online intitiatves.

William Drenttel and Winterhouse Institute. William Drenttel is president emeritus of AIGA, a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Drenttel is a partner with Jessica Helfand in Winterhouse Institute, which supports writing and publishing projects that further an understanding of design and visual culture.

Go visit the Polling Place Photo Project. Hit the comment button and let us know what you think.