As I’ve already mentioned the air seems to be ripe for change within established institutions and it isn’t always the obvious culprits of citizen journalism and online encyclopedias. Even museums are beginning to use the wisdom of the crowds to produce quality content.

New York’s MOMA is going to display video art produced by produced by amateur artists that was uploaded through YouTube. Everyone can vote to select which video will finally become an installation at the museum.

Andrew LaVallee, posted a quick synopsis on his home site.

Then in the world of publishing there is “We Are Smarter Than Me,” a “network-book” that will be authored by a large expert crowd organized by MIT, Wharton’s business school, Pearson and Shared Insights. In a very meta-move, the book will be a study on the impact of social networks on traditional business functions. Everyone contributes and everyone will be an author of the book that will be published in 2007.

Although these projects aren’t directly related to reporting or journalism, it shows a changing tide in the atmosphere that is starting to pop up in all kinds of fields.

Thomas Malone talked about this in his opening remarks for MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.

“On the one hand there are people who think that collective intelligence is magic, and if you just add it, it’ll make everything wonderful….They think that just doing things “collectively” will make everything great.

On the other hand, there are people who are prejudiced against the very notion of collectiveness and decentralization… based on that, they have argued that nothing without central control can ever be successful.

Now, I think both of these extremes are equally wrong. Sometimes collective intelligence is good; sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Our goal at NewAssignment is to spark innovation and experiment with crowd sourcing in journalism. I’m curious to know what advice Malone might have for a project like ours that focuses on funneling information and creating well written and informative works of journalism. I’ll be checking in with CCI shortly and post what I find.