Up to this point NewAssignment.Net has been a source for news about the development of journalism on the Web and the spread of the open source movement.

Well, it’s time to put theory into practice with our first open journalism project. See the shiny new Assignment Zero logo on the left? Go ahead, click it.

Assignment Zero is an investigation into the open source Diaspora, which can be broadly labeled “crowdsourcing.” There have been plenty of stories from professional journalists looking into this growing trend. It’s the buzz of Web 2.0. But the crowdsource phenomenon has spread too far and too fast for any single journalist to keep up. It is the business story of the modern age, a re-work of the assembly line, and if we can collect enough information on this trend, a true compendium of the crowdsourced movement can be assembled and viewed from a birds eye perspective.

How can we get this larger picture? Perhaps through the wisdom of the crowd, the same crowd that is participating in this business revolution.

This is a joint project with Wired News. They’ve provided an editor, Lauren Sandler, and a writer, Jeff Howe. They will be joined by Steve Fox and Amanda Michel and myself from NewAssignment.Net in this venture. But the team is larger. Much larger. It includes everyone and anyone who wants to join.

So rather than type your ear off, I will apologize for NewAssignment.Net’s absence in blog posts this last week. At least now you know it wasn’t because we got lazy. I hope that you check out Assignment Zero and see the potential that we all believe it has – in being the first national crowdsourced journalism project.