Jay Rosen beats them to the punch tonight with a great post that both walks up to the summit and shares his lessons from NewAssignment.net. Jay’s summary:

That is my attempt to map the perimeter: solutions lie within. Division of labor is the key creative decision in acts of distributed reporting. Grok the motivations or it can’t be done. Watch for ballooning coordination costs as ramp up succeeds. Where the small pieces meet the larger narrative the alchemy of the project lives. Shared background knowledge raises group capacity. Extant communities already coordinate well.

No one is saying that collaborative, pro-am, networked journalism is the cure to the industry’s ills or that it will replace the professional model. I believe that it is one means by which journalism can and should expand now — even as journalistic organizations’ revenue and often staffs decline. New Assignment is one way to try this — with Rosen et al or on your own, as Brian Lehrer at WNYC has done. And the day’s participants will hear about many other endeavors in other models. I hope we all leave with information and inspiration and new ideas to implement and experiment with. We will report back on their plans and will follow up with progress reports.

Main Goal: To spark innovation in open platform journalism. Journalism that is done by a network of people on the web using social media as a tool for investigations. This type of work is done in the open and often relies on a gift economy. “It’s such a new practice area, that it’s unrealistic to think that traditional news organizations would do this work, but if somebody else goes first they might follow. I don’t think that we’ll discover the answers or we’ll provide the solutions, but that others looking on and reviewing what we do will,” says Rosen.

Notable Achievements: Assignment Zero: A collaborative investigation into the trend of crowdsourcing with Wired Magazine. Assignment Zero relied on a network of volunteers to examine the different areas where open source practices and principles have spread, including citizen journalism itself. Upon completion Assignment Zero collected 80 interviews and nine feature stories.

OffTheBus.Net: A collaboration with the Huffington Post, OffThe Bus is Adding a new dimension to campaign coverage by relying on the angles and issues that are important to a network of citizen journalists. They don’t follow the campaign bus, it comes to them.

David Cohn, who was associate editor at Assignment Zero also runs NewAssignment.Net’s blog where he is “Director of Distributed Reporting.”

What surprised you the most?: “That there are enthusiastic people who want to participate in the projects, both citizens and media partners. We have had no problem getting people interested from either end,” says Rosen.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: When asking users to participate in a distributed reporting project you have to be extremely clear about what you are asking people to do. It must be clear how one can contribute, obvious how their piece fits into the larger picture and what the division of labor is. It is not a science, but an art that must be learned.

Money: NewAssignment.Net is an academic endeavor that is currently supported by grants, donations and collaborations with media partners.

Future Goals: To continue OffTheBus.Net’s coverage until the end of the 08′ election.

To repeat and capitalize on the lessons of Assignment Zero — but with a less obscure subject that is easier for people to grasp.

Devising a social network approach to beat reporting. The idea would be to equip reporters with Facebook-like social networking tools that would allow them to build a network of sources and friends that help them cover their beat.

NewAssignment.Net itself is a project with an eventual end date. A deadline hasn’t been set — but Rosen doesn’t see it lasting more than three years.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

“More people working on the problem of distributed reporting so we can crack the case and new people to work with.”