I’m working on my masters in journalism. A big part of that is interviewing people. That’s because I’m working on a 5,000 word article on Drupal.

Meanwhile, Mark de Lange has a different way to “interview people.”

Working on his masters in marketing over in Amsterdam, Mark is studying crowdsourcing. The very topic of Assignment Zero is actually the subject of several masters projects that I know of in different fields. It is related to marketing, mass communications, psychology and probably a few other fields I haven’t thought of.

I took Mark’s survey, which will help him with his research. If you have five minutes, you should take it too. It seems the main focus is trying to determine the limits, forces and causes of crowdsourced participation — the key to keeping a crowdsourced project successful. There is no silver bullet to this problem yet and there may never be. But research like Mark’s will help pave the way.

Hopefully Assignment Zero will be able to provide some insight as well.