Well, the first struggle is over. We’ve launched our first open source journalism project, Assignment Zero. While Lauren’s blog will be the center of communication for Assignment Zero, this blog will continue to chug along — feeding you the latest from the front of new media. How the Web is changing communication and its relationship to journalism. But since we are still fresh off our first day with Assignment Zero, let’s take a moment to highlight what other people are saying about Assignment Zero so far.

Infony: “The use of the newspaper terminology makes the underlying architecture and workflow clear to an average user. It is also important to note that Blogs were also influenced by the newspaper’s information architecture of who, when, what and where.”

Customers Rock: “Although I already consider myself a citizen journalist via blogging, I have signed up to participate in this project… I look forward to sharing ideas with a whole new crowd… I may do some research, or perhaps through this blog, we will provide some story profile information. You see, you can contribute as an individual, as part of a group, or even as a blog community.”

Joel Achenbach: “It’s a pro-am thing. It’s a bit like Wikipedia-meets-Woodward-and-Bernstein. Rosen calls it ‘distributed journalism.’”

Mashable:”Wired has teamed up with NewAssignment.Net to launch AssignmentZero, a peer produced journalism - or “citzen journalism” - project. Wired coined the term “crowdsourcing”, so if they can’t make it work, no one can. I’m skeptical about whether any of this stuff can be successful due to the headaches of managing large teams - Wikipedia broke out, but WikiNews didn’t. The project is funded by Reuters, but it’s a non-profit.”

Pajamanation: “An exciting piece in Wired News today about a project called Assignment Zero, a project that could also be called “PajamaJournalism.” We all know that some of the better bloggers out there have been correcting false news reports and factchecking the mainstream media for the last several years. But Assignment Zero is the first project we know of – with any seriousness of intention — that tries to organize itself as a sort-of open source, decentralized news service.”

Johannes Kuhn: “A few months from now we will be smarter and see whether open source-journalism works, but I have a feeling this project could very well change journalism. I do say this as a journalist myself and as somebody who believes in the possibilities of a new era of communication.”