Building an open source fact checking system at NewAssignment.net

NewAssignment.net is a non-profit experiment in open source reporting led by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU and the man behind the PressThink blog.
As he explained it, NAN is "a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.”
Craig Silverman, the editor of this site, was recently announced as the Director of Verification for NAN. And now I'll shift to the first person to tell you more...
As part of my role at NAN, I will be helping devise a system to ensure that every fact, statistic and quote contained in a NAN article has been checked and verified. NAN stories will be researched, reported and written by a combination of experienced journalists and large groups of people from (we hope) all over the world. The fact checking process will also follow this distributed pro-am model. Experienced fact checkers will work with volunteers to ensure everything we publish meets a high standard of accuracy.
In the process, we hope to create a new model for how distributed fact checking can work, and build tools that can be used by other media outlets or reporting/research projects to manage their fact checking process.
If this project sounds interesting to you, go read my recent post at the NAN site. I've also published a report about my presentation at a BarCamp event in Montreal.
Most importantly, though, please email me if you'd like to work as a fact checker for the project. Everyone is welcome. We can't do it without you.