There’s a great journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing over at the OJR, which is close to being added to my must-read online journalism blog posts due to this quote: “Ultimately, journalism is social science, and journalists who want to make best use of crowdsourcing need to get familiar with the mathematics of social science.” Here’s some more:
“if you want to attempt a true crowdsourcing project, someone in your newsroom will [need programming skills]. Free online survey tools and mapping websites can help you collect and publish great reader-contributed data. But if you want custom information to move from survey form to published report in real time, you can’t do that yet without a programmer on your team.
“… The interviewing and document searches of 20th-century investigative reporting will look incomplete as savvy journalists and newsrooms learn to harness the Internet’s wide reach and interactivity to gather massive databases that only formal social science techniques can effectively manage and analyze.”
Online Journalism Blog 
I agree, online surveys are a wonderful tool for reporters. I’ve been using InstantSurvey] for a while. It’s a great way to guage public opinion on important topics, plus its a great way to engage your audience.
The OJR article is good, but leaves out something key to crowdsourced journalism–dealing with people.. I worked on Assignment Zero, perhaps the first crowdsouced journalism project (recenly won Hon. Mention in the ’07 Knight-Batten Awards) and we didn’t rely all that much on social science. Rather, we relied heavily on people-skills that are more common to working with volunteers. Think of it this way: if you are going to be working with “the crowd” to produce a work of journailsm, you will need to deal with them. You can’t be hands-off and simply expect people to contribute to what you’re doing. If you’d like information to be more than just a “yes-no-maybe” answer from a poll, you will have to be accessable and answer questions. It then becomes important to communicate with people in an open and genuine manner. If an org is too detatched–as the social scientist model implies–there may be limits to whom among the people a project is able to reach.