Here's What was Happening:
December 5, 2009, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-something governmental and military-the guys who invented the precursor to the internet) staged a competition. Ten of these red balloons were placed somewhere in the continental United States. The first team/individual able to locate all 10 and submit their correct latitude and longitude would win $40,000!!
4300 teams entered the contest. The balloons were up from 10 am to 4 pm. The continental U.S. is roughly 8 million square kilometers!! A team from MIT was able to locate all 10 in about 8 hours and 53 minutes!! Wow!!
WHY the contest?
The contest was designed to test the the way social networking, crowdsourcing and lesser-known Web-based techniques could help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task. DARPA met with teams after to review approaches and strategies used to build networks, collect information and participate in the challenge. According to Alex Pentland ( a member of the winning team)
“ this excercise showed how building the proper incentives into a viral collaboration can quickly harness a large population to work together to address broad societal needs. It helped us better understand how information spreads and why people cooperate"
DARPA was also exploring different kinds of motivation that can be brought to bear on this type of problem. DARPA was interested in learning what motivates people to become involved. In reality, $40,000 is not much money when split among many people. However, when treated like a game or citizen project people tend to become involved and the money becomes irrelevant or at least not the major motivating factor. Information gathered from this contest may be used to mobilize people to respond to societal needs such as finding missing children, or responding to natural disasters, etc.
HOW MIT WON:
The MIT team used a strategy similar to multi-level marketing. You are compensated for your information and also for the information provided by anyone you recruited to join the effort. MIT developed a website and recruited a network of spotters. All spotters had a unique link to the website that they could access via e-mail, web-site, social network or any other means. Anyone could invite anyone else to join the network. $2000 would be awarded to the person with the correct coordinates. $1000 would go to the person that invited that person, $500 to the person who invited that person and so on. This made it worth your while to join the team and tell others to join. Just by inviting everyone on your own personal network to join you multiplied your chances of winning something. You would not even have to go out and actively look and you could still win some money. The system allowed all participants to see their direct impact on the social network. The third place team speculated that MIT may also have had an advantage due to media coverage of the event. MIT was often mentioned as a team that would be in the running. As a recognizable name, anyone spotting a balloon may have gone directly to their site.
SO, WHERE WAS I?
How is it that I had no idea this was going on? I consider myself somewhat of a science nerd and I think I have plenty of friends, yet I was not even aware the contest was happening!! I obviously am not connected. There were no balloons in Nebraska. Most of the balloons were located on the coasts with one in Tennessee. One disparaging remark claimed we may not be among trendy digital America. “Had the Pentagon put up balloons in Kansas or Nebraska the victory may not have been as swift” Perhaps they are correct.
This is a very interesting concept! What a unique way to gain an understanding of social networking by doing this activity on a large scale. I wonder if you could do this kind of competition throughout a state and teach students about the concept of networking using a similar format?
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of using this in our own state as Michelle said. This could be something that students may really get into. I think that it also demonstrates just how social networking and Web 2.0 technology could be used in a positive way in classroom curriculum. The idea of this activity reminds me a little of geocaching which is also a way for students to learn about connecting to others, as well as teaching them about GPS technology and geography. What a great way to get students active in school! Check out the following websites if you want to know more about geocaching: (http://www.geocaching.com/) (http://www.geocaching.com/local/default.aspx?state_id=28)
ReplyDeleteI thought this project was so interesting to see how powerful human resources truly are when channelled correctly. Our government should look closely at this project and others like it to realize how our nation could handle a national disaster!
ReplyDeleteAlso, these people that set up this site and won this contest should be immediately hired in some capacity by our government...if they knew what was good for them!!
I would almost like to see the same experiment done, but without the use of web 2.0 technology. I wonder how long it would take for the country to respond if they had to do so with a completely outdated set of tools. I have a feeling it would be much slower. I just think that relying too heavily on technology is a bad idea in general. It was neat concept and experiment though that did show how useful the technology can be.
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