Those brain boxes form MIT won the forty thousand Darpa prize after they identified all ten weather balloon locations.
The Defense Departments Defense Advanced Research projects Agency put this challenge together so they could see the effect of social networks. The $40,000 prize was offered to the first individual or team who worked out where the balloons were.
The research was particularly concerned with the level of trust through these social networks especially under time constraints. Teams had to come up with novel ideas to get the web 2.0 community to join their efforts. Almost every combination was tried from cash, prizes, charity and pure begging were tried.
The victorious team used a combination of techniques offering varying level os cash depending on the accuracy of the information and then donating any surplus to a good cause.
Twitter and Facebook were awash with information but some of it deliberately false in the hope of throwing other teams off the scent. The guys from ten red balloons used an ingenious PR stunt by claiming to know where one balloon was even before the contest started. They admitted this was just to get them some viral traffic and apparently it worked so well done to them.
The contest was a huge success with double the entrants than expected with in excess of four thousand people taking part. Darpa are going to go through the teams methodologies to see what can be learnt from the exercise.
The MIT team like ours had a clear financial plan to bring in participants and perhaps there’s was more coherent and people perhaps thought they has a better chance at winning a few thousand dollars rather than a long shot at winning the forty thousand.
One of the issues we had was that we were too successful in getting people in and had to totally clear the map at one stage as it had become unreadable. One lesson we learnt is that Twitter is the most instant social tool for this type of event or news buzz. It is also true that many people spend their time trying to give out misinformation rather than finding the real answers. It’s also interesting that the winning team used financial gain as part of the model but also the giving aspect as well. It would be interesting to know which one was more powerful or if it was the combination that was potent.