This Saturday, December 5, DARPA (a federal agency charged with the development of new technologies) will place 10 large red balloons in various locations across the country and they want you to help find them. Of course their whereabouts are already known by a select few, but the goal of this prize competition is to examine the speed and accuracy of nationally networked individuals who will identify and map each of the locations using social media. The first team to send in an accurate list of balloon locations will win $40,000.
More than 2,500 persons have registered to take part in this "Network Challenge." One emergency management organization in Johnson County, Kansas which values the importance of social media and wide-area collaboration, is enlisting the help of other offices across the country. (Johnson County, Kansas is also holding a daylong conference this January on new media in crisis.) If you happen to find a balloon, you can post the information to the Johnson County Facebook site that has been set up just for this event.
Recent examples of crowdsourced information and networked technologies have shown that distributed networks coupled with local boots on the ground all using social media have the potential to carry information at phenomenal speed with excellent accuracy. But, participants should beware ⦠DARPA has warned that some information available online may be intentionally misleading and inaccurate. The balloons will only be visible on Saturday, December 5 during daylight hours. Once they have been taken down, balloon-spotters will be required to use their networked connections to find the locations of any balloons they did not already locate. It will be up to competitors to assess the validity of information and verify each identified location in a wiki-like fashion.
This event will unfold online as participants share information through open and closed networks. The submission deadline is listed on the DARPA website as December 14. I'll be very curious to see how volunteer balloon-spotters emerge and converge into an organized network of information points. Shall we place wagers on how long it actually takes to complete the task?
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More than 2,500 persons have registered to take part in this "Network Challenge." One emergency management organization in Johnson County, Kansas which values the importance of social media and wide-area collaboration, is enlisting the help of other offices across the country. (Johnson County, Kansas is also holding a daylong conference this January on new media in crisis.) If you happen to find a balloon, you can post the information to the Johnson County Facebook site that has been set up just for this event.
Recent examples of crowdsourced information and networked technologies have shown that distributed networks coupled with local boots on the ground all using social media have the potential to carry information at phenomenal speed with excellent accuracy. But, participants should beware ⦠DARPA has warned that some information available online may be intentionally misleading and inaccurate. The balloons will only be visible on Saturday, December 5 during daylight hours. Once they have been taken down, balloon-spotters will be required to use their networked connections to find the locations of any balloons they did not already locate. It will be up to competitors to assess the validity of information and verify each identified location in a wiki-like fashion.
This event will unfold online as participants share information through open and closed networks. The submission deadline is listed on the DARPA website as December 14. I'll be very curious to see how volunteer balloon-spotters emerge and converge into an organized network of information points. Shall we place wagers on how long it actually takes to complete the task?
