Saturday’s DARPA red balloon challenge
DARPA (you know, the guys who really invented the Internet), has set up a little geo-challenge contest tomorrow.
At 10 a.m. ET, 10 red weather balloons will be put on display, moored to the ground, at locations around the continental US. They will stay in place until 4 p.m. local time. The first team to submit the correct latitude and longitude of all ten will win $40,000.
This has really fascinated me. It appears to be all about crowdsourcing solutions for national defense and natural disasters. Lets just say that the Web will be all atwitter tomorrow, as social media is sure to come into play. From the DARPA challenge website:
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.
Some of the challenges that teams can expect will be:
- How to motivate people to help them
- How to avoid providing locations to other teams
- How to verify the accuracy of reported locations
- How to avoid being scammed by false reports
Now what does this have to do with GPS? Not much except that participants will likely use GPS units to grab coordinates. And there happens to be a group of millions of folks with handheld receivers who could perhaps be mobilized to help – geocachers. Not coincidentally, Groundspeak, the folks behind geocaching.com, have jumped into the game, with a website and a Twitter account. But hey, it’s not a slam dunk, as MIT and some other not so lightweights are competing too. Should be fun to watch.
EDIT: Groups actively trying to win, via Read Write Web
Tweet
Direct tweets safe? If you’re in it to win it I’ll pass along anything I spot
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But is that the best way to motivate your team? To play your cards close?
This team seems to be the most organized so far:
http://balloon.media.mit.edu/speigg
This is what one group did:
https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:26653.2642338382/rid:050a5ad69cee0b80d646659a2a3212df
Fun but I think this is not a good social media crowdsourcing experiment. DARPA, perhaps intentionally, is testing a competitive team task where secretiveness pays off. Perhaps it’s looking at the way a small cell of people might use social media to determine locations.
In, for example, a natural disaster you’d see people cooperate rather than compete, and info would flow more freely as it usually does on Twitter and other social networking outreach sites.