MIT researchers were able to solve DARPA’s ultimate needle-in-a-haystack balloon hunt in just nine hours. Not just because they were especially brilliant, but because they knew how to motivate and organize thousands of people to solve a problem. As Peter Lee, a DARPA project manager, put it: “They got a huge amount of participation from shockingly little money.”
Crowdsourcing is a process that fascinates all of us at SmartBrief on Social Media. It can provide fantastic results, but it’s a little more complicated than just asking the Internet to do you a favor — see our ongoing experiment with re-tweeting readers. It requires the know-how to energize and then coordinate the efforts of strangers who are typically working for little or no pay. While the DARPA experiment shows unequivocally that crowdsourcing works, it’ll be some time before researchers can decode what MIT’s efforts say about crowdsourcing best practices.
Have you ever crowd-sourced a project? How did you energize and coordinate your fans?
Image credit, Nikada via iStock
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[...] SmartBlog On Social Media » Getting results for “shockingly little money” smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2009/12/07/getting-results-for-shockingly-little-money – view page – cached MIT researchers were able to solve DARPA’s ultimate needle-in-a-haystack balloon hunt in just nine hours. Not just because they were especially brilliant, but because they knew how to motivate and… Read moreMIT researchers were able to solve DARPA’s ultimate needle-in-a-haystack balloon hunt in just nine hours. Not just because they were especially brilliant, but because they knew how to motivate and organize thousands of people to solve a problem. As Peter Lee, a DARPA project manager, put it: “They got a huge amount of participation from shockingly little money.” View page [...]
I can see it being used for “Guerilla Marketing” Tactics. There seems to be a common drive in everyone to relate or be apart of something bigger.
If you can tap into it (the movement) and set-up data points (hashtags, Fan Pages, etc.) for people to leave and receive data, then you only need to monitor those points. Problem is finding the key to bring the whole thing to the points you establish and not other ones that are unmonitored.
That’s the benefit from al of this. We don’t need to make people do anything other then checkin at a designated point.
Looks like MIT coughed up the goods faster than I expected: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10411211-93.html
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