December 21st, 2009
DARPA Red Balloon Challenge and the Diminishing Power of Elite Networks?
To all you crowdsourcing-lovers out there who see the web as a way to subvert impenetrable elite networks and democratize industries and systems, congratulations, you have a new convert. (This girl.)
I was totally fascinated by the DARPA red balloon challenge earlier this month, and obviously pumped to see an MIT team named the winner. It took less than 9 hours for the team to locate the 10 red weather balloons deployed in different cities around the U.S.
If that stat alone doesn’t for the zillionth time reiterate the astounding power of the internet, please return to your cave. K thx.
What was most interesting, though, was not the shockingly short duration of the competition, but the very different strategies used by the MIT and Harvard teams and how each played out during the competition itself. To me, the strategies proved to me that effectively deployed crowdsourcing is an extremely powerful tool.
First, some disclaimers:
-I am currently a student at MIT, though I was not involved at all in the team’s efforts. I didn’t even register on their site. But I’m still biased.
-Everything I know about the Harvard team I got from these two great and thorough blog posts from Rafael Corrales and Caren Kelleher.
So, my thesis. The MIT team’s use of recursive incentives (ahem, cash money) to compel participation indicates to me that:
-Even on the web, greed and personal gain are powerful motivational forces
-Although the Harvard team was able to mobilize and engage their extremely powerful student and alumni network, the MIT team’s more tangible incentives were better suited to encourage widespread participation. Could this be an indicator of the potentially diminishing power of single networks (no matter how powerful)? I think it is.
Here’s why:
Based on the articles I read about the Harvard team, although they ran a Google adwords campaign, had a website, a twitter account (@helpredballoon) and a pledge to donate the entire $40,000 to charity, by far the most useful tool they employed was leveraging the current student and alumni networks. The Harvard network is arguably the most powerful network in the world – a common bond that ties together world leaders, politicians, billionaires, academics, etc. The sheer level of participation and engagement that the group received from this network is notable.
The MIT team, on the other hand, created an incentive structure that encouraged people to not only participate themselves, but get their friends to participate as well.
I think to me that was a key difference – converting participants versus converting them AND compelling them to get their friends involved too (the Facebook application Causes comes to mind here).
I don’t think the tools available on the web even five years ago would have had such success when pitted against a network as powerful as Harvard’s. But web tools are becoming downright easy to make, which I believe will enable this sort of mobilization to take many forms in the next few years and continue to chip away at the relative power of these very elite and deeply entrenched networks (examples: big media + youtube, finance industry + kaching, etc.)
The web/software as a tool of democratization is not a new idea; it has been very artfully articulated for years. Though few instances have provided such a clear case for why the process is so game-changing and how the web’s ability to mobilize disparate groups is changing the meaning of elitism.
Pluralists, take note.