Thousands of Eyes: Using the Digital Swarm to Find Things

In 2009, a Network Challenge by DARPA placed 10 red weather balloons in random locations around the US and awarded a $40,000 prize to the team that located all 10 the fastest.  A team from MIT managed to do this in less than 9 hours using a combination of multi-level rewards, crowd-sourcing, camera phones, and data mining http://archive.darpa.mil/networkchallenge/darpanetworkchallengewinner2009.pdf). The MIT solution was a powerful illustration of leveraging the ties of social networks with the ubiquity of mobile device and their sensors (camera, etc.).  We are beginning to see the "power of the crowd" show up in more everyday examples such as idea sourcing (Brainstorm, Spigot, etc.), problem reporting/tracking (SeeClickFix, CitySense, etc.), Social Search (Evri, Quora, etc.).  Mobile is accelerating the ability of these networks to respond in real-time as well as collect more data from the environment.  When you add incentives for participation (weather it be monetary, charitable, or civic), this just accelerates the repines of the system even more.  The MIT team used a multi-layer rewards scheme where each referral of quality information resulted in a reward for the people that had made the initial connection to that person.  Kind of like Amway for social intelligence gathering!  The lessons here are important for companies that struggle everyday with how to tap the collective brainpower of the organization and get employees more involved in innovation, issue reporting, and better decisions at the edge of the business.  Weather its sensing a new product defect in the field, identifying a more optimal flow for a supply chain, or creating a new service offering for your customers, companies can leverage social + mobile to do these faster, better, and even cheaper in the future.
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This page contains a single entry by Scott A. Snyder published on February 5, 2012 9:11 AM.

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