'Time-Critical Social Mobilization' with Riley Crane

The World Wide Web is commonly seen as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and scale. To explore the Web’s ability for social mobilization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held the DARPA Network Challenge, in which competing teams were asked to locate 10 red weather balloons placed at locations around the continental United States. Using a recursive incentive mechanism that both spread information about the task and incentivized individuals to act, Branco Weiss fellow Riley Crane and his team were able to find all 10 balloons in less than 9 hours, thus winning the Challenge.

To find out more view the article as published in Science …