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Editor Login


Convener in chief:


David Lazer
(Methodology, Networked Governance)

Editors:


Stanley Wasserman
(Current Trends, Methodology, Social Networks)
Guy Stuart
(Economic Sociology, Finance)
David Gibson
(Social Networks, Interaction, Theory)
Jason Greenberg>
(Networks, Econmic Sociology, Entrepreneurship)
Allan Friedman
(Simulations)
Sune Lehmann
(Complex Networks, Computational Social Science, Statistics)
Jukka-Pekka Onnela
(Methodology, Social Networks, Technology)
Nathan Eagle
(Technology, Social Computing, Powerlaws, Current Trends)
Ben Waber
(Technology, Social Computing) Ines Mergel
(Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Government 20)
Maria Binz-Scharf
(Qualitative Methodology, Knowledge Sharing, eGovernment)
Sebastian Schorf
(Social Interaction, Cultural Interaction)
Alexander Schellong
(Admin, eGovernment, Government 20, Citizen Relationship Management)

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« Political Networks 2009 videos: James Fowler | Main | Berardo on the networks of networkers »

3 December 2009

DARPA Network Challenge - Not Networks, but maybe a Challenge

As many of you know, DARPA has announced a network challenge in the vein of the DARPA grand challenge (although for much less money).

In this challenge, participants are tasked with finding 10 red weather balloons distributed throughout the continental US for 8 hours on December 5. The idea is to get this to be a crowdsourcing kind of activity, where people will use social media tools to solve this problem. This is my major beef with the name of the competition, since it should be called the DARPA Social Media Challenge since in its current framing networks per se have little to do with it.

One group that has formed to tackle this problem, however, is attempting to look at it from a network perspective, and along the way gather interesting data about information diffusion across a variety of communication platforms. The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, based out of the MIT Media Lab, has created a system where you get money not just for finding balloons, but for getting people to join the hunt who find the balloons, or for getting people who get people who find balloons, etc. Here's an image of the structure:

First you have to sign up, which you can do here. Then you can send invitations to others to join through your own unique URL, crediting you with recruiting them.

While they are interested in winning the contest, they are also interested in looking at information diffusion patterns. Does Twitter spread information faster than blogs? What is the geographic distribution of someone's friends on Facebook?

It's great that these researchers have found a way to make this contest into a real "network challenge".

Posted by Ben Waber at December 3, 2009 6:51 PM