http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html
Darpa’s Crowdsourcer-in-Chief Bolts for Microsoft Darpa’s leading advocate for crowdsourcing and other ways of tapping new talent is leaving to join Microsoft — after only a year at the Defense Department’s top R&D division. Peter Lee, the former head of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, joined Darpa to head up its new Transformational Convergence Technology Office. The group quickly became known within the agency for avoiding the traditional cadre of military researchers — and reaching out to the rest of us, instead. Lee helped organize Darpa’s “Network Challenge,” which sent people scouring the country for a set of 10 big red balloons in an attempt to “explore the roles the internet and social networking play [in] timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization,” according to an agency website. Lee’s office also launched “Transformative Apps,” a project to create a marketplace for soldier software. “It’s like an iPhone store.
Innovations: Technology, Governance, Global Philip E. Auerswald and Iqbal Z. Quadir, Editors Innovations is about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. The journal features cases authored by exceptional innovators; commentary and research from leading academics; and essays from globally recognized executives and political leaders. Ethics of Crowdsourcing – What Constitutes an Abuse of the Commons While getting ready to launch Finder! we had an internal debate whether or not to put limits on dataset downloading. There were several options, ranging from requiring a user to be logged in before they downloaded to limiting the number of downloads a user could make in a day.
Crowdsourcing Software Long Before Crowdsourcing Got Cool Wade Roush4/23/09 Can competitions and prizes get you to the Moon? Google thinks so—it’s backing the $30 million Lunar X Prize, which will be awarded to the first privately funded team that sends a remote-controlled robot to the Moon, drives it 500 meters, and collects video of the trip. Back here on Earth, the $10 million Archon X Prize is being offered to the first team that can build a device that sequences 100 human genomes in 10 days or less, and the Wellpoint Foundation is proposing a $10 million Healthcare X Prize for the first organization that figures out how to deliver a 50 percent improvement in the cost-effectiveness of community healthcare over a three-year period.
untitled Speaker: Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland (MIT, Human Dynamics) We have developed robust models of how social network dynamics shape human behavior. These models are constructed by use of data collected by my research group's unique `reality mining' sensor platforms, which allow us to track the behavior of hundreds of people in great detail and over long periods of time, and provide accurate predictions of human decision making performance across a wide range of network sizes. The Next Evolution in Crowdsourcing As we get closer to reaching the critical milestone of 40,000 testers in the uTest community (any day now!), we knew we’d have to find ways to scale our community programs in order to manage, vet and engage our enormous pool of expert testers and QA professionals. Well, we didn’t have to look very far! The answers were right in front of us — where else but within the uTester community itself.
Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos American intelligence in Afghanistan is broken, says the top U.S. intelligence officer there. That’s because it focuses too much on whacking Taliban, and not enough on figuring out Afghanistan’s social and cultural landscapes. But the report from Maj. Gen.
Crowdsourcing Innovation: Q&A with Dwayne Spradlin of InnoCentiv In recent years, corporations have turned to open innovation to solve their toughest research problems and reduce runaway costs of R&D. Now non-profits are beginning to see prize-based innovation as a strategy for humanitarian causes too, such as developing medicines to fight tuberculosis in the developing world, cleaning up oil spills or designing solar technologies for villages in rural India and Africa. InnoCentive is the premier open innovation marketplace in the world, where corporations and non-profits post their toughest research problems and a global network of 160,000 solvers takes a crack at solving them for cash rewards.
Crowdsourced Software A new crowdsourcing company, called Cambrian House, launched this week. The idea is pretty straightforward – open source software development minus the free labor. It's a little hard to evaluate whether Cambrian House can develop competitive applications in an increasingly crowded market, but I'm impressed with the degree to which they've thought out the model. I also like that they intend to put the crowd to work at three separate tasks: 1) originating the ideas; 2) evaluating the ideas; and 3) developing the code itself. Postscript: I hope my regular readers will forgive the lapse between posts. My goal is to never let more than a week elapse and, if significant or interesting developments occur, post in as reactive a manner possible.
Petraeus Keeps McChrystal’s Top Intel Officer Just because General Stanley McChrystal lost his job as commander in Afghanistan doesn’t mean a key member of his team is out as well. Major General Michael Flynn, the head of intelligence operations for the NATO war effort, will stay on, Danger Room has learned. “Major General Flynn is going to stay and be General Petraeus’s top intel officer,” says Colonel Erik Gunhus, Petraeus’ spokesman. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Flynn (pictured, above and right) wasn’t a factor in the Rolling Stone profile that doomed McChrystal’s career.
User Innovation and Firm Boundaries: Organizing for Innovation b These pages are about the symposium presentation held during the Academy of Management 2008 meeting in Anaheim. Participants The session was organized by Marcel Bogers (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). Presenting their individual papers were Allan Afuah (University of Michigan), Lars Bo Jeppesen (Copenhagen Business School), Wim Vanhaverbeke (Hasselt University & Eindhoven University of Technology) and Joel West (San José State University). Crowdsourced Software Development? This afternoon, the MatrixMaxx team at Matrix Group held a Town Hall meeting with clients to get feedback on about a half dozen features slated to go into the 10.1 version (scheduled for release in early February). We could have surveyed clients via e-mail or a Web survey; we could have conducted a focus group; we could have called a select group of clients and consultants; or we could have gone with our gut and made decisions about credit card processing, meeting wait lists, individual relationships, etc. Instead, we decided to crowdsource the specifications. Crowdsource?
Print: The Watchers Draws Glowing Portrait of Überspook Illustration: Kate Gibb; photo: Getty Shane Harris says that in 2004, when he first shook hands with retired admiral John Poindexter , he thought he was meeting an “evil genius.” Poindexter had become infamous in the ’80s for orchestrating the Iran-Contra scheme with the help of an at-home encrypted data line. After 9/11, he fell into further disrepute as the architect of Total Information Awareness, an antiterrorism program that proposed collecting as much data as possible — emails, credit card statements, even veterinarian bills — about everyone on the planet. It was too much even for a war-on-terror-era Congress, which shuttered the vast data-mining project in 2003 and ran Poindexter out of office. But as Harris , a correspondent for (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) got to know Poindexter — hanging out on his boat, sharing lunches of Spam and Tequiza, and trading documents over a private file-sharing network — he was impressed by the admiral’s relentless intellect.
DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Ja On "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold Now, another big idea is taking hold, but this time it's more painful for some people to embrace, even to contemplate. It's nothing less than the migration from individual mind to collective intelligence. I call it "here comes everybody", and it represents, for good or for bad, a fundamental change in our notion of who we are.