What DARPA’s Scavenger Hunt Taught Us About Mobilizing People Fast

Disaster strikes. A hurricane or an earthquake hits a major city, taking out power stations and emergency-services communications. No one knows how many are dead and how many need immediate help. First responders need information, and they need it fast?not just about casualties, but also about what resources they can muster quickly. Emergency workers faced with such a situation have to cobble together whatever resources are available?after Hurricane Katrina, for example, rescuers relied on an ad hoc citizen-radio network to relay information. But there are smarter and better ways to mobilize lots of people in a hurry?as shown by an oddball scavenger hunt.

Two years ago, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Pentagon?s mad-scientist department, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Internet by issuing a challenge. It scattered 10 weather balloons in undisclosed locations around the U.S., promising to award $40,000 to the first team to find them all. Anyone could win, but rapid organization of team members scattered across the country would be essential. After all, someone who happened to be near one of the 8-foot-diameter bright red balloons would have no trouble spotting it, but the competing teams would need to connect those lucky bystanders to their own team as quickly as possible. Between the time DARPA announced the competition in late October and Dec. 5, the day of the contest, the MIT Red Balloon Team mobilized some 4400 team members to find all 10 balloons in just 8 hours 52 minutes.

The reason DARPA put on this curious contest was to find out the best way to get lots of people spread out over lots of space to work together. And this week, the MIT team reflected on just why their strategy worked so well. In the new edition of the journal Science, seven MIT team members describe their so-called "recursive incentive mechanism" in a paper titled "Time Critical Social Mobilization." Here?s what they learned about mass mobilization.

1. A Little Something for Everybody

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, director of MIT?s Human Dynamics Lab and co-author of the paper, says he and his MIT colleagues and students took on the challenge partly for fun, but partly for pride: His team?s research involves figuring out how to motivate groups of people to work together with maximum efficiency. To do it in the DARPA contest, the team dreamed ups its recursive incentive scheme, a way to break up the prize money into smaller chunks, and thereby motivate more people. The team promised to pay out the $40,000 prize money (if won, of course) in the form of incentives to each member of the team who found a balloon, as well as to each member who recruited a balloon finder, and who recruited a recruiter of a finder, and so on. The team?s organizers allocated $4000 total for each balloon, with payments starting at $2000 for a finder and being halved with each remove.

"I guess you could say it was a flash of insight," Pentland says. "But mostly it was obvious to us. When you think about how to use social networks to get people to work together, this is sort of the obvious thing to do. Apparently it wasn?t obvious to anyone else though."

2. People Don?t Hunt Balloons for Charity

The MIT group estimates there were between 50 and 100 other groups. Some used strategies that included offering to donate the entire $40,000 to charity if the team won, or recruiting key members who already had large followings on Twitter?hoping that would maximize the team?s reach. (Perhaps the problem was too many fake followers.) Lesson learned: Direct incentives trump altruism. In other words, people in these fast-mobilizing social networks say: Show me the money.

3. What About Real Life?

Team MIT?s following quickly swelled to its 4000-plus members from a core group of just four recruited from a website set up by the team. The team?s Science paper suggests that their organizing strategy could see applications ranging from mobilizing people for fight world hunger, for playing games, and for social media marketing.

But Pentland has much bigger ambitions. In addition to all of that, as well as for helping first responders react to disasters and emergencies, he sees "the rise of new types of companies and governments that are more agile and efficient." Agile because they would be formed around social networks rather than traditional top-down hierarchies. Efficient because they would be powered by incentives providing maximum motivation to participants rather than the plain old boring rules that govern most organized groups.

For now Pentland and team are focusing on a more mundane application: motivating people to exercise more. Participants in a new?project carry Android phones with?accelerometers?that track their degree of physical activity. A game on the phones rewards players with money for increasing their physical activity over time, with a catch. "Instead of giving you a reward for being more active," Pentland says, "we give your buddies a reward for your increase in activity." Players are thus encouraged to help each other to win, and that fosters cooperation for mutual benefit?the way the winning balloon-challenge scheme worked. "[Players] are finding it much more effective than standard techniques" for motivating themselves to get off the couch, he says.

Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, From the Internet to Artificial Limbs.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/research/what-darpas-scavenger-hunt-taught-us-about-mobilizing-people-fast?src=rss

martin luther king memorial walking dead season 2 walking dead season 2 saving private ryan nfl scores nfl scores world series tickets