to the intended audience. While mass
media played a key role in making the
general public aware of the Challenge,
social media were an important factor
in viral diffusion of Challenge information, especially among the teams relying on them to quickly recruit and connect participants.
Reflecting across the three teams
revealed similarities and interesting
differences in strategy and implications for each team’s operations. All
three set up co-located operations
centers where a core team assembled
on launch day to actively monitor the
real-time chatter in social networking feeds to learn of balloon sightings
and possible clues of their validity. The
bulk of the effort involved analyzing
the balloon sighting information to determine which reports were accurate.
Beyond these similarities, the table
here summarizes the main differences
concerning how the teams motivated
participants, validated balloon sightings, and used social and mass media.
The MIT team aligned individual
incentives with connecting a social
network so it would grow quickly and
autonomously. Financial incentives
served as extrinsic motivation to work
with strangers, both in quickly recruiting the network and in activating the
network to locate the balloons. The
MIT team also developed strategies for
verifying the accuracy of reported balloon sightings largely by analyzing the
balloon sighting information submitted to the team.
The GTRI team took advantage of
its early start and relied on a combination of social media and mass media
coverage to make the team’s quest visible to the vast audience of potential
participants. But GTRI’s network size
from three weeks of recruiting was far
smaller than the network the MIT team
recruited in three days. While difficult
to determine the causes (such as motivational incentives and social connections), the wide range of responses
to the MIT and GTRI teams shows the
great variability in dissemination that
is somewhat characteristic of social
media today.
The iSchools team mined publicly
available information through Twitter to identify balloon sightings. In
this sense, the team did not offer any
motivation or incentives to attract
the Challenge
demonstrated
that geospatial
intelligence
is potentially
available to anyone
with an internet
connection, not
just to government
intelligence
analysts.
people to help the team but exploited
information people made public voluntarily. The advent of social media
tools has made a wealth of information
publicly available, and the iSchools
team’s strategy demonstrated that this
information could be mined to tackle a
time-urgent problem. While the strategies of the MIT and GTRI teams relied
on social media tools to quickly extend
their reach to people who could help
solve the problem, the iSchools’ data-mining strategy would have been impossible without the social networking
tools that elicited data to be made publicly available in the first place.
However, since the information
providers had no motivation to help
the iSchools team win, the team had
perhaps the most challenging job of
identifying accurate sightings among
the wide range of noisy information
circulating through Twitter. The team
was able to identify five balloons simply
through publicly available information, performing better than many
teams that actively recruited members. Its approach is most relevant
for tackling problems where advance
preparation, direct recruiting, and
financial incentives are inappropriate.
Together, the three teams exhibited a range of strategies that relied on
intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and
proactive recruiting or reactive data
mining. While social networking tools
played a role (to varying degrees) in
data collection for all teams, the data
generated could not be trusted without
first verifying its accuracy. The teams’
strategies for validation also varied
but relied largely on analyzing the internal consistency of the data or independently verifying balloon sightings,
often through social networking tools
or trusted social connections. The MIT
team’s approach enabled it to solve the
game-like problem within a day, while
the iSchools team had planned for
more extensive data-mining tools that
would be useful in a more long-lived
challenge. Comparing the teams highlights the different ways social media
were used to recruit participants, collect balloon sightings, and validate balloon sighting data.
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