Communications - April 2011

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.