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The search for ten balloons: Riley Crane crowdsources his way to discovery

Kiley Lambert ( Bio / Posts ) | Thursday, January 27, 2011 UTC

The DARPA Network Challenge: “Be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States.” Although Riley Crane found out about the contest only four days before it started, four days, eight hours, and 52 minutes later he and his fellow MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, had won it. A postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Media Lab, Crane devised a system that allowed his team to harness the power of individual social networks by crowdsourcing the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge.

“It was a great network and winning the challenge was fun, but the real question is: what can we use it for?” Crane said. “If we want to see new things happen that are going to blow our minds, we need to start to really rethinking the way we communicate. If we do, the world will become really responsive to large-scale change.”

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