Crowdsourced Problem Solving

Postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Media Lab Riley Crane discusses his team's experience in a competition that required them to put the crowdsourcing and social media capabilities of new technology to find ten red weather balloons located randomly across America.

Riley Crane explores the new responsiveness of the world that is a product of the world wide web which connects people, places and things. However, Riley Crane notes that regardless of crowdsourcing abilities, there are problems that require coordination and collaboration that are not solved with those new technologies.

Riley Crane and his team were successful in the balloon challenge by creating an online network linking people looking as well, and takes the lessons from that competition and applies them to real world problems. The new methods of keeping in touch with other people not only help us keep in touch with our close friends, or strong ties, but also our weak ties, creating entirely new communication paradigms and strengthening the power of our networks.