Submitted by Jenni Lieberman on Dec 09, 2009, 02:30 PM

The 2009 DARPA challenge sought to examine how people use social networks to solve problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the winning solution involved using cash payouts as an incentive for information-sharing. While the MIT team that won the prize was innovative in its approach, I am really curious what a solution without a cash-incentive would look like. Could we efficiently and creatively use existent networks to solve puzzles? There have been fun, isolated incidents. For example, there was the 2008 game in which artists painted Where's Waldo on a rooftop and then let the world find him with Google Earth. Are there any other examples of this kind of play? Anyone studying what we can learn from it? I find it inspiring.

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Inspiring?!?
Posted on Dec 09, 2009-03:57pm by nknouf
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The fact that DARPA was enrolling people (using monetary rewards) to willingly take part in a war game and then use that data to, as their materials say, "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems" is inspiring?  I'm flabbergasted.  DARPA was simulating war and/or terrorist attacks---nothing more, no matter their rhetoric. 

On the most basic level there are severe ethical issues at work here with respect to human subjects research, something that, from the information I can find, the MIT team did not take into consideration.  I see no evidence that their experiment was approved by the MIT IRB.  Payouts of this amount raise very troubling issues.  (Behavioral economics experiments have been difficult to get IRB approval for for precisely this reason.)  The MIT team collected username, e-mail address, and IP addresses, something prohibited by HIPAA regulations.  The legal issues here are enormous.

But even more important are the ethical concerns.  Why should we be supporting the further militarization of society by lauding a DARPA war game involving civilians?  Why aren't we denouncing an event that is put on by an agency engaged in state-sponsored lethal violence?