The Frontiers of Network-Enabled Collaboration

DARPA is funding a number of projects to explore new technologies, tools, and techniques for online collaboration. On December 5, 2009, DARPA researchers hoisted ten large, tethered red balloons at ten different public sites across the US and offered a reward of $40,000 to the first team who could find them. Dozens of teams, some with thousands of people, used Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to share clues, coordinate their search, and double-check their findings. The experiment revealed a great deal about how large teams can self-assemble online, how team members can be motivated, and how information (and disinformation) can spread through social networks. This is just one of several DARPA-funded investigations of large online collaborations. By February, 2011, there will new results from these other projects to report as well. (Since it is unlikely that DARPA staff would be able to travel to AAAS meetings outside the Washington area, the 2011 annual meeting is a unique opportunity to involve DARPA project leaders in AAAS panels.) If, due to scheduling conflicts that develop, Norman Whitaker is not available, Peter Lee, the head of TCTO, would be an alternate.