The 2009 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Network Challenge was a prize competition for exploring the roles the Internet and social networking play in the real-time communications, wide-area collaborations, and practical actions required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. In the competition, teams had to locate ten red balloons placed around the United States and then report their findings to DARPA. Due to the distributed nature of the contest, many teams used online resources, such as social media sites, to gather information or to recruit people that would look for balloons. Even though DARPA was prepared to deploy the balloons for a second day and accept submissions for up to a week until a team found all 10 balloons, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team won the competition in under 9 hours. (Source: Wikipedia.org)

MIT, the winner of the DARPA challenge, subsequently determined that "The key to mobilizing large numbers of people is incentives." Read the article Searching for balloons in a social network on the MIT website for details about the study, the methodology behind the winning strategy, and insights about mobilizing people networks through a strategy of recursive incentivization.

"We live in this web of social relationships, and a lot of what we do and the satisfaction we derive comes from the web of social relationships. So if you want to get people to coordinate or change their behavior, you have to first and foremost deal with the existing web of relationships, rather than treat people as isolated individuals."

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, director of the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory