Research Notes

The other day I was chatting with some folks at Berkman and this idea came up as a possibly fun and quirky experimental project. It’s not fully fleshed out,  but maybe this can inspire more conversations to turn it into something feasible.

The goal of the project is to crate an Internet contraption that, in the spirit of a Rube Goldberg machine, runs on its own after having started it. It will be completely funded, defined, and carried out by the Internet using today’s micro-funding and micro-tasks platforms.  The project would be the embodiment of crowdsourcing — it will both celebrate it and problematize it.

The creators of the contraption, will have very little say in the final project itself.  Their role would be to define its stages and to set the structure that will hopefully lead to something awesome. Here is how it might work: Read the rest of this entry »