Coase’s Penguin, ReCAPTCHA and OpenStreetMap in Haiti
Are you familiar with Coase's Penguin? The paper discusses a model for the emerging economy in this information age. It demonstrates how rogue packs of volunteers beat out organized PhDs or giant, wealthy corporations. Linux vs. Windows, Wikipedia vs. Britannica, you get the idea.
This 18 minute TED Talk by the author is well presented with phenomenal content and I highly recommend it. http://www.ted.com/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html
The Human Computation aspect reminds me of Luis von Ahn from CMU, including ReCAPTCHA which digitizes old books by piggybacking on the human verification step when you buy front row tickets to that Lady Gaga concert. This 12 minute video is informative and entertaining. His work in Games With A Purpose (GWAPs) is fascinating as well.
I just discovered Coase's Penguin in a talk about the monumental volunteer efforts after the Haiti earthquake. Within a couple weeks after the quake what was virtually a blank map of Haiti on OpenStreetMap was transformed into a detailed, highly accurate, real-time resource used by rescue teams on the ground. For free. By volunteers. This video is 15 minutes well spent.http://opengeodata.org/bravo-osm-haiti-editors-you-saved-lives
In 30 seconds you can see the map edits in the two weeks following the quake.
OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
p.s. Coase's Penguin is the seminal paper by Yochai Benkler, a professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and author of The Wealth of Networks. It was written in 2002 but is still highly germane today. I'm amazed this is the first I've heard of it. Apparently I've been busy for the past 8 years. http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
tk
