2009 Post-Mortem Chat Transcript
This is the transcript of the public chat held on Sunday Dec 6th between members of many DARPA Network Challenge teams. It has been edited for clarity. DeciNena team members have a DN after their name.
Other teams with a speaking part here were:
DeciNena, Airigami, Red40k, nerdfighters, 10balloonies/Groundspeak and robogreg/Facebook Darpa Network Challenge Search Group
Some others may have been lurking without speaking.
17:04:20 lmcelhiney (DN) I saw online that DARPA is going to interview "all" of the teams to see what worked and what didn't. Did anyone else use the Wave?
17:04:31 cwho(DN) I was speaking with a friend on Friday night. He did not think the money split was motivating. We came up with a proposed payout scheme very similar to MIT's in our phone call. You needed to pay for the two things we needed. Recruiting and spotting. We only really paid for spotting.
17:05:10 cwho(DN) Of course they had the benefit of being a non profit or otherwise paid team orginaizers which helped
17:05:11 rchern (DN) the Wave being GWave?
17:05:36 TillerBee/(DN) That's true cwho.
17:06:09 lmcelhiney (DN) I read that the notice was given in October. MIT is VERY on top of this sort of challenged, however, the GeoCachers had a War Room with at least 9 computers running ,
17:06:14 TillerBee/(DN) I noticed that the MIT and the GeoCachers were all in one room.
17:06:43 rchern (DN) I only found out about it Friday afternoon via the CNN article.
17:06:45 TillerBee/(DN) For the people on GWAVE, did you think it worked well?
17:06:53 lmcelhiney (DN) Well, their control centers were--it was the network that made them what they were.
17:07:44 TillerBee/(DN) rchern, was the Mountain Lady's comment about the team that drew you in?
17:07:52 rchern (DN) GWave is great.
17:07:55 cwho(DN) How many baloons did we spot with feet on the pavement and how many were cyber spotted?
17:08:22 rchern (DN) i didn't read the comments :o
17:08:22 lmcelhiney (DN) I'd never used the Wave before, but I thought that it worked admirably. That is why a bit more time with training and communication techniques might have helped. And then, to recruit some really devious folks for disinformation!
17:08:29 TillerBee/(DN) I had a lot of trouble with in on my iMac with FireFox. It wouldn't scroll very well and dumped me off a few times.
17:08:58 DeciNena (DN) I have now posted the DeciNena Post-Mortem outline: http://decinena.com/content/2009-post-mortem-outline
17:09:04 TillerBee/(DN) DeciNena, do you have the Aspen balloon image still?
17:09:06 rchern (DN) Google had a bit of a maintenance issue there towards the end. Not the best timing...
17:09:44 TillerBee/(DN) I thought DARPA's site was pretty good and the way the coordinates stayed in the table for quick submissions was great.
17:10:16 lmcelhiney (DN) I have a couple of Macs here, both running pre-3.5 FF and it went well until I would get a "script has stopped running on this page" error. I had to restart FF once.
17:10:47 TillerBee/(DN) Are we going to look for ideas to make the next contest? You're leaving this site up, right?
17:11:01 rchern (DN) I keep hearing people say GWave lags for them. I've had absolutely no issues on Vista or Win7 with Chrome. Sad that people have issues.
17:11:11 TillerBee/(DN) lmcelhiney (DN), I just knew I liked you! I got that script error a few times also.
17:11:31 lmcelhiney (DN) GeoCacher Team had beer on the their war room table before 1:30PM (in some TZ)
17:11:57 TillerBee/(DN) That was in the picture they posted, wasn't it?
17:12:31 John/Red40k.com So, I notice that you traded your locations with other teams to get closer to the goal. I had a clause in my rules that prohibited me from trading.
17:12:58 lmcelhiney (DN) TillerBee/: Yep.
17:12:59 TillerBee/(DN) John, do you have your rules posted?
17:13:03 DeciNena (DN) John, what was the motivation for that clause?
17:13:25 John/Red40k.com They are still up at my site, linked through the wrap up I posted.
17:13:33 rchern (DN) http://red40k.com/rules.html
17:14:35 John/Red40k.com I wanted people to feel secure in posting their locations with me. I didn't want them to think that I would just repost their locations to other teams to try to get a prize myself.
17:15:27 kurtisnelson I am very mad at myself for not spotting the one in Centenial Olympic Park, I am at GA Tech.
17:16:05 TillerBee/(DN) John, I read through your page. Nice writeup.
17:17:17 TillerBee/(DN) John, I think there had to be a lot of trust on team like ours where we were not a cohesive group before the contest. We all mostly met online.
17:18:12 rchern (DN) Sure. An interesting aspect of the challenge itself.
17:18:57 lmcelhiney (DN) [b]DeciNena[/b] How many folks from our Yahoo group were involved?
17:19:39 John/Red40k.com I did not even attempt to create a network at all. I felt like many people who knew about the challenge but were not part of other teams would find it easy to post with me.
17:20:41 facilitator Ok, so we'll go ahead and start. If you want to ask a question, wait for someone to say Done, and then ask away. I'll choose the question and report it, and if you have an answer, say "answer" and I'll name who should go ahead and answer.
17:20:50 facilitator We'll start with Larry's question.
17:21:12 DeciNena (DN) Larry, we had 150 total site members.
17:21:21 DeciNena (DN) A few of those were foreign team members.
17:21:43 DeciNena (DN) I noted a very few who mentioned Kryptos YahooGroup affiliation, but I would guess it was lass than half a dozen.
17:22:46 kurtisnelson DN What happened with the confusion on the 8th balloon?
17:22:56 kurtisnelson DN What went wrong
17:23:18 John/Red40k.com did other teams experience many false balloon location submissions?
17:23:38 DeciNena (DN) I'll answer that
17:24:07 DeciNena (DN) We did not find the 8th balloon ourself. We 'found' 1-4 and 9 without the help of other teams.
17:24:44 DeciNena (DN) We knew geocachers claimed to have found it in person and that it was very difficult. Other teams were claiming to have found it, but geocachers claimed they were probably wrong.
17:25:31 DeciNena (DN) We traded another team, I can look and see who it is, to get #8. It was our second-to-last number we got (last was #10 from Larry/Airigami/Cupcake).
17:26:22 DeciNena (DN) We had heard of a balloon in Michigan, and had seen a photo of it, and it looked bogus. Wrong kind of Balloon, too high, etc. And when we got the coordinates from the other team, we figured they were wrong.
17:27:23 DeciNena (DN) We demanded more proof from our trade partner and they sent a photo. The photo showed a sleeveless balloon, too high, with too small of a number-pennant that was equilateral instead of long isoceles. We knew it was wrong, but files with it anyway just in case.
17:28:04 DeciNena (DN) We continued to try to trade another team for a real #8. We approached the MIT-CSAIL team (MIT had about 4 teams, but Media Lab was the biggest) as well as geocachers.
17:28:48 DeciNena (DN) Geocachers had already closed their war-room for the night (I do not understand why) and didn't reply. They had the real #8. :( MIT-CSAIL was negotiating with us and getting the #8 info they had when we found out that MIT-MediaLab had won.
17:28:58 DeciNena (DN) I do not know if MIT-CSAIL had the right #8 anyway.
17:29:11 lmcelhiney (DN) Have you had any queries from DARPA yet? Has a list been posted?
17:30:04 facilitator From John40k: did other teams experience many false balloon location submissions?
17:31:53 DeciNena (DN) I'm trying to think if we had any false submissions. Let me check the list...
17:34:09 DeciNena (DN) Ok, we did have a couple of bogus submissions.
17:34:12 DeciNena (DN) http://decinena.com/content/kroeger-food-and-drug-blacklick-oh
17:34:19 DeciNena (DN) Another at Mall of America.
17:34:39 DeciNena (DN) Another in Ohio that I now realize might have been our very own decoy #9. I will have to check the coordinates to be sure.
17:35:22 Goddess of Cupc We did
17:35:32 Goddess of Cupc Larry- you want to take this?
17:35:39 Airigami/Cupcak yes. we had quite a few. Almost all of them we were able to eliminate very quickly.
17:35:49 Airigami/Cupcak That was actually where we were strongest.
17:36:16 Airigami/Cupcak We didn't necessarily have people that were finding balloons, but we could easily check the sitings.
17:36:30 Airigami/Cupcak The one that was odd was that so many people were saying that they couldn't find 10 and it was the first one we found.
17:37:05 Airigami/Cupcak So we submitted it, in the end with others we were fairly certain were wrong, just to make sure we had a reasonably complete entry.
17:37:29 TheMike Stratofox admitted to planting some bogus balloons.
17:37:50 Airigami/Cupcak So, I'm curious about why 10 was sucha problem. Our spotter said her only difficulty was that there were too many people there. It was a very crowded evet, so I was surprised there weren't more reports of it.
17:38:59 John/Red40k.com I got only 2 balloon submissions that were partial.
17:39:46 John/Red40k.com I knew that they were most likely wrong, but didn't have good reports on those balloons, so submitted them anyway.
17:40:58 John/Red40k.com I had bogus reports on balloons 1 and 7.
17:42:02 John/Red40k.com 1 was supposedly in chicago, 7 was purported to be in erie indiana
17:42:49 John/Red40k.com I had valid reports on balloons 2,3,5,and 9.
17:43:33 John/Red40k.com the submittors all described a paper with the coordinates on it, and I talked to them on the phone to verrify that the coordinates they submitted were from the paper.
17:45:12 lmcelhiney (DN) Have you had any queries from DARPA yet? Has a list been posted?
17:47:01 BreakingCodes ( DARPA stated that they'll be interviewing some of the teams to find out methods, strategies, issues, etc. [Done.]
17:47:18 DeciNena (DN) DeciNena has not been contacted by DARPA yet.
17:47:50 rchern (DN) For the 2nd half of Larry's question, I saw somewhere (forget where now) that DARPA would be releasing more info on Monday.
17:48:06 DeciNena (DN) We filed different reports through different e-mails just for convenience (which team member was avialable to file at the time) so we don't know who they will contact. But we don't believe they are contacting anyone yet.
17:49:27 Airigami/Cupcak I'd like to ask about people's motivations. Everyone talked about the money. But was it really the hope of winnign money, giving it to charity? was it the game aspect? PR? What did people really join for?
17:50:18 cwho(DN) My personal motivation was that I knew the DN team leader. I think that personal ties are important in social networking but that we needed to do more, taking a page out of some of the policial playbooks
17:50:44 cwho(DN) Also, we needed to push the money for spotting a baloon more. Everyone secretly thinks they will win
17:52:26 TheMike My list of teams that came close is 10balloonies (8/10), ispyaredballoon (9/10)and Fark (8/10). ArmyofEyes was claming 9/10 fairly early. Any others??
17:52:46 BreakingCodes ( My motivation was about the same as DARPA's: to see how such a collaboration would work on such short notice. I can imagine lots of uses for something like this (think Amber Alert, etc.). I had no illusions of making any money with hundreds of thousands of partipants involved.
17:54:06 lmcelhiney (DN) I was recruited up front by a known and trusted fellow from the Mountain Time Zone. But, had I known about it in any other way, I would have tried to join up. I like the teamwork toward a common goal (hence Yahoo!Group KRYPTOS) and it was a great opportunity to see how all of the Social networking interacted.
17:54:51 lmcelhiney (DN) Money was NEVER on the plate for me. [Done]
17:55:26 DeciNena (DN) The money would have been nice for me too, but really it was about the game, and experimenting with the operations.
17:56:11 DeciNena (DN) I had an enormously fun time, and learned a ton about the technology and the operations (how to coordinate and motivate people).
17:56:49 DeciNena (DN) Really, I think the money was most useful as an incentive to people in the rest of the team. We were trying to recruit Joe Q Public types, and in theory, money talks.
17:57:43 DeciNena (DN) Although MIT-MediaLab's Pryamid/MLM scheme appears to have been more successful at motivating people to recruit because of the 2nd and 3rd and nth degree of Bacon principle. I never heard their final team size, but I thought it was a couple thousand, and evidently it gave them the edge.
17:58:21 DeciNena (DN) I think DN did extremely well for only being around 10 organizers and 130 more team members, none of whom shared a physical space with each other during the contest.
17:58:36 TheMike MIT just sent out an email saying their team was well into the thousands.
17:59:05 Airigami/Cupcak I thought the money thing was an interesting piece. But like others here have said, it wasn't my motivation either.
17:59:22 Airigami/Cupcak I knew I had a huge network of people that I've knwon for years.
17:59:56 Airigami/Cupcak about 2500 total, 1500 very active in my world (balloonhq). But I knew I had to motivate them somehow.
18:00:12 Airigami/Cupcak offering money didn't seem like it would work since the odds of being the spotter were small.
18:00:32 Airigami/Cupcak so I reallyw as wondering about the social dynamic and was curious if offering a community event would be appealing.
18:00:51 Airigami/Cupcak I knew the way for me to build my team more was with media. I put that to the test and was quite hapy.
18:01:31 Airigami/Cupcak so I had a huge team. But in the end, it served more to rally the balloon industry together on a big project than solve the actual problem at hand.
18:01:59 John/Red40k.com I was in it for the money.
18:03:01 John/Red40k.com pure and simple... I had early hopes that I could tie into some other projects that I am working on. but I have a bunch of debt that I need to pay off.
18:03:51 John/Red40k.com I had no other team members working with me, and I would have kept all of my share.
18:04:26 rchern (DN) For me, money was definitely a motivation. I did recognize my chances of getting any money was very slim.
18:04:36 rchern (DN) The challenge was intriguing.
18:05:13 rchern (DN) Thinking about ways to confirm reports found on twitter or other sites.
18:05:46 rchern (DN) I was very curious to see how things would play out, and I'm looking forward to more details that DARPA releases.
18:06:04 trueblue joins DeciNena Chatroom
18:07:37 Airigami/Kelly I was just curious how many other teams had women as leads/organizers-
18:08:26 John/Red40k.com not me... I was alone
18:08:44 TheMike ispyaredballoon.com... GA Tech had a least one woman on the organizing team.
18:09:19 TheMike The were no humans on the MIT Media Team.
18:09:28 Airigami/Kelly hahahah
18:09:33 rchern (DN) lol
18:09:37 lmcelhiney (DN) Wonderful!
18:09:46 DeciNena (DN) DeciNena had Rebecca and TillerBee/Jane very active as organizers.
18:10:24 TheMike The War Room at 10balloonies had a couple of women.
