Forty years later, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off a contest asking teams to locate the longitudes and latitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned in stationary locations across the continental United States. Although the contest was officially open for seven days, it only took nine hours for the team from MIT to locate all 10 balloons, winning the competition and $40,000 in prize money.
The goal of the project wasn't to see who could answer the question, but how. More specifically, "the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems."
Now that MIT has won, DARPA plans to meet with teams to review various approaches and strategies used to build networks and collect information.
In the MIT team's case, it looks like they had a pretty solid information infrastructure set up prior to the contest even starting. Potential team members could sign up to join the team from the group's Web site and then invite friends using their own identifiable link. The tracking link makes it easy for the team to distribute the winning funds to not just the people that identified a balloon, but the person who invited them to join the team in the first place.
The site also had a form where team members could enter in balloon locations or even DARPA coordinates. MIT also encouraged team members to post their personalized invitation links to sites like Facebook and Twitter.