… Sweetened with a little Airigami fun

Help us find the 10 Red Balloons this December 5, 2009 for the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge and we’ll celebrate the 40th birthday of the internet in style by building a giant flying cupcake out of balloons! While you’re hunting for DARPA’s balloons, we’ll provide the snacks.  There will also be ten balloon cupcakes flying in various cities, and we’re providing the prizes for those.

Challenge #1: The DARPA Challenge

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.  (from http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/)

Challenge #2: The Cupcake challenge

This challenge will echo the DARPA aims but with an artistic and – let’s face it – somewhat silly take on balloons:  ten balloon artists across the U.S. will create and launch flying cupcake balloon sculptures on Saturday, and people finding these can win prizes by reporting sightings and submitting photos here.  Of course, this is in addition to the DARPA challenge. We want you to report cupcake findings, but don’t forget the weather balloons!

Almost 18 years ago, Larry started an online community, BalloonHQ, that unites thousands of balloon artists from around the world. These days, the projects that get most of his attention are those that involve large communities in giant, interactive sculptures. How could we ignore this challenge created by DARPA?

We need your help

If you happen to spot an official red DARPA balloon either in person, online, or on your local news coverage and want to help us out, just fill in the form below (form will be live during the contest dates) with as much information as possible. We’ll be instantly alerted. If you prefer, you can contact us by email or phone.

There’s no way to know where the red balloons will be. There may be one in your city, but you can’t really plan for it. All you can do is keep your eyes open on December 5, 2009. If you see one, you can report it back to us. The balloons will only be available for a maximum of nine hours that day, weather permitting. The balloons may be released a day later if weather or some other interference is encountered. The plan is for all balloons to be released at 10:00 AM EST and they’ll remain visible until 4:00 PM local time.

To help identify the balloons, DARPA has posted photos of the 8′ red balloons. They have said they’ll be in accessible areas, visible from major roads. They may have a DARPA name and/or logo on them. We will post additional indentifying information as soon as it becomes available. They also said that all of the balloons will be accompanied by an official that will be able to present credentials to verify the legitimacy of a balloon. None of this is secret. It shouldn’t be hard to find. They’re performing a social media experiment, so they want the balloons to be found. What they’re interested in is the dynamic of people sharing the information. If you send the exact location to us as soon as you find one or possibly even see it on your local news or something like that, let us know. We’ll submit the location. What qualifies as exact location? Address, GPS coordinates, intersection. Anything that can be used to get someone to that location is good enough to convert to the format we need.

Why should you help the Airigami team?

This should be a fun experiment. It will require the attentiveness of a lot of people and therefore a lot of people should be able to enjoy the fruits of a completed project.

DARPA is offering a $40,000 prize to the first individual that reports the locations of all the balloons (or the largest number of them). The money should go toward a community project that everyone can enjoy. It should be a project in the spirit of the challenge. It should unite people across the country, celebrating the Internet, social media, and balloon art.

We want to build a flying birthday cupcake made of balloons. The $40K will go to covering the cost of creating the sculpture and housing the participating artists in the project. If we win, those of you that help us find the balloons will also be invited, expenses to be covered by the prize money, to take part in the project.

It’s a ‘logical’ extension of the plans to use the $40,000 prize to build a giant flying cupcake balloon sculpture. Besides the hundreds who would help build it, thousands would see it fly in the sky, and perhaps millions more could view the whole process online with streaming web cams and YouTube videos via the Internet – that way, everyone would get a piece of the pie (er, I mean, cupcake).

Sweetening the pot

We have been called the ‘naive and fluffy’ team (UK’s The Register), and the Flying Cupcake Challenge reinforces that. While people are out there searching for the DARPA balloons, they’ll probably want a snack. Keep an eye out for the ten cupcake balloon sculptures flying around the country. We’ll have a form online here for you to submit and upload photos of your cupcake sightings. Unlike that other contest, we’re not going to make you find all of them.  Just report the ones you do find. Winners of various prizes, like T-shirts, posters, and balloon art books will be selected randomly from those that submit findings.

Larry’s history of community projects -- what you can expect when we win

Larry gave a talk recently on building community with balloons. It outlined his history of creating communities, online and off. A video of that talk can be seen below to give you an idea of what you can expect if you help us win.