Program for the Future Challenge

The winners shown below, chosen by a distinguished panel of judges, are outstanding examples of tools to help people work together better, make better decisions together or solve tougher problems together to create a better world.  The final winner(s) of the Program for the Future Challenge will be chosen in a few weeks by staff from The Tech Museum and other participating museums, after the entrants have time to develop "demos" or museum exhibits for their entries. The project that won the Engelbart Award, HealthMap, is a web platform that combines official and informal (e.g. Google News) sources for an up-to-the-minute global map of human and animal diseases.  The platform has been recognized as a leading indicator of disease outbreaks such as the H1N1 flu. The Engelbart Prize carries an award of $1000 USD.   In addition to the five semi-finalists, other projects deemed worthy of honorable mention by the judges and/or the conference organizers are Charity Connect, The Synergy Engine,  Transit Everywhere, Bloomer--Collective Intelligence,  Intelligent Web,  Fair-Share Spending and Hugging Media.

Dr. Douglas Engelbart (right) congratulates Clark Freifeld, a co- author of the HealthMap project via Skype (photo by Bill Daul).

The Program for the Future Challenge Semi-Finalists

	HealthMap: Global Disease Alert Map	John Brownstein, Harvard Medical School; Clark Freifeld, Mass. General Hospital; et al.
Engelbart Prize Winner		HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
	Your Health vs. The Crowd	Alex Carmichael, Cure Together
		How does your health compare to thousands of other people? This interactive exhibit will compare visitors' biometrics with all other visitors, and allow people to look up recommendations from the crowd for how to deal with a number of health conditions, drawing on the wealth of data collected at CureTogether.com.
	The Deliberatorium: Towards Large-Scale Structured Deliberation	Mark Klein, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
		Large numbers of people view, comment on, rate, and contribute issues, ideas, pros, and cons for solving a complex multi-disciplinary challenge in a way that enables radically improved signal-to-noise ratios, encourages evidence-based reasoning, and allows effective allocation of community attention.
	Sourcemap	Leonardo Bonanni, MIT Media Lab
		A web tool for understanding where things come from and what they are made of in order to foster an informed discussion around the issues of environmental and social sustainability.
	Dreamfish: a global work cooperative	Tiffany von Emmell, Dreamfish
		A global work cooperative, we are building a work world for all that alleviates poverty and empowers the disadvantaged through microenterprise development networking. Women entrepreneurs moving out of poverty, unemployed professionals, elders starting next career, young independents making a difference - All are welcome to dreamfish.com.

To see the current entries or add a new one, go to
http://thetechvirtual.org/projects/program-for-the-future/program-for-the-future-challenge

The judging criteria for the Challenge entries, determined by a distinguished panel of advisors, are in three parts:

Your Method, Tool or Technology

• Can your innovation be a stepping stone towards enabling people to solve an important problem?
• Does your innovation promote communication and collaboration? 
• Will your innovation enable changes in the way people work together that will lead to better decisions or outcomes?
• Does your innovation scale, continuing to support better outcomes even as more people use it? 
• Does your innovation have the potential to change social and cultural practices for the better? 

Your Demo 

• Is your demo hands-on and interactive? Is the museum visitor's experience an improvement over Web access? 
• Does your demo adequately explain how and why your method, tool or technology works? 
• Will your demo inspire others? 

Your Plan for Impact 

• Is your plan likely to lead to successful adoption and widespread dissemination?
• Would winning a prize make a significant difference to your innovation’s potential impact? 
• Does your plan favor community contribution and global connection?

Many really interesting ideas have been submitted, but few have a well-developed idea for a demo (a.k.a. museum exhibit).  Apparently, developing collective intelligence tools and museum exhibits require quite different skill sets.  Who knew?  The advisors have therefore decided to split the judging process in two: deciding first on the merits of only the "method, tool or technology" and the "plan for impact."  Judging the merits of the demo will not occur until about a month later, in coordination with the sponsoring museums (The Tech Museum, the MIT Museum and Science Centre Singapore).

Accordingly, we are giving entrants an **EXTENSION** of about a month (details coming soon) to complete their demos.  This will not; however; change the Feb. 8 deadline to enter; describe your method, tool or technology; and your plan for impact.  The selection of the first stage of judging (but not the final winners) will be announced at CoLABoration 2010, the second Program for the Future Conference, on March 3.  The final winners will be announced a month or two later.

Finally, speaking of the PFTF Conference on March 3, it will be a collaboration mash-up.  At CoLABoration 2010, we are experimenting with Doug Engelbart's idea of "co-evolution" -- by bringing together technology leaders with experts in human facilitation and representatives of many disciplines -- all focused on improving collaborative techniques.  Can you help us fire up the global brain?  Our  goal is to launch a collaborative community that will become an intentional neural network for global problem solving.  Humanity could find innovative ways to handle our world crises (not to mention our day-to-day problems)  if we all could put our heads together and our egos out of the way.

Because it will be focused on doing collaboration not just talking about it, attendance will be limited.  If you would like to attend in person at The Tech Museum in San Jose, please fill out this application and we will contact you.  We will announce plans for virtual participation soon.  For more information, see programforthefuture.org/conference.