SciStarter Blog

CrowdScanner: A social media experiment in crowdsourcing. (Join our team, today!)

If you see Chuck, take a picture and upoad it, today!

How can social media be used to accomplish a seemingly impossible task? Today, a social experiment called the “Tag Challenge” sends 5 individuals to roam the streets of New York, DC, Bratislava, Stockholm, and London. The task is to locate them before the sun sets based only on their mugshots. You can contribute by taking and uploading pictures of these individuals if you see them, or even just inviting others to participate!
The $5000 prize will be distributed among the participants, to those who submit pictures as well as those who recruit.

For the CrowdScanner team (which includes SciStarter),  the challenge is a chance to study how information propagates through social networks and what it takes for a message to go viral. The lessons we  learn will help us understand successes and failures of social media in recent events. You can become part of the challenge and help the study by joining our team at www.crowdscanner.net

For more info, or to sign up, go to:
https://bit.ly/H4JXtG

Who’s the CrowdScanner team?
The team consists of a group of researchers from MIT, UCSD, Masdar Institute, and University of Southampton (including the guys who won the Red Balloon challenge).

What’s Tag Challenge?
Tag Challenge is a competition to acquire pictures of 5 volunteers, each in public in a different major city, in a single day. Due to its geographically distributed nature, the competition can only be won by the crowd-sourced efforts of people like you and me. More at http://www.tag-challenge.com