“Why do we collaborate?” - A Special Post for "COLLABORATION"

We really enjoyed listening to the recorded podcast of July 12, 2013 for the TED Radio Hour. The topic immediately grabbed our attention, as we're sure you’ll see why. 

The title was: “Why do we collaborate?”

We encourage you to read the overview of this session and then listen to the interviews, which include:

1. An interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia – an online collaborative encyclopaedia built through the efforts of individuals who volunteer to lend their expertise to it’s development.
2. Next, Luis Von Ahn describes the unique and creative approaches used in his Duolingo project, teaching students languages by getting them to translate the web. This is something that we found to be fascinating and we've added some additional notes below!
3. Clay Shirky, provides some great ideas on how our free time can be used more creatively to increase civic value.
4. The discussion with Jason Fried may spark passionate argument between those on either side of the flexible work environments debate. Jason explains why the workplace is often so unproductive and proposes an alternative.
5. And then Jennifer Pahlka weighs in on the role that citizens have to not only be consumers of government services, but to become actively involved and pro-active in making desired changes a reality.
   

All of the above interviews can be heard on the NPR Website at:
      http://www.npr.org/2013/07/13/197986218/why-we-collaborate


Foot Notes: 

Louis von Ahn is an associate professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and he's at the forefront of the crowdsourcing craze. His work takes advantage of the evergrowing Web-connected population to acheive collaboration in unprecedented numbers. His projects aim to leverage the crowd for human good. His company reCAPTCHA, sold to Google in 2009, digitizes human knowledge (books), one word at a time. His new project is Duolingo, which aims to get 100 million people translating the Web in every major language.

Quotes by Luis von Ahn

“Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I’ve just shown you a project where we’ve gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.”

“Every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book.”

“The current business model for language education is the student pays — in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world’s population doesn’t have $500.”

“The question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 [people], what can we do with 100 million?”

Sourced from http://www.ted.com/speakers/luis_von_ahn.html