Open Sourcing Project 10^100?
November 25, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
Do you remember Google’s Project 10 to the 100th? In the autumn of 2008 Google asked us all to submit ‘ideas that would change the World’. More than 170,000 of us did just that across 170 countries. We submitted the ColaLife idea. The plan was that Google would select the top 100 ideas and ask people to vote on them. The top 5 would share $10m to implement their idea. Inspirational! Unfortunately, after a very long delay Google backed off their original vision and turned something quite extraordinary into something very, very ordinary.
Backing off the original vision was bad enough but, more seriously, 170,000 ideas have simply disappeared. Only Google knows what they are.
Enter the wonderful people at project10tothe100now.org who have set up a website where those of us who submitted ideas to Google can submit them again but this time where everyone can see them! They also have a Facebook Group.
So if you submitted an idea to Google which is now trapped in Google’s servers somewhere, free it! Submit it here.
Google back off from original vision
September 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · 12 Comments
My Twitter search on Project 10 100 just started to yield results. With great excitement I rushed to my PC to see this:
Is ColaLife one of the 100 semi-finalists? No it isn’t. But hang on, there are not 100 semi-finalists! Google have changed the rules of the game!
There won’t be 100 concrete ideas to vote on, but 16 broad-brush themes. It now looks like a programme that a government or an aid agency would announce. Each theme is huge and it seems to me would need a lot more than a share of $10 million to make a significant impression. As an example, the first theme is ‘Help social entrepreneurs drive change‘ and within that is the idea to ‘Create a non-profit, venture capital-like revolving fund to invest in high-impact local entrepreneurs’. Nothing wrong with that idea, but it has been done. In the UK we have just such a scheme - UnLtd - which is wonderful. But UnLtd was set up with a £100 million endowment, not a $2 million investment.
Project 10 to the 100th has morphed. It’s not going to give 100 individual and amazing ideas the oxygen of publicity they need to become a reality. Perhaps that notion was just too innovative and too ambitious. It looks like we’re going to get a modest amount of additional funding with the traditional four or five key themes that existing organisations will bid for.
It turns out that Project 10^100 has been a bit of a distraction for ColaLife. We now need to move on and vigorously explore other options to make our idea a reality.
Onwards and upwards.
ColaLife featured on the Project 10^100 NOW Blog
August 7, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments
Hats off to Evan Kroske who has started a campaign to get Google to commit to an announcement date for their 10th anniversary competition which has been postponed twice and is currently postponed indefinitely.
It’s true that Google have been somewhat overwhelmed by the number of responses they have received (150,000 in 20+ different languages) but there are many who think they should have ‘open sourced’ the selection process in some way.
Anyway, Evan was generous enough to mention ColaLife as an example of the task Google have taken on - see the blog post and comments here.
He also points to a Digg video interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google, who said that Google will be making some announcements regarding Project 10^100 this fall. In the interview, Mayer said “We’ll be making some announcements coming up this fall to close the process, get the public vote going, and ultimately decide on the winning idea or ideas.” See the full response here. The question starts 7min 20 secs in:
We have made a lot of progress since we submitted our idea to Google way back in October 2008. But we still Google’s help. Here’s why.
And . . . just to finish off . . . let’s remind ourselves what ColaLife is all about:
What others are saying about ColaLife- ColaLife on Flickr
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