People power transforms the web in next online revolution

By: Charles Leadbetter/The Observer, March 9 2008

n July 2004, US cinema advertisements for Halo 2, the science fiction computer game, briefly carried the address for a website - ilovebees.com - which appeared to belong to a beekeeper who had mysteriously disappeared. Her honey-based recipes had been replaced by an apparently random list of numbers. Over four months 600,000 people joined in solving the mystery of what the numbers meant. What unfolded was a striking display of 'We Think': structured, mass collaborative creativity and intelligence.

People set up blogs and bulletin boards, websites and instant message groups. One 4,000-strong group, the Beekeepers, became the community's core, and discovered that the numbers were 210 sets of global positioning co-ordinates around the world and at each there was a public payphone.

The game's designers at 42 Entertainment in Los Angeles set the players a series of complex tasks and on the final day started calling 1,000 payphones on the East Coast of America. Whoever answered had to provide five words of intimate information, such as the name of their first girlfriend. The caller would then call another phone within the hour and expect to be told the five words. In the last of 12 challenges that day, the players had just 15 seconds to get the five words. They never once failed.

If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?

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