Inducement prize contests are simple: offer up a cash reward to whoever can best solve a problem first. One of the most famous current inducement prize organizers is the X Prize Foundation, which organizes a number of such competitions around scientific endeavors such as space flight, lunar exploration, and human genetics. Inducement prize contests can be extremely effective at initiating innovation and inspiring public imagination about complex problems, but they're not easy to organize. A new web site called BigCarrot aims to change that by crowdsourcing the creation of inducement prize contests.
Inducement prizes are not a new concept. In 1714, for example, the British Parliament offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who could come up with a way to measure a ship's longitude to within a half a degree. In 1980 Edward Fedkin, a computer science professor, offered a $100,000 prize for anyone who could build a computer that could best a chess grandmaster (in a game of chess) -- it was claimed by IBM developers for their famous "Deep Blue" in 1997. But, says BigCarrot, inducement prizes have in the past mostly been available only to governments or the very wealthy.
"I see this as a way to democratize innovation. BigCarrot gives everyone the ability to proactively advocate for whatever cause matters most to them," the company's founder, J. Kent Pepper said in an email.
BigCarrot was launched in December 2007 and currently plays host to about 8 prizes, ranging from $100-$515. These are a far cry from the ten million dollar Ansari X Prize, but then again, the problems people are so far hoping to tackle on BigCarrot aren't quite rocket science.
BigCarrot has already had success running an inducement prize competition. The company started the notMac Challenge in 2006 to create an open source utility for using Apple's dotMac services. The prize eventually grew to over $7,000 and was claimed last year.
What BigCarrot is trying to do for inducement prizes is not unlike what MicroPledge (our coverage) and Cofundos.org (our coverage) are trying to do for software bounties. In fact, inducement prize contests and software bounties operate on essentially the same premise -- dangle a carrot and let talented people fight for it.
The site's approach democratizes the process of creating and running inducement prize contests. Once the initial prize is created and opened to the public, anyone can jump in as a funder pushing the prize amount higher. Being a funder also means that you get a vote in who wins the prize.
It will be interesting to see if sites like BigCarrot, MicroPledge, and Cofundos.org take off with both users and developers. Facilitating the ability for people to band together to advocate for the creation of things that matter to them is powerful. In a way, it's not unlike how people who have been wronged band together in class action law suits -- on person is easy to ignore, but a few hundred or thousand are more difficult to sweep under the rug.
译文:
BigCarrot--提供X奖项的平台
引诱奖项的比赛模式是非常简单的：把奖金颁发给最妥善解决问题的人。x大奖基金会是当前最有名望的x奖项的组织者。他组织了许多有关科学贡献、太空飞行、月球探索、人类基因等竞争奖项。引诱奖在激发公众的灵感与想象方面，起到了非常大的作用。但是，这些奖项要组织起来并不简单。现在有个新的网站BigCarrot，想要试图改变这一状况。他们汇集所有创立的引诱奖奖项。
引诱奖并不是一个全新的概念。就如1714年，英国政府曾提供2万英镑，悬赏能够测量出一艘船所处纬度的好对策，并且要精确在0.5度以内。1980年，一位计算机科学的教授，提供10万美元，悬赏那些能够造出一台会下国际象棋的计算机，并且水平要达到大师级。这个奖项在1997年由IBM的“深蓝”计算机获得。尽管如此，BigCarrot声称引诱奖的得主大多是政府部门或是有钱的人。BigCarrot的创始者J.Kent Pepper 曾在他的邮件里说：“我认为这是使创新民主化的好方法。BigCarrot让每个人都有能力采取主动，将那些困扰他们的问题提出来。
Bigcarrot成立于2007年12月。现在组织的奖项一共有8个，奖金范围从515美元到100美元。这和1000万美元的anseri的Ｘ大奖还是有很大的差距的。但是话说回来，在BigCarrot上，现在人们想解决的问题也并不是火箭的科学原理这样的问题。
BigCarrot在组织引诱奖方面已经取得了成功。公司在2006年开展了notMac挑战,目的是创立苹果dotMac服务软件的公共资源库。这个奖项最终超过了7000美元，而且在去年已经颁发出去了。
BigCarrot 现在努力做的和MicroPledge和Cofundos.org并没有什么不同。事实上，引诱奖和网络赏金都建立在同一个的基础上——吊出一根萝卜，让智者们为它而竭尽所能地争夺。
这些网站所采取的手段，使得创立和运行这些引诱奖的过程更加的民主化。最初的奖项一旦被建立，并公布给大众，那么任何人都可以以一个赞助商的名义把奖金抬高。当然，作为一个赞助商，在选择获胜者的时候，你也有投票的权利。
对于像BigCarrot、MicroPledge、Cofundos.org这样的网站是否能够在使用者和发展者的帮助下展翅高飞，我们都将拭目以待。推动人们一起坚持创新的力量是巨大的。顺便提下，这和集体诉讼法案的原理是相似的，把所有受害人的人联合起来一起进行诉讼——一个人的力量是很容易被忽视的，但是成千上百人的力量是很难在地毯下被一扫而空的。