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Help me crowd-source my birthday?

A Brief History of Challenge or Crowd-sourcing Contests

(borrowed from a paper written by my colleague Michael Maltese)

For centuries, wealthy individuals, organizations, and governments have offered prizes to address specific challenges from engineering to mathematics. One of the more famous such contests dates back to the British Longitude Act in 1714, when the British government offered prizes for measuring longitude to varying degrees of accuracy. In 1773, just three years before his death, clockmaker, carpenter, and inventor John Harrison claimed the top prize by inventing what is widely considered to be the first accurate chronometer.

Centuries later, French hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the pilot who made the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York City. This financial incentive compelled a number of the most highly skilled pilots in the world to take on the challenge. Out of obscurity, Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year old air mail pilot, succeeded in winning the prize in May 1927, ushering in the new era of commercial flight. Since then, a number of challenge competitions have been held with great success, especially the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes and the X Prizes, the first of which awarded $10 million to the first team to launch a reusable rocket that would spur technological development of low-cast space flight. Companies like InnoCentive now work with companies to crowd-source their more difficult challenges, and in the field of social entrepreneurship, Ashoka now runs a number of contests focused on social and economic challenges.

These competitions imbue the belief that the best solutions can come from anywhere. Moreover, they cost-effectively leverage the collective problem-solving power of a large number of individuals, some who may not even be knowledgeable about the specific area, and focus their attention through a prize incentive. As the Orteig Prize demonstrated, these bottom-up contests leverage far more money and brainpower towards solving a problem than if an organization decided instead to find experts and fund their research.

Since the piece above was written, we discovered OpenIDEO, a project of the human-centered design firm IDEO that invites individuals to solve some of the world's greatest challenges by participating in every stage of the design process. A current challenge on the site asks how we might improve access to clean water and sanitation in low-income urban communities.

Coming from a grassroots organizing background, I find this system for soliciting solutions to be the next best thing since knocking on doors and showing up at native plants meetings to find campaign volunteers. So I thought I might apply this innovation creation station idea to a current challenge in my life: deciding what to do for my birthday.

When I turned 16, my high school friends threw me a surprise Rocky Horror Picture Show themed birthday party. Yes, they did. Perhaps because that was so unique, I didn't try to organize anything particularly exciting until just last year, when Melanie and I organized a trivia party. (notice Wyatt's shirt, a party favor)

You wouldn't think that a bunch of 20-somethings who don't all know each other would sit still in a tiny living room long enough to play 4 rounds of homemade trivia but it went surprisingly well. It was also potluck and the food was delicious.

So the question remains,

how can I throw a party that is at least as much fun as last year's?

That is your challenge dear readers! Please help the cause by commenting on this post and leaving a suggestion or voting on one of the ideas below.

Here is what has been suggested so far:

- Stone Soup party, everyone brings an ingredient for the soup
- Mad Libs
- Apples to Apples (we would make our own cards at the party)
- A special concert, ideally including the Macrotones and the one and only Nariman Moghtaderi
- A video scavenger hunt (it's WAY too cold to do this in January in Boston unfortunately)
- Bring your favorite food that you've never made (maybe too stressful?)
- Pub Crawl
- Beck Hansen Party - each person must personify a line from a Beck song, i.e. "cocaine nosejob", "devil's haircut," or "hot sex in back rows"



Hit me up! The deadline is December 27th. The party will be sometime in late January. Winners receive an invitation to and/or VIP pictures from the event.

Song of the Day: Djohariah

Michigan native and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens really kills it in this song from his recent EP All Delighted People. Most of the song is just a chorus chanting and Sufjan wailing on electric guitar. Then he throws in some of his signature sad, aggressive, stab-you-in-the-heart lyrics towards the end. I've always enjoyed Sufjan's music because it has a unique quality of pulling you out of the everyday. It's the ultimate soundtrack for mindfulness.

Great Gifts for the Holidays

I don't know about you but that phrase makes my stomach turn.

I do want to give my girl Laura props for sending me a hilarious and wonderful gift of four garden gnomes. I'm looking forward to naming them all.







This past weekend Wyatt threw a Hanukkah party. I made Challah for the first time. It turned out okay. We also had cabbage, brisket and of course, latkes!



The bread.


The guests.

An idea a day

I find myself full of ideas these days. Some might be good, others not so good, but I think it's time to start keeping track of them, in case any of them are worth anything. Feel free to comment and tell me that I'm a genius, a lazy dreamer or a complete lunatic.

1. Healthy Gift Basket Subscription
You can buy people gift basket subscriptions of almost any kind these days: Beer of the Month, Cheese of the Month, Bacon of the Month and even dog treat of the month. Why not cater to the health-obsessed, tree hugging, my-body-is-a-temple folks with a green, good for you, health food gift basket. Sounds questionable, right? But, what if each month was a different yummy and not bad for your surprise, like fair trade organic chocolate, vegan energy bars, assorted detox teas or locally grown root vegetables with a recipe on how to use them? It would be like SELF magazine but edible. Also interesting: herbal remedy club



2. Vest with personal heating unit
Tired of hunching your shoulders against the wind? Ever feel like if you could keep the spot between your shoulder blades a little warmer it would make the winter much more tolerable? I have a preliminary design for a special warming vest. It comes with a reusable heating pad that you can warm in the microwave in two minutes, then pop in a pocket in the back of the vest. Wear it under your coat or when you go to sleep. It will keep your neck and upper back warm for more than 30 minutes. Perfect for walking the dog or setting out on your commute in the wee hours.



3. Alternate Economies to Fight Climate Change
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't look like we're going to pass a Cap and Trade bill in America any time soon. Still sea levels are rising, weather is changing, we're destroying communities in the name of coal and doing myriad other things to ensure our future is not so promising. There is a lot to be done legislatively to fix our future, but we can't count on the government alone to get us out of this deep fried pickle. We need corporate buy in. We need more companies to invest in a clean energy future, more investors to invest in clean energy companies and all parties involved to create those green jobs everyone's been talking about. We need to create economic alternatives for people in communities that rely on dirty energy.

But why trust companies to be charitable? And creating incentives takes money and the government time. In Appalachia, where people have an intense love/hate relationship with the coal industry, there has been some success in luring businesses in to create employment alternatives but not nearly enough.

Instead of trying to create incentives for companies to go to the people who need them, why not make new companies? We could train community members in the art entrepreneurship, identify needs in the communities and create common sense business solutions to address them that are both environmentally and economically sustainable. It might sound crazy but I think it's a sweet idea.




More soon...

Healthy 2x Baked Potatoes?

Almost! These are potato-innards mixed with milk, salt, pepper, mushrooms, spinach and some homemade bread crumbs, accompanied by chicken marinated in homemade vinaigrette. Mushrooms, onions and garlic were cooked in Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay.



Recipe for Bad Ass Vinaigrette:
- lemon juice
- honey
- mustard
- cider vinegar
- olive oil
- one clove garlic
- pinch of sugar

* This is good as a salad dressing and a marinade. We also threw some parsley in but I'm not sure it really added anything.


This Slate piece on diplomatic cables as literature makes me think I should be a diplomat. Who doesn't want to write denigrating reports on the drinking habits of royal families or detailed psychological analyses of foreign leaders?

A portrait of Ben Bernanke

This is currently on display at the portrait gallery in D.C.