The Critical Mass of Collaboration

Today I listened to a TED talk by Luis von Ahn the creators of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, the text confirmation software used by some websites to confirm that you're actually a real person accessing the page. To the average person, this looks like some wonky, squiggly text with some random curves drawn through it; and you're supposed to fill in what the text says.

An example of a reCAPTCHA image.

The talk was well worth listening to in its own right because it reveals how, when filling out these "human detector" puzzles you're also, without even knowing it, helping to digitize books... And millions of books are being digitized each year through the use of this technology. So as I said; this TED talk is well worth checking out.

One of the comments that I found particularly interesting is his suggestion that one of the historic boundaries to human collaboration has been the inability of people (before the proliferation of the internet) to be able to coordinate an effort involving more than one hundred thousand people.

What Luis reminded me is that measuring the world's population in billions, is a very modern phenomenon. In fact, according to Wikipedia, around 200 hundred years ago, the human population was breaching it's first billion. 

Let's consider Europe for a moment, which is often considered as the focal point of development over the last few thousand years. In Europe at the moment, the population is around 740 Million. This is compared to an estimated 20 million people around 1000 years ago. This is a massive increase by 37 times.

Now let us consider some remarkable and enduring things people have built around the world:

• The Parthenon built in 15 years when the population of the entire city of Athens was estimated to be around 150,000.
• The  Taj_Mahal built in 22 years by about 22,000 people.
• The  Colosseum built in about 10 years by an estimated 30,000 people.
• The  Pyramids of Egypt built 3000 years ago with an estimated 20,000 - 100,000 people.
• (If you can think of more examples, please feel free to comment or message me.)

The point here is that it doesn't take that many people (let's use 100,000 people) to make a big difference. Imagine if 100,000 people volunteered to build a school, how long would that take to build? What would be the effect of 100,000 people volunteering to teach 1 hour a week? What would be the effect of 100,000 people volunteered to make a hospital a beautiful place to be? How long would it take to create a computer system to manage these efforts, if 22,000 software developers volunteered to build it? 

Requiring 22,000 people to build the Taj Mahal is quite a feat; however requiring 22,000 among the 3.5 million people living in Cape Town is only 1 in 159 people. Requiring 100,000 among six billion is only 1 in 60,000. 

The Challenge: Do not let your feeling of anonymity, among the many millions of people with whom you share your city, dilute your own expectation of the effect you can have on society. Be the 1 in 159 people that volunteers, and change the world for the better.

I invite you, if you agree with the sentiment of this article, to kindly +1 this page.