Inside PBS Blog

This week, during the seventy-two hours of the TED conference (the annual gathering where fifty speakers have eighteen minutes each to speak on creativity and bettering humanity), a new company called Kluster will attempt to "harness the collective power of TED attendees, and our online community to develop a totally new, tangible product. . . .[W]e would love to see something that has a global impact."

Kluster, an online social project collaboration tool, invites anyone (not just TED attendees) to sign up and participate in what it calls project 72, a groupsourced game about different religious faiths. As they participate, players accrue Kluster's currency, "watts," as their contributions "spark" development for the product. At the end of the project, company algorithms determine payout to site contributors, and Kluster may then bring the game to market.

Currently, participants are proposing gameplay ideas. Kluster member Xanthe Matychak's idea makes game players "collaborative actors" who must collect something "unique to a culture" from other players--she uses recipes as an example. Project 72 ends March 1st.

Meantime, Carbonrally, a site started in 2007 for climate change improvements, continues its online campaign inspiring teams to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Carbonrally participants accept daily or weekly challenges like replacing incandescent lights with LED (light-emitting diode) lights, and giving up bottled water or disposable coffee cups for a week.

Carbonrally members can map their team's impact and make suggestions that others vote up, surfacing new site challenge ideas in a manner similar to social bookmarking service sites like Digg and Reddit, where site member votes raise a submitted Web url to the front page, usually generating a significant amount of traffic and comment energy to the highlighted url.

Currently, the Carbonrally map shows Summit, N.J., leading other areas. Soon the site administrators plan to expand the challenges to global rallies. You can sign up for an account here.