Various labels describe it: open-sourcing, the hive-mind, crowd-sourcing.

Take your pick but in the end, the idea is this: by increasing the availability of information and thereby increasing the number of people who access it, you simultaneously increase the probability of and shorten the time necessary to solving a problem.

What’s this got to do with HIV research?

Gamers solved a riddle that scientists and even the world’s most sophisticated computers hadn’t been able to solve for the last 12 years. And, they did it in three. Three weeks that is.

Instead of hogging the information for themselves, researchers used it to design a game that involved creating 3d protein models which, in turn, might hold the solution to this 12 year-0ld HIV riddle.

Enjoy the following story from MSNBC then ask yourself, what other problems might be solved and how much sooner might we solve them if only the information needed to solve them was in the hands of the public rather than a safe in some private company somewhere?

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