Now Hear This!

Election Day is still a month away, but there's another vote you should be aware of.  It's called Project 10¹⁰⁰.  Sponsored by Google, Project is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible, that launched last October.

Project's voting has been delayed more than once, which encouraged some naysayers across the Web to call the effort a scam. Google insists that it was simply overwhelmed by the flood of ideas that came in (more than 154,000) and that the organization process took more time that it originally thought. Whatever the reason, the delay caused Project and its vote to slip my mind. Luckily, I was reminded of it and the vote this afternoon by Deirdre Walsh, a member of the NI team who I follow through my personal Twitter account (@deffree). (Thanks, Deirdre!) Voting closes tomorrow and I was eager to cast my ballot once I saw her tweet.

Google staffers narrowed down the 154,000 submissions to 16 "big ideas," combining like-minded submissions from multiple individual submitters. The company's advisory board will consider the public's votes in selecting up to five final ideas that will share $10 million in funding. Once the final five are chosen, Google will launch an RFP (request for proposal) process to identify the organizations that are best suited to implementing the ideas.

And -- rightfully so -- the listed 16 ideas drip with engineering support, especially ideas "Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists" and "Enhance science and engineering education," which was inspired in part by a suggestion to sponsor the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition.

Before you ask, "what's in it for the idea contributors?" Nothing, well except, as Project site puts it, "good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that their ideas truly might help a lot of people."

You can vote and read about the 16 big ideas here (hurry, voting ends October 8). Read more about the competition here. Also check out the video below.

As always, your thoughts are welcome. Share any opinions you have on the Google project, its up-for-vote ideas, support for engineering, or the "good karma" aspect of this effort below the video.






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