Netflix Contest Illustrates the Power of Collaboration

As a member of a group that works to make movies in new collective and collaborative ways, I am always excited to learn about how people use their collective brainpower to overcome problems.  So when I heard about how Netflix's 1 million dollar challenge finally ended up, I was quite pleased. Netflix was offering 1 million dollars to the first person that could improve the recommendations for their automated systems by 10 percent.  What is awesome about this is that no one person won the contest.  There were a bunch of teams all sharing resources online and the final winner was actually a combination of two of the leading teams, proving that two minds (or more) are often better than one.  This is especially impressive given that the final prize was money.  If only more people in the world recognized that working together and sharing the wealth leads to better results and, in turn, a better world. *photo by Brymo (cc)