Gnomedex is fundamentally about the why of social media, and not about the how. In other words, it’s not aimed at the engineers or the infrastructure, but how technology works to bring people together.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the presentation by FoldIt, a video game for protein folding.
Wait, what?
A team at the University of Washington is doing advanced research in protein folding—this is critical because how a protein can be folded often determines if it’s benign of causes some nasty disease. The mechanism, in the case, is a video game (you can download it from the link above). The research team discovered that people, in playing the game (trying to fold a protein to a “low-energy state”), are much more efficient than computer simulations. Because of the large number of degrees of freedom, the task is computationally extremely expensive. By using a video game as the medium, the protein folding achieves better results, faster. In this case, there’s nothing new about the medium (video games have been around for years), but the purpose (curing diseases and advancing medical research) is extraordinarily novel.
Another novel presentation was by the creator of the Maker Bot, a 3D printer that can rapidly create any desired solid objects. By leveraging the power of the social community, the device has achieved far more than a dedicated team (in a closed company) might have done. In essence, the business is leveraging volunteer labor for the greater good.
