14 DAY TRIAL // As some of you may know, Google turned 10 last month. Besides the regular celebration of the event, the people at Google admitted that, in spite of being a top answer-provider, they do not have all the answers, and thought they might also help the world help itself with this occasion. Therefore, they came up with a project entitled Google 10100, which is actually a googol (the number represented by 10 followed by 100 zeros), and also points to their 10th birthday event.
Basically, it gave people worldwide the possibility to think of ideas that would really make their lives better, and offered to support those ideas financially, with quite a generous sum ($10 million for the whole project). People were supposed to fill in a form with specific fields that would help them explain their ideas in greater detail, and they were also given the possibility to attach a 30-second self-made explanatory movie to it.
The main categories that these could cover were as follows: Community (helping people connect, building communities and protecting unique cultures); Opportunity (helping people better provide for themselves and their families); Energy (ways of globally switching to safe, clean, inexpensive energy); Environment (promoting a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem); Health (helping people lead longer, healthier lives); Education (providing wider access to better education for more people); Shelter (providing a safe place to live for as many people as possible); and, of course, Everything else (the category that hosted ideas that didn't fit any of the above).
From more than 100,000 ideas received by Google, only 100 will be chosen by January 27, 2009. They will be evaluated according to the following criteria: Reach (how many individuals are affected by the idea); Depth (to what extent people are affected and how urgent is the need); Attainability (whether the idea can be implemented within maximum 2 years); Efficiency (the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the idea); and Longevity (how long the impact of the idea will last). On that date, the 100 chosen ideas will be subjected to public voting, with only 20 of them making it further into the contest.
A special committee formed by people who are experts in their fields will then evaluate them and choose only 5 final winners. Their ideas (not the people who subjected them, though) will receive a total funding of $10 million, while Google will also search for the organizations and proposals that would best help implement them. The people who submitted the 5 finalist ideas will actually have nothing to do with them but, as Google says, they will “get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that [their] idea might truly help a lot of people.”
If you are interested in some of the ideas that were proposed, you can search for them on YouTube. Also, if you want to be involved in the voting process that will begin in late January, you can be reminded to vote in due time, by clicking here. As Google says, “May those who help the most win.”