2009 Post-Mortem Outline

This is a rough outline of what were able to put down in writing since yesterday. We will expand it into a more detailed article as time permits. Feel free to ask questions about anything.

Drupal

Site built in about 3 days from scratch.
We used pre-made modules like Location and Countdown to flesh out the site quickly.
Forums
Drupal native forums are easy, but not as polished and full-featured as other forums. Drupal needs development assistance to help make them better. Go join their project!
User registration
Drupal comes with complete account creation and maintenance
You can easily add custom fields (personal info like phone contact and geospatial location) per user
Roles, permissions
Great access control. We had Roles for Admins, Forum moderators, Organizers, Seekers, Foreign Team Members and New users.
Each role could have unique permissions for what they could see, and do.
Brief writeup of our Drupal engineering on Drupal site: http://drupal.org/node/649860

EC2

We setup a mirror copy of our web site running on Amazon's EC2
Intent was to have multiple completely identical web-head machines so we could add more as needed with a load-balancer front-end or roundrobin DNS.
NFS server would store common files
AWS RDS database would be the back-end database to store site data.
we didn't end up cutting over to the cloud system in the end because traffic was low.

Found Balloons:

First five were direct
After that they were trades

Trading strategies

Always appear weaker, so we don't seem like a threat that would be close to winning as a result of trade.
Ask what you want and what you have, not disclose what we have.

Google Wave

We found it hard to add new members
Got very slow under FIrefox, maybe Chrome
Scrollbars are unusual

Fakes

Ethan Dicks -- physical fake in Ohio -- nobody ever found it.
Mike Ash -- digital fakes formulated from photos collected during our "dry runs"
Dissemination was hard on digital fakes -- needed credible agents not visibly connected to our team.

AntiDisinformation

Most fakes were poor.
Many tweets were obviously bogus. Cryo-Bill even commented on this on Twitter.
Many fake tweets that appeared to be naive could be traced back to a user obviously connected to a team or aware of the challenge.
We used our friend Neal Krawetz (hackerfactor.com) to double-check digital fakes

Team Merging

Why it should have happened, why it didn't.
As far as we know, we were the only team actively pursuing it.
Cambridge joined with us rather than create a team from scratch

Team Size

We were 150 total users (a handful were foreign team members)
We had less than 10 active oganizers.
Battlefield Promotions to organizer -- Rebecca

Decoys

Boulder -- saw in Flickr picture, verified as missing/wrong
Michigan -- everyone else fell for it. We traded for it, but knew as soon as we saw it that it was bogus.

Real validation

Fake pictures?
Certificates
We didn't know what the DARPA certificates actually looked like, and when se saw the first (Portland) we thought it was a good fake.
It wasn't until we got the second (Arizona) and it matched that we realized it was either legit, or a huge disinformation campaign.
When we got #5, we were surprised that it appeared to be printed in monochrome, not color like the others, and first thought it was a fake too.

Groups approached

Truckers
Cycling
Motorcyclist, car club groups (saturdays are often group-drive/ride days)
None were very helpful.

Craigslist

We tried using Craigslist for recruiting by posting a "job opportunity".
Craigslist charges $25 per posting, per category, per city. It was infeasible. Other attempts to mass post in the free "gigs" section in multiple cities were defeated by anti-spamming measures detecting identical messages.

Confirmation Strategies

Called Hotel Manager in Tennessee to see if one report we heard was legit. It wasn't.
Calling businesses nearby
If needed to verify in a foreign city where we had no agents We planned to call Taxi companies
Miami balloon was confirmed (by another team) by calling a business across the street
SanFran balloon #1 was directly confirmed by a friend of a friend who happened to be preparing his stand-up comedy gig at a theatre two blocks from the site. he had about 20 mins to run down the street, confirm the target, email it to us, and get back to his show. This turned out to be one of the most valuable numbers for trade.

Other Teams

Geocachers -- we tried to trade with them for the elusive correct number eight, but they had somewhat shut down their team war-room effort by this time, and we're available. We are unsure why they shut down so early.