The TAG Challenge

A one-day competition based in part on 2009's DARPA Red Balloon challenge. Teams will face off to see if anyone can track five "thieves" in cities around the world.

If you had to track down fugitives hidden in five cities around the world, would one day and a $5,000 reward be enough to succeed? And if so, how?
That's what the people behind the TAG Challenge want to know--and what the whole world will soon find out.

On March 31, mug shots of five "suspects" will be published, and it'll be game on in a global hunt for "jewel thieves" in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stockholm; London; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, each of whom will spend 12 hours that day in public areas. The first team to upload photographs of each of the five by noon eastern time on April 1 will win the competition--and with it, a ton of international glory.
Then again, there's a good chance no one will win, given the limited time available to contestants.
The competition is based in part on 2009's DARPA Red Balloon Challenge--in which DARPA hid 10 balloons around the United States and offered a $40,000 prize to the first team that could find them all in a single day.

The TAG Challenge is about learning whether it's possible to implement something similar, said lead organizer Joshua deLara, but in a way that has functional meaning to law enforcement and international security agencies interested in seeing how social media could be used to track fugitives or missing persons.