In a project aimed at exploring the evolving face of communication, networking, and shared tasks, DARPA is marking the 40th anniversary of the Internet with a team-building challenge hoping to inspire organization and coordination of groups throughout the continental United States.

IKEA and WWF are galvanizing Swedish school kids in the ages 6-9 to collect the aluminum shells from tea lights.

The London Underground is now opening up its future reputation to the public with a competition to re-design fabric moquettes…

Virgin is teaming up with Google to promote cloud computing. On June 24th, the Day in the Cloud Challenge, lets players compete versus others either on the ground or while flying in one of Virgin’s flights through WiFi. If you’re flying Virgin that day, you’ll receive free WiFi to join the challenge. But if you have work to do, you can opt to share documents, email, browse websites or anything you normally do back at the office.
Whether you can teleconference is not clear, though it might be fun to collaborate on solving a puzzle while flying.

Architecture For Humanity promotes open source architecture and provides professional design services to communities and non-profits to help build a sustainable future. They’ve announced their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge, and this year’s assignment is to design a better classroom. Anyone is eligible to participate in this competition to help imagine better learning spaces – you don’t even have to be an architect to get involved.
They explain:
We are inviting you, the designer, to work with students and teachers to design the classroom of the future for a school of your choosing. Your design should address the unique challenges your school faces [...]