Can a thousand people working together design a product better than one person, or a small group of people, could? That's the provocative question behind crowdsourced design, an increasingly popular practice in the commercial sector -- and one that seems to have caught the Pentagon's attention, too. AOL reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development arm of the Pentagon, announced this week that it is planning an "industry day" to meet with various companies interested in developing a crowdsourcing project. Called vehicleforge.mil, the project will "generate an open-source development collaboration environment and website for the creation of large, complex, cyber-electro-mechanical systems by numerous unaffiliated designers."

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