Billions of dollars. Hundreds of miles. A gauntlet of engineering challenges and regulatory snarls. These are just a few of the reasons that bridges, highways, and other enormous infrastructure projects are the domain of governments or big corporations. And they're among the reasons you might be surprised that the most serious attempt to build the Hyperloop plans to rely on the crowd—not on the feds.

The Hyperloop took the tech world by storm in August, when Tesla Motors and SpaceX chief Elon Musk released his plans for a transportation system to take passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a half-hour, a system that he said would cost in the neighborhood of $6 billion to build. Musk made his plans open-source so anyone could download and tinker with them. Shortly thereafter, the plans appeared on JumpStartFund, a crowdsourcing website dedicated to bolstering entrepreneurs and their ideas. And now, a group there has picked up the challenge of actually creating the Hyperloop, one baby step at a time.

Daunting is the first word that comes to mind. We've seen crowdsourcing successes through science projects such as Galaxy Zoo, in which astronomers enlisted the help of amateurs in classifying thousands of galaxies. We've seen video games and smartwatches and gadgets galore take off on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo. But just how do you use the crowd to tackle an endeavor as enormous as the Hyperloop?

"The Hyperloop is one of those things where a lot of people talked about it, a lot of people said, 'It wouldn't be possible. It's so difficult,'" JumpStartFund CEO Dirk Ahlborn says. "But in the end, all it takes is someone who really says 'Let's do it. We will figure out, once we really try, whether we can find a solution."

The Process

First, get some people who know their stuff. Marco Villa, who until recently was the director of mission operations for SpaceX, has signed on to co-lead the Hyperloop group along with Patricia Galloway, formerly the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Villa wasn't involved in creating the first draft of the Hyperloop during his time at SpaceX. But, he says, it was the perfect project for him to tackle. Plus, the JumpStartFund platform had just launched in beta and was starting to get interesting.

The thing to keep in mind about JumpStartFund: This isn't Kickstarter, where a team brings a completed proposal and asks the crowd for money to build it. "The way JSF works is, we are a place for anybody, especially entrepreneurs, to put up their ideas or patents," Ahlborn says. "We work with national research labs and universities—[for example,] the aerospace corps of NASA, or UCLA—to try to get their patent portfolio to post those on the site. The community then votes and comments on the different ideas or patents." JumpStartFund's team selects one idea per week (for now) to move forward, with the end goal of creating a corporation from the enthusiasts who sign up to solve the particular problem. "Everybody from the community who participates gets a small percentage of the future revenue of the company," he says. They hope to gather thousands of community participants to bolster the smaller, core team. Villa says volunteers have been bombarding the project with requests to join in.

"This is actually the way Elon wanted it to be done—through the community," Villa says. "Using a platform that is already there, that Dirk put together, we think that combining that with some key persons who provide a little expertise, that's a formula that should work. The reality is, we're going to learn through doing exactly how that needs to be shaped. But that's the great thing—we can adapt fast."

Hyperloop has already gone through a month-long comment period on the JSF site. The next goal, Villa says, is to produce a new iteration of the Hyperloop design, one that addresses some of the biggest mechanical and other challenges that the online contributors have identified. He hopes to complete that in about six months. After that, it's time to actually build something. "The next logical step is going to be to do a subscale project, and we will define exactly what that means."

The Unknowns

It's easy to envision the team designing an even better version of the Hyperloop. But there is a huge leap from blueprints to breaking ground, and Hyperloop's is bigger than most.

First, the money: While JumpStartFund relies on the wisdom of the crowd to vet new ideas and get them off the ground, Ahlborn says he never intended to rely completly on the crowd for financing. Projects could and should get their money from a mix of sources. For something that costs billions of dollars, there's simply no way around it. "In terms of the Hyperloop, it's going to be fairly difficult to raise all the money through crowd funding," he says. "There are some problems already from a regulatory point of view that make it very difficult, so we would have to find a way, by doing a small-scale IPO or doing some other things, to tackle that. We will look at all the available sources, from venture capital to public financing to crowd funding."

Forming the corporation and raising the money represent a sort of intermediate step, Villa says. "We are building a company in parallel that is going to be the incubator for everybody to be part of it. And if there is then funding coming in—or, I should say, when there is funding coming in—then there is a way to channel that through, to make it then become a more traditional organization, or whatever is needed to do the final execution."

The final step is much harder to foresee today. As we noted as Musk was preparing to share the Hyperloop with the world, anybody who builds such a thing would have to confront more than just mechanical issues: There are the legal and political questions surrounding the land rights, the need to keep passengers safe and presumably get some manner of government safety oversight, and, at some point, to run a profitable transportation business. Villa isn't even thinking much about those issues right now. "First we need to prove to ourselves and prove to everybody that we can crack that problem and find out the feasibility of all the different aspects—mechanical, aerodynamics, comfort, safety, etc."

The Dream

The Hyperloop team at JumpStartFund is a long way from building an ultra-high-speed transportation system. And it's entirely possible they won't succeed at settling upon a workable design or raising enough money to make it come to life. But Villa and Ahlborn say tapping the crowd is the best way—perhaps the only way—to tackle it.

Ahlborn points to the success of FoldIt, in which scientists at the University of Washington turned the problem of protein folding—which they'd been trying to crack for 15 years—into a game for Web users, with staggering results. As for the money? "There is no org that we can put together in reality—no traditional corporate organization—that from the beginning would be sure to raise that amount of money and try to give it a go," Villa says. That's why they're starting small.

And the real advantage of the crowd, Ahlborn says, is passion. Maybe a major corporation that answers to its shareholders can't afford to invest the time in a great idea that might be a huge risk.

"Nobody to tries to tackle the big problems of this world," Ahlborn says. "Everybody is thinking about making the next Instagram—getting rich overnight. Let's do an iPhone app. Let's sell it somewhere. There's really only a few people out there that are really trying to make a change in this world and tackle what you might call the big problems."

But, on the Web, those people can find one another.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io