Smarterware

ThinkUp’s iPad 2 Bounty

I don't have any experience with open source bounties, but I'm about to get some thanks to my employer, Expert Labs. We're offering some special motivation to ThinkUp contributors as we work our way to ThinkUp's 1.0 release: Get a wow-worthy contribution accepted into ThinkUp and earn yourself a brand new iPad 2 on top of "I made a great open source project better" bragging rights. 

Expert Labs is offering a new iPad 2 (16GB, Wi-Fi only) to a community member who makes a significant contribution in the next month and a half. Here's how it will work:

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Code and Community: A Year in Numbers

One year ago today, ThinkUp's first official release, alpha 1, quietly became available. I'd been building the app mostly solo during my spare time since August of 2009, but when Expert Labs took on the project in February of 2010, things got really fun. Here are a few representative numbers on how ThinkUp's first year of releases went.

In terms of ThinkUp's codebase, in the past year:

• The source code changed 664 times, an average of about 1.8 commits per day. ¹
• 1,002 out of about 5,500 ² files in ThinkUp's codebase changed: specifically, there were 165,583 lines added and 29,904 lines deleted. ³
• ThinkUp had 16 releases: 8 alpha releases from February of 2010 until September, and 8 beta releases from September 2010 to February of 2011, which is an average of 1.3 releases per month.
• ThinkUp releases and related plugins have been downloaded almost 11,000 times. ⁴
• ThinkUp's automated test coverage skyrocketed to 3,485 passing tests.
• Out of 648 items in ThinkUp's issue tracker, 94 are open, and 554 are closed.
• ThinkUp has spawned two separate open source software projects which it uses: the GitHub pull request email bot by Sam Rose, and Mark Wilkie's Fixture Builder library.

Source code is one thing, but ThinkUp's best feature is its community. In the past year:

• 26 programmers made changes to ThinkUp's codebase. ⁵
• 42 community members helped write ThinkUp's documentation. ⁶
• The project's main hub, the ThinkUp general mailing list, grew to 483 subscribers.
• Community members discussed about 510 topics (not including replies) on that mailing list, an average of about 9.8 conversations per week.
• Of those 510 discussion threads, there were a total of 0 flame wars.
• On Twitter, @thinkupapp gained 2,944 followers. On Facebook, 143 people "liked" ThinkUp's page.
• Community members established the #thinkup IRC channel, in which developers and users are available to chat in realtime almost around the clock.
• Two episodes of the community-run ThinkUp podcast have been broadcast.
• Just this month, we established a brand new developer-specific ThinkUp mailing list. So far it has 24 subscribers and lots of high-quality, technical discussion.

We've also had some incredible users beta-test the ThinkUp application in the past year, from civic and government organizations to Hollywood celebrities and tech journalists. Take a look at the the White House's ThinkUp, Code for America's ThinkUp, Steve Martin's ThinkUp, Wil Wheaton's ThinkUp, and Leo Laporte's ThinkUp. (Are you running ThinkUp? Post a link to your installation in the comments.)

Building software and community around ThinkUp has been one of the most gratifying "jobs" I've ever had. Here's to an even better second year of ThinkUp releases.

1. At first ThinkUp's commit log was busier and messier than it should have been because we weren't "squashing" related commits into a single patch. Later in the year, when the community defined our git/GitHub process, the commit log became much cleaner, and commits to the master branch increased in quality but decreased in quantity. ↩
2. Counted using the command $ find "thinkup/" \! -name ".*" | wc -l ↩
3. Lines of code and number of commits are not indicators of software quality, but they are indicators of project activity. ↩
4. We're not tracking individual ThinkUp installations yet. This number is a total of GitHub's download counts. ↩
5. As per GitHub's comparison of alpha 1 and beta 8.1. ↩
6. Give or take a few authors due to multiple email addresses/GitHub accounts. ↩

Cross-posted to the Expert Labs blog.

Big! Exciting! News: ThinkTank Is Now at Expert Labs

I am thrilled to announce I've landed a pinch-me dream job: I'm now a Project Director at Expert Labs, the new non-profit headed up by Anil Dash. I'll be in charge of developing ThinkTank. Here's what happened.

Last March I was thinking about buying a netbook, and asked my Twitter followers a question: Do you have a netbook? What do you love or hate about it?

When I got back 243 informed opinions by savvy netbook owners, I knew I needed a way to easily parse and share the most useful replies--and ThinkTank was born. ThinkTank is a work-in-progress web application that archives your conversations and social graph on Twitter (and eventually beyond). As you tweet, ThinkTank captures, filters, and ranks responses to those tweets so you can see the most useful responses first.

In other words, ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses. That's what makes it a perfect fit for Expert Labs. Expert Labs' goal is to make government run better by helping policy makers take advantage of the same kinds of crowdsourcing tools that the rest of us take for granted. Expert Labs is also part of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the world's largest general scientific community. While you and I can use social networks to figure out what kind of netbook to buy, policy makers can use social networks to tap the expertise of scientists and technologists and inform decisions on how to govern. ThinkTank's goal is to facilitate that.

The most amazing part of this whole thing? The first project that will be putting ThinkTank to use is for the White House itself. The President has identified a series of scientific and technical challenges that are as important to the future as the moon landing was. And we want to help drive feedback on that list, and even suggest what other items should be on there that haven't been included. Here's more on the Grand Challenges initiative from the White House.

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