Naming products is hard. After weeks of brainstorming, teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, trademark searching, late-night strikes of inspiration followed by crushing morning realizations that the idea sucked, I'm thrilled to announce that ThinkTank has been renamed to ThinkUp. It's our Firebird-to-Firefox moment. Rebranding is difficult, but the most heartening part of this process was that the ThinkUp idea came to us via the app. @markwallace responded to Anil's call for ideas on the name change in this thread, captured by ThinkUp.
I've been busybusy shepherding this project along this summer, and loving every minute of it. Between our two excellent Google Summer of Code students and a community of volunteers, the project has been growing and evolving in leaps and bounds. Late August/early September we're on track to have a web-based installer in place as well as some neat data visualizations that will make capturing your tweets and Facebook updates even more easy and fun to do. Interested in hearing more? Join the ThinkUp mailing list.
In the past three months Anil and I have been to events in six different cities talking about Expert Labs and how the White House used ThinkTank to compile feedback on the Grand Challenges initiative. At Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored event in New York City last month, Anil absolutely killed it in a 12 minute presentation that hits the nail right on the head. Press play to check it out.
This week the White House will put out a call to techies and scientists across the internet, asking a simple question: What should the United States' next greatest technological and scientific achievement be? Get your answers ready, geeks.
When you reply to the White House's prompt--on Twitter, Facebook, or via email--your voice will be heard and your ideas will be counted. I know, because I helped build the software that will capture your responses and deliver them directly to the people in charge.
Ready to get involved? Here's what to do.
Think big! Imagine an ambitious science or technology challenge (something huge like the moon landing!) which you think can inspire great new ideas and inventions. Here are some examples President Obama listed.
Reply to the tweet or post with your idea, or a link to ideas you find interesting. On Twitter, use the hashtag #whgc. Alternately, you can email your response to challenge@ostp.gov.
Encourage your friends and followers to respond, too!
Everyone working on the Grand Challenges initiative can't wait to hear what you have to say, so thanks in advance for your insights and participation. We'll be sharing the responses we got both online and at Twitter's first official conference, Chirp, this week in San Francisco.
It's Ada Lovelace Day and I haven't had time to write up something profound about women in tech, because, well, I've been too busy coding. Appropriate, no? I've been jamming on ThinkTank, a new webapp that will help the White House crowdsource ideas for our country's scientific and technological goals. It's also one of the youngest, pluckiest, up-and-coming woman-friendly open source projects around. My partner at Expert Labs Anil Dash explains why:
Besides being created by a woman (Ed: that's me!), we've been able to start up an active, vibrant community that is supportive and inclusive of new members. I think that our habit of mentoring our newest contributors is part of why we were one of the youngest apps to be selected for Google Summer of Code students to participate in, and I think it also explains why we have a mailing list and community that's never had a single flame war, personal attack or ego battle. It also helps that we're doing meaningful work that helps government make better decisions every time we fix a bug in our application. Even if you've never considered yourself a coder, there are instructions on how to participate that make joining the project as easy as editing a file in Google docs.
ThinkTank hasn't been around long enough to have accumulated any cruft--either in the source code, or in the community's politics. If you join now you have the opportunity to make a major impact on early decisions that will shape ThinkTank's roadmap. I hope tomorrow's Adas will consider getting in on the ground floor and help us grow these seeds into something amazing in a helpful and supportive environment. Interested? Join the mailing list and dive into the code on GitHub.
Hi all! I've been working furiously on ThinkTank over at Expert Labs for about six weeks now. Once in awhile I'll post an update on where we're at with the project. This is such an update, and it's cross-posted from the Expert Labs blog.
ThinkTank development has been going strong, but we need your help. If you're a ThinkTank tester and/or a web developer, join the mailing list, fork the code, install ThinkTank on your server, and help us build the software and documentation. If you don't know what you can do or where to start, here are the three main priorities for ThinkTank right now:
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.
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.
Naming products is hard. After weeks of brainstorming, teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, trademark searching, late-night strikes of inspiration followed by crushing morning realizations that the idea sucked, I'm thrilled to announce that ThinkTank has been renamed to ThinkUp. It's our Firebird-to-Firefox moment. Rebranding is difficult, but the most heartening part of this process was that the ThinkUp idea came to us via the app. @markwallace responded to Anil's call for ideas on the name change in this thread, captured by ThinkUp. 
This week the White House will put out a call to techies and scientists across the internet, asking a simple question: What should the United States' next greatest technological and scientific achievement be? Get your answers ready, geeks. 
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