Hi! I'm Gina Trapani, Expert Labs' new Project Director. I'm heading up development on ThinkTank, the technology platform that will help the White House gather public responses in the Grand Challenges project.
I started building ThinkTank in March of 2009 when I needed an easy way to quickly capture and filter useful information out of conversations I was having on Twitter. It was a solution to a problem I'd been having for a long time. During the years I spent blogging at Lifehacker, I became acutely aware that the ability to pick the useful bits out of a voluminous stream of incoming information via email, comments, and feeds was the key to serving readers well. While some people consider me a "productivity expert" now because of this work, the truth is my expertise is entirely crowdsourced, informed by continuous conversations with actual experts through various channels. When you have a big platform with lots of incoming feedback, separating the wheat from the chaff is essential for turning it into something useful.
ThinkTank is a platform that aims to help anyone do just that. When you run ThinkTank, you capture your updates on popular social networks (right now just Twitter, but Facebook is to come) and also the responses they elicit. Then, ThinkTank sorts, organizes, and filters those responses to make the most interesting ones bubble up to the top.
ThinkTank is an open source software project that's still in its infancy and growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteer contributors who want to improve the platform for both themselves and the community.
Interested in helping out? The project is hosted on GitHub, and discussions about contributions and the project roadmap are going on now on the mailing list. Here at the Expert Labs blog, I'll post weekly updates about how the project's going; the rest of the time I'll be tweeting via the project's handle, @thinktankapp.
I'm thrilled to be a part of Expert Labs and have the incredible opportunity to serve my country using the social tech tools I love most on the web. I hope you'll follow along and join us.
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