Expert Labs

Web Page: http://wiki.github.com/ginatrapani/thinktank/google-summer-of-code-ideas-page

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/thinktankapp

Expert Labs is a new independent initiative whose aim is to help policy makers in the U.S. government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens to make better-informed decisions. We're building open source tools to connect policymakers to the public and scientific and technology communities on the web.

Here's how it works:

1. We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions.
2. We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers.
3. We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better.

Expert Labs' debut project is ThinkTank (http://thinktankapp.com), an open source, web-based platform for archiving and filtering conversations on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. Expert Labs' first client is the White House, who plans to use ThinkTank to crowdsource insights in its Grand Challenges initiative, in which the President determines a list of the country's top-priority scientific and technological challenges.

Projects

• Geo-location Awareness and Visualization Project by Ekansh Preet Singh ThinkTank project will benefit from display of response generating places on dynamically created maps. TT plugins will collect data about places and reverse geo-code it to locate the nearest city. Locations, in different color schemes for different characteristics, will be shown on a Google map. Controls, along maps and general filter, will enable users to focus on particular response categories. My Geo-location Visualization project will implement these features in a simple and neat interface.
• Installation Simplification and Auto-Updates Goal to this project is to simplify the ThinkTank installation process and implement an auto-update feature so that current ThinkTank installations get notification when a new version is available. The updated propasal is written on http://wiki.github.com/ginatrapani/thinktank/dwi-widiastuti-installation-simplification-and-auto-updates