Empowering Politicians through crowd sourcing? – ThinkTank and Expert Labs 25. February 2010 – 10:20 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

The idea of using the distributed web (Blogs, Twitter etc.) as a tool to identify opinions and feed them into decision making processes has been discussed on this blog before. In a recent article I also tried to suggest a rather crude tool to gather these kinds of distributed opinions using of the shelf web tools. The ThinkTank open source project by Gina Trapani and recently Expert Labs takes this idea to a whole new level in three ways:

1. The project started out as a tool to just gather Twitter data and back it up on another server but has since developed into a much larger and more ambitious web app that is able to gather activity related to a specific person or subject from existing social networks and organize this information in a useful fashion. ThinkTank stores all data it gathers in its own database, which makes analysis, filtering and documentation much easier.

2. One use of ThinkTank, which is especially suiting for political participation processes, is that it allows to gather the distributed answers posted to a a specific question on many different social networks. Gina Trapani uses the following example to illustrate the power of this ability: When she decided to buy a Netbook she asked her Twitter followers what the best model etc. is and got over 240 qualified results. „ThinkTank makes it easy to ask your contacts a question and find meaning in a high volume of responses.“

1. Recently Expert Labs, a non-profit independent organisation which tries to „help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens“, has hired Gina Trapani as a project director to work on ThinkTank as a tool in a political context. The idea is to empower politicians and administrative policy makers to make use of the distributed knowledge and expertise represented by citizens in various social networks. In other words: Like Gina was able to ask her savvy Twitter followers about the best Netbook, politicians should be able to ask about the best policy decision and be able to make sense of the answers.

The first test for ThinkTank in the political context will be Grant Challenges initiative by the White House. The tool will be used to gather feedback on the list of scientific and technical challenges identified by the White House. It will be interesting to see how this still rather young open source project hold up to the task but it is great to see that the White House and Expert Labs are willing to make use of such an innovative tool for a real-life test.

Tags: Crowd Sourcing, Expert Lab, Gina Trapani, inenglish, Smarterware, ThinkTank