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ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges among underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open-source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world.

Why Open Source?

• Key Article: Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond
  
• Software Movements: Free Software Movement and the Open Source Initiative
• Research: Open Source Research Community (MIT)

That is the driving motivation behind the ThinkCycle Initiative.

Approach

At the heart of the community is an evolving database of reasonably well-posed problems and ongoing design solutions contributed by universities, Non-Govermental Organizations (NGOs), companies and the general public. The system is primarily aimed at, but in no way limited to, using the design and engineering skills of the students and researchers in universities worldwide. One scenario is for professors to assign challenges to their students, assist them in working collaboratively with communities and organizations in developing countries while encouraging peer review from domain experts of evolving design solutions archived on ThinkCycle. Motivated teams of students may also work on critical design challenges as independent study projects with their departments. The objective is to document all evolving design solutions, rationale, processes, peer reviews and contributions within a searchable and cross-referenced system. Distributed and shared intellecual property issues are approached by maintaining all contributions for individual projects on the system (more on this issue will be formalized soon, as we work closely with our current ThinkCycle design teams).

Teachers and academics now have a resource for selecting interesting, applied problems while students gain experience in working on challenging real-world projects. Design teams can approach partner organizations for support in extending their work on the field and the development of subsequent products and services. NGOs, practitioners and researchers now have a resource for sharing problems and design challenges, while the general public benefit from open-source access to innovative design, and a new generation of individuals working on problems that matter for the environment and our communities.

About the ThinkCycle Initiative

ThinkCycle is an academic non-profit initiative, developed and operated by a group of doctoral students at the MIT Media Laboratory with the support of many students and faculty throughout MIT. The system is now being used to support workshops and courses in partner universities to scale this initiative worldwide. The online site complements ongoing design courses at MIT and many campuses around the world, such as the inter-disclipinary design studios: Global Design that Matters. ThinkCycle seeks to support design, resources, peer review and funding grants for students, individuals, design teams and organizations engaged in collaborative design with ThinkCycle. It will remain open to the public domain, although we encourage companies to partner with members on design projects hosted in this initiative. More details forthcoming soon.

• QuickStart: Getting Started with Collaborative Design on Thinkcycle
• Tutorial: Hitchhikers Guide to Collaborative Design with ThinkCycle
• Introduction: ThinkCycle: Creating a Culture of Open Source Design Innovation
• Journal Paper: Sharing Distributed Design Knowledge for Open Collaborative Design

Participating

Join ThinkCycle by logging in here. An account will be created for you immediately and the password emailed to you for confirmation. Although your password is fully encrypted on the server, we recommend you create a new one for this site. While you do not need an account to browse the site, it provides many customized features, with the ability to share ideas and gain feedback from knowledgeable experts. Membership on ThinkCycle allows everyone to contribute and learn with this initiative, while creating a supportive online community.

Note: Although this system is designed to run on all browsers and platforms, some features currently function better on Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla or Firefox browsers. So if you experience any difficulties using Netscape 4.x, please try using Explorer 5.x or a more recent version of Netscape 6.

Development and Design

ThinkCycle is being developed and operates on open source tools including Linux, XEmacs, Gnome and ACS. The current prototype of the ThinkCycle Collaborative Open-Source Design Platform runs on the ArsDigita Community System. Oracle 8i is currently being used as the backend database (MIT has a site license), however an open source database like PostgreSQL using OpenACS is available.

The Oracle database is backed-up on a nightly basis. All ThinkCycle content files are archived 4 times a day on a separate ThinkCycle Mirror Server. We encourage others to create their own local mirror servers, for fast local access to all ThinkCycle content (see instructions on the mirror site). We also maintain a ThinkCycle Development Site for creation and testing of new features and services. You may try out and 'crash-test' the development site, and send us your comments at thinkcycle@media.mit.edu

People Involved

ThinkCycle is a voluntary and distributed initiative, with core participants and new members contributing in an ongoing basis.

• ThinkCycle Founders and Core Contributors
  
• Conceptual Development: Saul Griffith, Yael Maguire, Ravi Pappu, Wendy Plesniak, Nitin Sawhney and Ben Vigoda (in alphabetic order)
  
• Lead Software Development & Ongoing Support: Nitin Sawhney
  
• Oracle Setup & Admin: Jesse Kipp and Yael Maguire
• ThinkCycle Mirror Site: Jason Taylor
• Website Design: Vassia Alaykova, Logo and design templates: Wendy Plesniak

Last modified: Oct 22, 2004