Lifehacker’s founding editor Gina Trapani has just announced that she’s joining Expert Labs, the government-oriented independent think tank led by Anil Dash and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her first project: deploying her Twitter-based decision making software called ThinkTank for the White House.
The Obama administration announced the joint project with Expert Labs in a blog post earlier this month. As Trapani described it today: “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.”
Trapani explained today that the fundamental qualities of ThinkTank are that it leverages existing social connections (today on Twitter, soon on Facebook and later beyond), that it stores the data on your own server just like WordPress does and that it’s open source and community developed. The software sounds like “the WordPress of Twitter data harvesting.”
Trapani has been one of the foremost voices in tracking the ways the web can improve everyday life and work. She focuses on making new developments accessible and is also a respected software developer.