Breadcrumbs and ThinkCycle.

On the web, people can often lead you to interesting new places, even when they don’t have a home page, just by virtue of leaving bread crumbs with their name on them here and there.

Here’s an illustration. Duane Milne has just poured a number of good tips on finding good movies to rent in the Know-how wiki (a general-purpose free advice exchange). Looking his name up in Google led me to ThinkCycle.org.

ThinkCycle is an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing 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.

ThinkCycle provides a shared online space for designers, engineers, domain experts and stakeholders to discuss, exchange and construct ideas towards sustainable design solutions in critical problem domains. Join the ThinkCycle Community and make a difference!

The site looks pretty successful for such an ambitious initiative. 1746 members and counting. Lots of ideas in there; the design seems well-thought-out for facilitating productive open collaboration. I’ll definitely have to dig deeper into this.[Seb's Open Research]