ThinkCycle is a student-led initiative established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 is a web-based collaboration framework that supports individuals and organizations in seeking, documenting , and sharing information about problem domains and emerging design.

Strengths:

• It is a self-organized and decentralized system, allowing individuals to create online communities of interest around specific domains and contribute or learn from ongoing discussion and design activity. Topics consist of an online discussion board, shared file-space, categorical notes and publications .
• Organizations and domain experts typically post design challenges and resources, while design teams use the system to post iterative design concepts, technical notes, working files and images.
• Subscribers to specific topics are notified by email whenever new content is posted to the topic.
• All content can be peer-reviewed, searched and cross-linked to any other content on the site.
• C onsists of services and modules for managing content, versioning, permissions, user membership, messaging, session tracking .

Weaknesses:

• According to a study of the site, browsing and searching information was more prevalent than posting content. The web seems to be more useful as a medium for dissemination of information on sustainable design and resources, rather than primarily as a collaboration tool.
• Half the participants also found ThinkCycle somewhat complicated and time consuming to use, due to difficulties in navigation and structure
• P articipants view design as a social process rather than that of only archiving and exchanging data.
• O nline tools are perceived as an additional commitment, rather than a natural part of the design process.

Technology note: Most of the technology behind the site is open source, an aspect of back-end design that we would like emulate, The site was developed in the Tcl programming language with SQL queries, as packages running on an Oracle database and is regularly archived on distributed mirror sites. It was developed using an open source framework based on the ArsDigita Community System .

Screenshot of ThinkCycle Topic Page.ThinkCycle lists people, categories, discussions, publications and thinkspaces in its navigation menu. Information is organized by high level categories and related information, 'ThinkSpaces', and Notes are listed under the retrieved documents.

Screenshot of Comments/Attachments page. Users can add comments and link comments to other locations by clicking links at the top of the page.

Screenshot of Search Results. ThinkCycle lists the type of results, the title, the date and the poster. Users can click on titles to get to information about the result.