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Mission

The goal of OPDB is to help people create great project documentation in 5 minutes or less.

History

2003 This project started as Michael Rosenblatt's master thesis at the MIT Media Lab in the Grassroots Invention Group. It was then called iCubes. The goal of the project was to increase the overall efficiency of research work at the 400 person Media Lab by creating a repository for frequently used or highly novel resources. Michael's thesis, The Impact of Networked Display Devices on Awareness and Adoption of an Online Knowledge Sharing System [pdf 13MB] was about the creation of this system and getting people to use it.

2004 After graduating from MIT, Michael and his longtime friend (and classmate at both CMU and MIT) Rahul Bhargava borrowed on the learnings of that early trial, and scratch-built the a new system, titled inventionDB, and made it open for free public use on the internet. The site went live in April of 2004, but as an Alpha version and not widely announced. This year Michael demonstrated InventionDB to Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer co-founder. Woz said "Wow, this could really help people get to building things again," and he was particularly excited about the application to enabling robotics projects for kids. Woz remained an advisor through 2005 until his autobiographical book release and Venture Capital activities began to consume all his time.

2005 This year was the wide public announcement of InventionDB, and we ran two project contests to get the word out. Each contest rewarded an iPod for the best project submission. These contests were won respectively by David Merrill a grad student at MIT, and Travis Gregg who at the time was the sound engineer for the Unites States Marine Corp marching band. This year we had several releases, which added features such as comments on projects, the ability to apply Creative Commons licenses to projects, built-in photo cropping, and an improved browsing interface. InventionDB was featured on several blogs, including Make Magazine, WorldChanging and Digg.com. Also, against his better judgement, Michael got a day-job in 2005. While a cool job (helping make the world's most popular digital music players), it began to divert time away from InventionDB.

2006 This was a sad year for InventionDB. Several early contributors to InventionDB development also got day-jobs, and Michael's job became really, really busy. InventionDB got attacked by spammers, and it became hard to find actual project content in a sea of annoying ads postings. Very little development and almost no bug fixes were completed in 2006. It was a sad year. On a positive note, many InventionDB users continued to publish content - thank you for your perseverance!

2007 This was a great year. We got the project back onto the track with several technical and organizational changes. First, we have made InventionDB's underlying software open source. We now call this Open Project Database, or OPDB for short. This makes the code free and modifiable, and we encourage creative communities to install the software locally for their own use. To support this, we've made the interface easy to skin with new colors and easy to replace the logos. It can also integrate with popular log-in schemas such as LDAP. We've also implemented several anti-spamming measures to reduce the malicious clutter that plagued InventionDB in 2006.

On the administrative side, we formed the Open Project Database Organization and registered it as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. This organization will continue to run the public site InventionDB.com, and will manage development and releases of the OPDB open source code base.

This year also saw three organizations install OPDB on their servers: University of Massachusetts, Lowell; iCode - a middle-school focused robotics enrichment program; and San Jose State University.

2008 We're off to a good start in 2008. We are working directly with the early adopters of OPDB's code at their institutions. We launched OPDB 1.2 which allows OPDB installations to syndicate their content to another OPDB installation. This will allow schools to publish their projects (with attribution) to InventionDB.com. We also launched the InventionDB Facebook App 1.0. This allows InventionDB users to display their projects on their Facebook profiles. Our next step is an upcoming release for OPDB 1.3, which adds many features to support richer project documentation. This should be released by the end of March.

Thank you for reading this history, and look forward to exciting announcements in the near future.

Michael Rosenblatt michael@inventiondb.com

Current contributors:
  • Michael Rosenblatt developed the original project concept and thesis, and is the interim project leader. Michael is a graduate of MIT and Carnegie Mellon and currently works at Apple Inc. Hobbies include this project, reading, mountain biking and increasingly, writing.
  • Scott Ritter is just out of Stanford University with a MS in civil engineering and currently works at Google. Scott is a self-taught web developer, and is committed to doing things he feels are important. Such is his interest in InventionDB.
  • Miriam Poursaied has a background in technical sales of enterprise software systems. She will be working with us to advocate the use of InventionDB installed software among university-level learning institutions.
  • Sara Rosenblatt is supporting fundraising for the Open Project Database Organization.
  • Robin Tafel has a hand on experience in graphics designing. She is the Graphic Designer of OPDB.
  • Gabriel Francis is the Internal Tools Product Specialist at Google. He works on the Business Development and University Relations for OPDB in his free hours
  • Peter Dolan is a Support Engineer at Google. He has the responsibilities of mentorship and development guidance for OPDB.
  • David Cairns is a web-developer and makes development contributions to OPDB during his free time.
  • Anoop Antony is the full time developer for OPDB.
Past contributors:
  • Rahul Bhargava, for software development and web design.
  • Hans Kieserman, for software development.
  • Bakhtiar Mikhak, for continuing advisership beginning at MIT.
  • Fred Martin, for advisership.
  • Dan Sokol, for advisership.
  • Steve Wozniak, for advisership.