Education
Somewhere between one third and one half of all American high school students have access to Internet-enabled "tablet" computers. Most of us, however, call them smart phones. Given the approaching ubiquity of these devices and the push by many to place standard tablet computers in classrooms, we are working to produce compelling classroom-tested content optimized for touch screens yet accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. The Physics Calculator is our first offering, a free app. designed to help students with the solving of simple mechanics problems. In early 2012, we will follow it up with Tablet Physics.
Civic Engagment
We help communities choose and communicate questions to politicians through asynchronous online town halls. Powered by our communityCOUNTS platform, community members submit and rank questions for political candidates. Candidates can post responses, and the community is given a chance to vote on the replies. Voting in this round is not about whether or not a user likes an answer, but strictly whether or not users feel candidates actually answered the questions asked, encouraging more substantive replays. Additionally, the format avoids the usual excuses used by campaigns to avoid engagement. Thanks to a forum's asynchronous nature there can be no "scheduling conflicts." Since the questions come from constituents, there is no cry of media bias, and the replies' open format means there is no worry of being confined to "sound bites." To learn more about the history of communityCOUNTS, visit communitycounts.com
Law
In our spare time, we have started to think about how information technology can best be put to use assisting the legal community. The result is a proposed open source open-API project called WeJudicate. It invisions creating two parallel and complementary software solutions for the courts and attorneys--a case management system for use by legal practitioners and an electronic docketing system for use by the courts. In the spring of 2011, Anaces' president, then a third year law student, proposed to fund full-time WeJudicate development through a combination of Kickstarter funding and support from Anaces. However, the project failed to meet its fundraising goal and has since become one of Anaces' passion projects (projects that Anaces employees may work on using 20% of their work hours). As such, there is no firm launch date for the first version of the code base. If you would like to stay in the loop, you can join our mailing list or follow the project on twitter.
In The News
The Anaces name hasn't shown up in the press that often, but our projects have. Our highest profile work has been in fostering online political dialog through asynchronous town halls. You can find a selection of some coverage by clicking on a news outlet (below). Included are articles on the original communityCOUNTS along with various iterations of 10Questions and Ask The President, forums we have powered here in the United States. Our Mexican and Brazilian projects are not covered here.
