Who watches the watchmen? Whistleblowers

It’s common these days for startups who don’t gain traction in the marketplace to share post-mortems with the community. One hopes that the lessons they learned will be helpful to those who follow them. Also it gives the team a chance to share an inside look at their process and thinking which might be of interest to others.

This is a brief recounting of our team’s one month effort to produce an Edward Snowden action figure. If you’re interested in a fuller picture and timeline, please browse our GitHub repository https://github.com/peterood/action-figure-rapture/

JP started the repo January 24, 2014, and we set out tackling the challenge of constructing Snowden’s face, see issue. February 4, John received an email from ThatsMyFace.com saying the 3D face for [eddie] was complete, see page. We moved to produce the head, see issue. At this point, our execution regrettably slowed down as we waited to set up a business bank account for Nerdminer LLC. Jump to last week when learned that ThatsMyFace.com had produced their own Snowden and Assange action figures. It was a bittersweet moment as we were disappointed that we weren’t able to launch this in time but also glad that another team’s efforts were getting so much attention from the press.

Collection Mockup Made By JP The Night News Broke Feb 18

Congratulations to the ThatsMyFace team, and we hope their efforts will bring recognition and awareness to heroes less well known than Edward Snowden and Julian Assange like Chelsea Manning, William Binney, Barrett Brown, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, and many others. And also to those who provide invaluable assistance and journalism such as Alexa O’Brien, Jesselyn Radack, Sarah Harrison, Laura Poitras, and many others.

@bingeboy @johnreposa @pete_rood

a @nerdminer project