Chirp has two basic components:

• Desktop (client) software you and your teammates use;
• The Plum Canary sync service (on the Web) that synchronizes project information among your team.

To see how these work, let's follow four people launching a new cola product. The team includes:

• Sally, the VP of Marketing;
• Alex, who works for her as Director of Marketing Communications;
• Susan, who works for Alex as a graphics designer;
• Jean (who isn't launching the Cola product) is Sally's wedding planner.

A picture (and a few words) makes it easy to see how information flows among these people.

Step 1: Sally assigns a Task to Alex, then syncs

Sally first gives Alex overall product launch responsibilities by assigning him a task. To make the graphics easeir to see, we'll abbreviate the name of this task as “P1T1” – short for Project 1 Task 1. When Sally saves the newly-created task, her copy of Chirp uses the Plum Canary Sync Service to replicate that Task assignment over to Alex's copy of Chirp, like this:

Sally->SyncService

SyncService->Alex

Afterwards, you can see that both Sally and Alex have a copy of P1T1:

Step 2: Alex assigns Task to Susan

Alex is going to create a variety of tasks for others in the team in order to launch the new cola product. The first is to ask Susan to create a logo. (We'll call this Project 1, Task 2 - abbreviated P1T2.) Alex assigns the Task, and the Task is replicated to Susan's copy of Chirp, like this:

Alex->SyncService->Susan

The result looks like this. (But we're not done with this step yet.)

Step 3: Susan auto-updates Sally

As soon as Susan “Accepts” the assignment by Alex, a autmoated sequence of actions is triggered: Susan gets a copy of the P1T1 task from Sally (to Alex), so she can be up to date with the status on all the tasks in project P1. Likewise, Sally gets a copy of the P1T2 task (assigned by Alex to Susan), like this:

Susan->SyncService->Sally

After this, you can see that everyone on the team has all information about all tasks in the project:

Step 4: Sally's wedding tasks

Sally isn't only concerned with work, though. She needs to have Jean hire a DJ for her upcoming wedding. When she assigns this task to Jean, we don't want Sally's work team to see this Task. So Sally labels it under a different project name — we'll call it P2. The flow of the Task information looks like this:

Susan->SyncService->Jean

Final result

After this series of events, you can see that Sally has all the information she needs in order to assess how her project to launch a new cola project is going, as do Alex and Susan. Each Task assignee can update the status of their tasks, and the information is similarly synchronized to all the team members using the Plum Canary Sync Service.

And Sally has also safely assigned a wedding-related Task to Jean, and the information is properly distributed so that this information is not synchronized to Sally's workplace team.

The picture looks like this:

Extra bonus: Animated version

Want to see it all in one animation? Here it is!

Are you a technology junkie?

Want to know about all the advanced technology used inside Chirp? Look here.

Or, download your copy of Chirp, and get working with your teammates.