A friend forwarded this article to me last week entitled “Democratizing Knowledge at NASA and Elsewhere.” It is a short discussion about the idea of using wikis to ‘democratize’ knowledge at NASA. The author explains,

“A couple of years ago, I assigned a case study on NASA’s approach to knowledge management to several teams of MBA students as a final exam. As part of the exam, the teams were expected to make recommendations for how NASA should revise its approaches to knowledge. One MBA team suggested a major change in direction. Their recommendation went something like this: “NASA should abandon its current systems and approaches to managing knowledge and adopt a series of wikis instead.”

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The Broken Windows theory states that the behavior of actors within a particular situation is a function of its external environment. The theory was explored in an article in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly where the authors write:

“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.”

These examples articulate the power of context within one’s external environment and the sliding scale of socially acceptable behavior. But it isn’t just social behavior, it is behavior in general. Systems thinking states: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve finally compiled a report on the open discussion we held a couple of weeks ago in Second Life to begin brainstorming where virtual worlds are going, and how NASA can and should shape its contributions to this important emerging technology. From the draft report:

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recently a colleague sent an email out to an agency discussion group about open source, asking about rationales for open source release. his management didnt see the justification for his request to release his software under the NOSA. it’s interesting that although, as someone in the resulting discussion pointed out, NASA’s own charter states that it shall “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof”, open source software release is, in many instances, still seen as more of special case, than as a natural way to minimize overhead while maximizing the aforementioned dissemination (among other things).

last year i did a series of interviews with a cross section of developers, engineers, managers, and lawyers at Ames about open source. from there, i compiled the rationales they offered as the motivation for their interest in open source. i think it’s worth noting that none of these are unique to NASA per se, but i do consider all of them strong reasons in their own right for open source release and/or development, and certainly together they present a strong argument for encouraging open source release as long as there is no explicit reason not to. Read the rest of this entry »

I attended BarCampBlock in Palo Alto yesterday, which could have been the largest BarCamp to date with over 800 people in attendance.

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp.”

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i was in a meeting today where we were discussing the legalities surrounding open government-sponsored collaborative websites. that is, a NASA site facilitating open collaboration between NASA employees and non-NASA individuals or organization. what happens to intellectual property that comes out of that site? can the ideas be copyrighted? patented? should the ideas, content or inventions that come out of these collaborations be required to be openly accessible? can they be used commercially? and whatever decision is made, how is this communicated and enforced?

in general, we want to be as hands-off as possible. it should be up to groups and individuals collaborating on the site to decide when and if their content has gotten to the point that they want to (or that it justifies) being copyrighted or patented. however, as the sponsors of the time and resources that go into building and supporting this collaborative environment, NASA would expect a license to use any copyrighted or patented inventions or content.

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we had our third luna philosophie on july 30^th with bruce damer. he gave a great talk about the history of virtual environments and all the amazing work his company Digital Space has done with NASA over the years. It’s interesting to see how closely coupled that evolution has been to supporting the simulation of space environments. Ames Center Director Pete Worden attended the salon, and afterwards requested a briefing on virtual worlds and where we thought the Center should and could be directing research to move forward state of the art in this area. I’m organizing an in-world (Second Life) open meeting tomorrow (tuesday, august 7th) to have a discussion about this, and will follow up with a meeting at Ames. this work is also expected to go towards a director’s weekend workshop at Ames about virtual worlds, likely sometime in december.

more info about the meeting (copy and pasted from announcement email): Read the rest of this entry »

as most people know we are working on putting together an open source development site for nasa ames. these tools would support active open source development, as opposed to just release, by providing technical tools as well as a collection of written resources and documentation about the institutional, legal, and technical challenges, existing precedence, best practices, and general community support and interaction.

for a long time i’ve thought that we should create one comprehensive open source space community site, with the written resources and community interaction as the overarching element of a site that also hosts numerous individual projects and the respective tools to support this (wikis, issue tracking, subversion, etc.).

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