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.”

The author doesnt actually refer to any NASA-specific practices or challenges, and didnt seem to have even taken the time to speak with NASA about these ideas. However, he goes on to explain that while the utopian vision of wikis is great and all, it wont work for NASA. Why? “It would seem irresponsible,” he says, ” to treat all knowledge equally where lives and very large amounts of resources are at stake, as they are on all NASA space missions.”

This kind of thing drives me nuts, as it’s a response I often see to the idea of making NASA’s content and processes more transparent and accessible. How could we let a bunch of teenaged hackers develop code for the space station?

Well, guess what. Inviting contributions from an unrestricted audience doesnt mean decisions about those contributions dont go through the same quality control and approval processes as closed, proprietary work does. If anything, it means that maybe more of the “bugs” (conceptual or technical) will have been found ahead of time.

“… It is not a good idea for NASA to adopt a fully democratic approach to knowledge… [in] situations in which there are clear right answers and where some people are more likely to provide those answers than others.”

This is exactly the kind of thinking that wikis are designed to weed out. space exploration and settlement is one of the most important long-term challenges of our species. We can’t stick to what we already know or think we know. Every mission or spacecraft ever lost was the result of applying what we thought were “clearly right answers,” from the people we were told were “supposed to be” providing them.

If we want any chance of innovating outside the constraints of our traditional thinking, and breaking through age-old challenges of space exploration such as launch technologies, cost, and life support on other planets, we need to be open to answers from unexpected places. Wikis are just one of a suite of technologies
NASA should be employing to make room for and embrace those inputs.