NASA Tests the Social Waters with Employees

Hello, my name is Celeste Merryman and I work for NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (you may have heard of it), in the Knowledge Management and Collaboration Technologies Office. I asked the organizers of Open NASA if I can blog about my current project–NASAsphere. We are piloting social networking for NASA employees and internal contractors. We started May 12th, 2008 and have a current end date of June 10th, 2008. I hope to blog periodically about how things are going.

I want to start off by setting the scene for the knowledge sharing landscape in NASA (from my perspective of course). I think it is important background information that helps with understanding how and why social networking is important to implement in NASA and that it might be the right time to do it.

NASA is a federal agency that relies heavily on collaboration and collective intelligence to meet its missions. A shuttle launch involves several NASA centers. That takes collaboration. To implement and establish the International Space Station takes a tremendous amount of collaboration with international partners. NASA has proven track record of successfully meeting its missions.
However, we as employees frequently feel disconnected and out of touch with information and each other. There some 3,000 internal NASA web sites that employees and people inside the NASA firewall can go to. There is one main employee Intranet called InsideNASA; but there are also Intranet sites an every NASA center for them to describe their own process, documentation, events, etc… . NASA has lots of document repository systems to hold what knowledge management calls “explicit knowledge.” But, those still leave employees feeling empty. Where is the connectedness? Where is the interactive nature of collective intelligence? In comes NASAsphere.

NASAsphere is designed to allow employees (loose term to also include contractors like me) to socialize around questions/answers and ideas and commenting in order to reach the collective intelligence held in the heads of NASA employees. In knowledge management, that stuff is called “tacit knowledge” AKA the stuff you don’t get from a document repository. Tacit knowledge is where the rubber meets the road in terms of useful information and knowledge that helps people do their jobs better and generate innovative ideas to build a better space ship, satellite, or rover, or whatever.

So, how is it going so far? Off the chain! I am blown away at how many people are actively participating and the ideas and questions that are flowing. We stared out with a base pilot participation set of 87 enthusiastic people that said they wanted to take part. Four days later we have 194 people on the list. For a NASA web technology, that viral growth is amazing. We started out allowing participants to invite three colleagues. Then there was a posting and comments that said “three is not enough, I want to invite more.” So we increased the limit to 10. You may be wondering way we have a limit at all. This is a pilot and we have an official limit. I want to see if we can make our limit explode with demand.

I want to thank all of the participants and the vendor as well. We are using Socialcast which is a very up and coming company really making a mark. You got to love a company tag line like “Knowledge is Social.” They get it. Thanks a million Tim.

More later. Cheers!!

The views and opinions of author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the United States Government or any agency thereof.