I have always been fascinated with what makes a situation, person, or event succeed or fail. The psychology of it fascinates me. I studied psychology as an undergrad and in graduate school, but it wasn’t until I read The Tipping Point by Malcome Gladwell that I really became hooked on social psychology and specifically the power that people have to make an impact or be change agents.

Gladwell starts his book with a description of the successful come back of Hush Puppies. Yes, it is true Hush Puppies weren’t always popular and the brushed suede shoe line was down to 30,000 pairs per year in 1994. Then people started showing up in the trendy clubs and bars in Manhattan and it was on. People bought up the shoes from anywhere they could. Issac Mizrahi (before he was so famous and designed for Target) was wearing them, another designer wanted them for spring fashion shoot, someone created Hush Puppy boutique, as so on and so on. By the end of 1995, they had sold 430,000 pairs. Word of mouth drove the demand and ultimately the supply. Amazing!

During the pilot of NASAsphere (pilot investigating and testing out social networking in NASA), I started really thinking about tipping points again. I can’t say that one person or one thing made the tipping point in this project, but I definitely feel like we are experiencing a tipping point in NASA related to social networking. NASAsphere has just completed the original planned pilot period with an amazing level of participation by NASA employees/contractors. We started with 87 people on a list and after 30 days, participants grew to nearly 288 people (as of June 26th, 2008). NASA employees/contractors are flattening NASA center and organizational boundaries to talk about work ideas and questions. The NASAsphere participants were experiencing a first hand the ability to ask a question and get NASA collective intelligence in the answers.

Before staring the NASAsphere pilot, I thought NASA employees/contractors could benefit and find use in connecting with each other via on-line social networking. I thought technology pilots in NASA have been useful, but are frequently on the flat side, meaning people “test” it out and then are done participating in the pilot. To really see if social networking could work in NASA, I knew I needed to do more to set the stage to make it more interesting, and to make it less about a technology pilot and more about people. I purposefully incorporated key elements into the pilot, like allowing employees to easily invite colleagues without barriers, set “rules of engagement” and then allow participants freedom to post, as well as brand the off-the-self product to make it meaningful to participants—“sphere” has a physical connotation of planets, orbits, etc… and then also a social meaning like “sphere of influence.” And then I started sending invitations to people I knew, and so it goes.

We received word, and we are able to extend the pilot a little longer in order for the purpose of testing additional hypothesis and functionality that NASAsphere participants discussed using NASAsphere.

Could this really be a tipping point?