NASA : Innovation and Collaboration
In the past few months I have been working doing research on methods to make my group more effecient and productive. In the process of doing this I stumbled upon a vendor that is currently developing a Wiki/Sharepoint type software that is geared towards sharing calculation methodologies. We all know the impact Wiki type software has had in the world from our experience with Wikipedia. The marvels of this type of thinking has yet to be untapped.
I believe that this type of software has unlimited potential for what we do here at NASA. That being stated I was wondering if any of you guys would know who I could talk with to introduce this software?
On a different but related subject, if any of you guys have read Wikionomics you know that corporations are leveraging Open Source to help develop their proprietary software. I was thinking that using this type of strategy could be done by NASA as well to develop software that is necessary for our daily operations. My thought is that make it open source in order that we can get external developers for “free” and use a core-group of internal developers that help drive the direction the software is being developed. I have several potential ideas on what software we could develop that will help NASA meet its primary mission (i.e. space station) and secondary mission (drive innovation in America). If any of you know who I could talk to about this I would greatly appreciate it.
Rolando
2 Responses to “NASA : Innovation and Collaboration”
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Alexander M Orlando on September 29th, 2008
Hi Rolando
just got to your blog and it would be great to continue this conversation. Contact me so we can discuss.
Courtney Graham/ HQ OGC on October 6th, 2008
Try and make use of your local legal/patent counsel or CIO office for questions like this. It doesn’t appear that the people commenting on this site realize that there is a right answer and a lot of the legwork has already been done. Your patent counsel can usually point you in the right direction for questions like this (and your earlier question regarding distributing information about your program).
For example, NASA was one of the first government agencies to develop an OSI-approved open source license. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php
We are also wrapping up an agreement with SourceForge to facilitate deposit of source code by NASA engineers and our contractors for use by the open source community. However, release of software to the community does require review prior to the release to ensure that NASA protects the intellectual property of its contractors and complies with ITAR and other regulations. You can check with your local IPP office – they are the software release authority for the agency.
If you want to publicly release NASA scientific and technical information, that may also need to be reviewed for intellectual property and ITAR issues before you release it – putting it into the STI database is a great way to ensure you have a static address if you want to post information on how to access it elsewhere.
Your local legal office should also be able to help you determine whether there are restrictions on what you would like to post – the current administration has placed a lot of limits on information that would have been fine to distribute just a few years ago.
Obviously, you personally are free to comment, post and share your personal view on your own time – all of my comments above apply when you are speaking for the agency or want to distribute information/software for NASA.
If you have trouble finding this information, feel free to contact me directly – Courtney B. Graham in the HQ Office of General Counsel and I will help you find the right person. I’m in .X500.
“Follow me on Twitter: netlawyer”
Courtney