Ariel Waldman has just launched a fantastic new website for the space community called Spacehack. Spacehack is “a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, interact + connect with the space community and encourage citizen science” and lists projects from a broad range of topics including competitions, open source, data analysis, and education. It’s definitely a valuable source of information for anyone who wants to get involved in the space community. If you have a project that should be added to the directory, you can submit your project to be included on the site.
Over the past few weeks here at OpenNASA (and a few at NASAWatch), there have been a few debates about “Gen Y/Net Gen/Next Gen/Gen Next” wanting to be included more in how individual NASA centers (and NASA as a whole) are run. At the very least, they (really “we” since I’m included in Gen Y, if only by age) would like a seat at the table, as it were, and a voice to speak with. Whether or not mid - high level NASA managers actually listen to said voice is something else to be discussed at another time, but for the time being it looks like they are at least paying attention.
And I’m not talking about the presidential election.
No, I’m talking about something much closer to home. In the past year, I have seen and been involved in some amazing changes at Johnson Space Center.
For me, personally, it really started when I got back in touch with Nick Skytland (whom I first met at the 2006 Space Exploration Conference here in Houston) and he talked me in to writing for this blog. Around the same time, I came across Steven Gonzalez’s (of JSC’s Advanced Planning Office) blog and became aware of a group of 30 young professionals from around the center that was finishing up a 20 Year Vision for the center. Eager to help make a difference, I began attending the group’s after-work discussion sessions at a local pub and participated in the first Vision Forum that began spreading the message to the wider community.
In the comment section of the “Participatory Exploration” post, a few comments referred to employment opportunities at NASA. I started to respond to the comments, but then it turned into something much longer than comment worthy, so I’ll just post my comment here as a blog post. Here are few thoughts in response to career opportunities at NASA.
This is the first page you reach when you visit the nasa.gov website and look for information about working at NASA. If you go to nasa.gov and click “About NASA”, and then click “Careers@NASA” it will take you to what I’m talking about. The text here talks about how NASA is more than astronauts - and gives a list of folks who work within NASA including: scientists, engineers, computer programmers, personnel specialists, accountants, writers, maintenance workers. This is absolutely true and the actual list is much longer. There are people from all walks of life and backgrounds at NASA. So to address your question Brian, we absolutey need folks like you to give us a new and fresh persepective. Your background at NOAA and education as a geoscientist is invaluable. This is evidenced by none other than Justin, who was a former intel officer, and is now very active in the NASA community making huge contributions to what we do.
As a co-lead on JSC’s Barrier Analysis team for Center Director Mike Coats’ Inclusion & Innovation Council, I have been involved in some fascinating conversations over the past couple of months — Hurricane Ike not withstanding — about the culture and organization we work in. Our team includes engineers, various support staff, career veterans, and even an astronaut.
We’ve been specifically chartered to examine barriers to inclusion and innovation at the Center and, by January, propose a few solutions for breaking down those roadblocks. One issue, in particular, that we’ve touched on has come up before in this very blog, though perhaps not as directly or as clearly. That issue is relevance - fulfilling our social and civic responsibilities by providing and demonstrating value in our mission to the American people.
These are the slides from my talk at SEDS SpaceVision this weekend in College Station. I don’t have talking points yet, but when/if I do, I’ll post them here as well - I just wanted to get the slides up as soon as possible. SEDS SpaceVision is the annual event for chapters of SEDS (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) in the US to come together to meet, talk, listen to speakers from the space industry, and network. I’ve never had the chance to attend spacevision before, but since it was essentially in our back yard here in Texas, it was the perfect opportunity. Thanks to Texas A&M for hosting! This was about “participatory exploration” in context of both working at NASA and working with NASA. The audience was the interested college students attending the conference (I have another version of the “participatory exploration” I give to NASA program/project managers about how we actually go about opening our programs/projects and making them “participatory”). The goal of my talk was to let the students know a) how exciting working for NASA can be, b) how exciting the Constellation Program is, and c) that even if they didn’t literally work for NASA or for one of its subcontractors, there are still many ways to participate. Each day, we are creating more and more avenues for people to participate in the NASA mission. I’d love for readers of opennasa.com to share any other “participatory” efforts you know about. I’m also interested in hearing about what you do for NASA, if you work in the industry. If you have an awesome job, take a moment to tell us what you do! It was really good to see a number of good friends at the event, including Will Pomerantz (twitter.com/pomerantz) of the X PRIZE and Ken Davidian (twitter.com/kdavidian) of the FAA. Other notable speakers included Peter Diamandis, Bob Richards, and Loretta Hidalgo! Check out Will’s blog post(s) about the conference at The Launch Pad and check out Ken’s commercial space wiki. Note: This presentation was the ‘Feature Slideshow of the Day’ on slideshare.net on Sunday Nov 16: http://www.slideshare.net/ssod. Special thanks to Karen Lau (http://twitter.com/k_lau) for the awesome CoLab logo.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was just named #3 on Time’s list of inventions of the year for 2008! http://tinyurl.com/5t6ok9Congratulations LRO!
However, I don’t know about you, but my reaction to that was “is a spacecraft really an invention?”
Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ‘04 and Clark ‘04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.
Many 2004 campaign veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.
I would like to invite everyone to check out my copycat site openLangley and its affiliate, openLangley on Facebook. Both are unofficial. I just started them, and am struggling with how to make this work. Thoughts, suggestions, and offers of free help are appreciated.
Now, a word about the sponsor. I am beginning a new gig at Langley as lead of the newly formed New Media Team. We are exploring the use of new media such as this, with all the implications.
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