Comments on: How Does Participatory Exploration Scale?

By: Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:54:08 +0000

Don’t you think 40-something, 50-something and olders are also on their laptops creating the future? The computing table set for Gen-Y was done by GenX,W,and V. I’d like to see alot more cross-generation talk.

A thought problem I gave to Robbie 6 months. Say NASA said it would turn NASA over to GenY today. What is your plan? You don’t have the knowledge base to do it.

It may by true that new information collaboration technologies provide new methods to interact without bureaucracy, but they themselves are content free. Until GenY puts together a plan which calls for the orderly organization of the spacecraft knowledge in the heads of GenY,X,W,V – it will continue to receive the criticism it has encountered (see NASA watch).

A GenXer willing to help.

By: Garth Henning

Garth Henning — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:58:27 +0000

Any ideas for human spaceflight? While some of the data ideas may apply well to space station microgravity research, but what about the rest of the experience? What is participation beyond just IT stuff? What does it mean to be a participating part of the human spaceflight experience?

And then could you (since I’m looking for crowd-sourced help here myself) provide specific ideas for what participation might mean for an operational launch vehicle, a launch vehicle in development, and an operational on-orbit laboratory? I think participation will mean different things for each of those different programs within human spaceflight.

By: Stephen Scotti

Stephen Scotti — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:06:01 +0000

Perhaps an intermediate level (i.e., above the general public audience) with some face-to-face technical organization and capability is needed for the useful technical contributions, especially in the area of design. An example could be university design classes/projects where design teams could contribute to a NASA problem, but where there is a class instructor or other mentor(s) that can help. This approach may act as a filter that keeps totally useless or impractical ideas from adding to the overhead of a NASA project management or technical team, and it would also help develop skills needed for operating in a team environment. The danger of course is that it may filter out some good ideas too. The frequency and format of interactions between NASA and the teams would need to be determined by trial and error, but the overall process could evolve into a totally a new paradigm for design efforts.

By: ahoppin

ahoppin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:25:29 +0000

1) Automation:
Staff behind the project never have to interact with its participants en masse. Not just the relatively “passive” participatory experience of SETI@Home, but also the quite active and yet automated, algorithm driven process of a DIGG (http://www.digg.com).

2) Group Competition:
Provide templates for structured work by smaller groups, but break “massive scale” into discrete manageable groups, each with the same structure and process for their work, and with metrics for competing amongst the groups; the most successful groups get attention from the staff behind the project, get the rewards of success, etc.; X-Prizes and online fantasy sports leagues are two analogs.

3) Community Process / Peer-to-Peer:
The entity behind the project provides the environment for interaction amongst participants but doesn’t need to participate actively itself, and can harvest data from the results of the peer to peer interaction. Yahoo! Answers might be an analog, or NASA CoLab in Second Life– which certainly takes some staff work but also self-manages as a community to a large degree, so that there is a low ratio of staff time spent relative to participation by participants with one another.

As an aside, IMO we shouldn’t measure “scale” only in terms of the number of participants, but also the depth and quality of that participation. I’d most like to see participatory projects that achieve large scale on both axes– depth/quality/duration/frequency, and also raw numbers of participants.

By: Justin Kugler

Justin Kugler — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:25:12 +0000

SETI@Home and Stanford’s Folding@Home I think have really set a standard for general audience, participatory projects.

Perhaps NASA could set up something on the PlayStation Network and/or the Internet where people can download a program that does number crunching for NASA projects that need intense data processing. In return, the users could get high-res exploration images, concept art, or even maybe perks in the upcoming NASA MMO.