For some people it appears to be not much more than a buzzword for public outreach, where the general public is just informed about what NASA is doing, why it’s doing this, and how it’s done. This can be done using a website, Twitter, or Facebook. Although these tools have been called a “digital tool for collaboration” in the paper, the information flow on Facebook, Twitter, and so on is usually restricted to one direction and the chances of obtaining feedback from the public are limited (e.g., direct messages, comments). That’s a first step, but from my point of view, participatory is more than just reading about NASA, it is the chance to be part of it. For the same reason projects like SETI@Home, Folding@Home, and Stardust@Home have to be excluded as well, because they are only using my personal (= time) or computational resources, without allowing a direct interaction between the public and the people running SETI or Stardust.

But how do give people the chance to be part of NASA? This is a really tough question considering the generation “25 years and older”, also referred as taxpayers. For those people participatory exploration may really mean to just give them something, they are proud of paying for? Firstly, this requires for NASA to be in the newspapers not just with budget overruns or project delays, but with good news for a change. Secondly there are surely more possibilities, but my interest is participatory exploration for younger people.

Considering the generation “25 years and younger”, participatory exploration is – or better should be – part of education. I am totally agreeing with Chris’ post on how we got (and could get) young children inspired. Honestly, just show them the Moon and tell them that NASA had people walking up there! Show them rockets, airplanes, and all the fun stuff. Unfortunately NASA seems to loose touch with many of those children – being the future workforce – once they get older. And NASA supports that drift by only spending a very small amount of its education budget on projects with students in their late high school years or at universities. This from my point of view is strange, considering the vast amount of possibilities for actual participatory exploration at this point. One of those possibilities is the American Student Moon Orbiter (ASMO) concept (http://asmo.arc.nasa.gov), where students from allover the U.S. are supposed to design, built, test, launch, and operate their own spacecraft around the Moon. This means they really are an actual part of the exploration program, not just the audience for it. And maybe inspiring their children and supporting STEM education is considered “worth it” by the taxpayers as well.

P.S. Other federal agencies are already demonstrating the capabilities of participatory exploration with students (e.g., University Nanosat Program of the US Air Force (http://www.vs.afrl.af.mil/UNP/), Cubesat program of the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08549/nsf08549.htm)).

The paper is very focused on NASA allowing public participation in its programs (which I greatly applaud and support) which is fine. But I’d love to see some verbage about NASA participation going the other way: make it easier for NASA employees and projects to participate in activities organized and run by others (be they individuals or organizations). I think that might help mitigate any Not Invented Here syndrome as well.

IPP had (has?) a program last year where NASA employees could participate in “externships” with other organizations for up to a year. That way the organization could benefit from NASA’s perspective but NASA gets to learn new ways of doing things. That’s a little “heavy” for what you’re talking about in that paper but it does get NASA out and into other people’s projects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXroUTAdQA

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia.....dcast.html

I was first introduced to this podcast competition during the AIAA 2nd Space Exploration Conference in Houston, TX, in December 2006. It provides students in various age categories the opportunity to develop and submit an audio or video podcast related to NASA and its work. These entries were presented to the audience at the AIAA conference and winners were selected by these audience members.

That is where this event stopped. You could view some of the winners online, but only if you knew where to look to find the information. Since then, the website has been brought down and http://www.explorationpodcast.com no longer provides information about this competition or links to the past winners.

This competition was (I’m assuming it is no longer held) a perfect example of participatory exploration. It was students creating NASA podcasts for other students.

NASA asked the younger generation to participate and relate their knowledge of NASA’s mission to other students. Unfortunately, in my opinion, NASA did not hold up to its end of the bargain.

First, the Exploration Podcast webpage had a big disclaimer at the bottom of the page alienating NASA’s association with the competition. Why is the agency afraid to associate themselves with anything that may remotely resemble advertisement?

Second, there was no significant publicity or effort to distribute or display the resultant podcasts. When I e-mailed the organizers of this competition to ask about donating materials which could be used to mass distribute the podcasts to local schools, the answer was typical of many of NASA’s most phenomenal educational outreach programs:

“Even if we had CDs or other media which could be used to distribute the materials from this competition, we do not have the budget to pay someone to burn the CDs.”

So how could this play into participatory exploration? Simple. Examine the phenomenal programs that are already in place, evaluate their potential, eliminate the money pits, and invest the small amount of money necessary to distribute the free publicity that was generated by the age group NASA so desperately wants to reach.

Another great example of wasted publicity is the NASA Means Business competition. Some of the best, 30-second commercials in support of NASA go unseen each year as there is no centralized, easily accessible means of viewing these videos.

Once again, my point is simple. Examine the programs already in place before creating a slew of new programs with the explanation “NASA needs to reach out.” Chances are we might find that NASA is already reaching out, but pulling their hand away at the last second and saying “Psych!”.