Announcing people.openNASA

Ever since I started at NASA, my colleagues and I have lamented how little information is available via our agency-wide employee directory. The information is practical– email, phone, employer, etc.– but we often remark how great it would be if we could extend that information with more detailed, timely, and even personal content. Information about who you are, what you work on, tags and skills, or side projects, would help us connect in more meaningful ways. It would let us not just find people we already know about, but search for people based on specific properties, and learn more about colleagues we are collaborating with.

Last month, spurred into action by Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon, we wanted to show that transparency isn’t just something the public consumes from government, it’s something the government provides, too. After all, “the government” is just you and me, right?

The three pillars of the Open Government Directive (as discussed here previously) are transparency, participation, and collaboration. Collaboration (or lack thereof) is something that directly affects our ability to do our jobs every day.

As a result, Nick, Robbie and I are happy to announce the availability of people.openNASA. people is a new interface for finding and learning about your colleagues and collaborators at NASA. It is an extension to the x500 system currently available at people.nasa.gov. people.openNASA automatically includes all the information provided by x500, and exposes a number of additional fields which you can fill out to tell people more about yourself and your projects (all fields are optional).

We think people is cool because it builds a superset of the existing, public, NASA contact directory. Almost anyone you can find with people.nasa.gov, you can find with this new interface. Anyone with a NASA email address can edit their own profile (after validating their identity via email). You can add a bio, details and links about your main project, social media links, previous and side projects, and of course tags and skills. You can also customize your primary name, email and phone number. No more phone calls to your old office!

And finally, we’re using a service called Gravatar to pull in a profile picture associated with your NASA email address. Once you set a gravatar, not only will it show up in people, it will show up anytime you use your NASA email on a Gravatar-enabled service online to comment or post. It’s great to put a face with a name. And if you’re not comfortable with that, again, all these field are optional.

Right now you can search by name, tag, or skills, and we’ll be adding new features as you request them on our feedback page. Please try searching for yourself, and customizing your profile. We’re looking for suggestions, so let us know what you think!