I have always been fascinated with what makes a situation, person, or event succeed or fail. The psychology of it fascinates me. I studied psychology as an undergrad and in graduate school, but it wasn’t until I read The Tipping Point by Malcome Gladwell that I really became hooked on social psychology and specifically the power that people have to make an impact or be change agents.

Gladwell starts his book with a description of the successful come back of Hush Puppies. Yes, it is true Hush Puppies weren’t always popular and the brushed suede shoe line was down to 30,000 pairs per year in 1994. Then people started showing up in the trendy clubs and bars in Manhattan and it was on. People bought up the shoes from anywhere they could. Issac Mizrahi (before he was so famous and designed for Target) was wearing them, another designer wanted them for spring fashion shoot, someone created Hush Puppy boutique, as so on and so on. By the end of 1995, they had sold 430,000 pairs. Word of mouth drove the demand and ultimately the supply. Amazing!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, my name is Celeste Merryman and I work for NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (you may have heard of it), in the Knowledge Management and Collaboration Technologies Office. I asked the organizers of Open NASA if I can blog about my current project–NASAsphere. We are piloting social networking for NASA employees and internal contractors. We started May 12th, 2008 and have a current end date of June 10th, 2008. I hope to blog periodically about how things are going.

I want to start off by setting the scene for the knowledge sharing landscape in NASA (from my perspective of course). I think it is important background information that helps with understanding how and why social networking is important to implement in NASA and that it might be the right time to do it.

Read the rest of this entry »