The Web site I discovered is a search-based site called WorldWideScience.org and is maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), which is in the Office of Science under the Department of Energy. Using federated search engine technology, WorldWideScience.org provides single search and retrieval for national and international science and technology information, something the “top three” search engines cannot do. And here is why.

In order to be a global science and technology search site, WorldWideScience.org made partnerships with other countries, some traditionally not open to share, like China and Korea. You can view the video about worldwidescience.org as well as the China’s and Korea’s Participation signing ceremonies . Other countries that share content are India, Finland, Sweden, Britain, Japan, Mexico, Cuba, and many more  and the participation has grown since its 2007 debut from 10 countries to 56 countries and 375 million pages of science information, as of June 2009.

In researching WorldWideScience.org and the databases indexed (a term used in the search field that basically means a partnering of the database with the search function), I found out that NASA content is searched by virtue of being part of science.gov . If you are interested in the list databases and content indexed by science.gov, go to http://www.science.gov/scigov/search.html?searchMode=advanced and click the [+] sign.

The ability to share and search science and technology information is an amazing effort, not only technically but socially as well. Some people find power in holding on to information and not sharing. They lack the vision of sharing power, the leveraging of knowledge that someone else has. Sharing information with other people leads to a new collective knowledge and collective intelligence (see Wikipedia). And in the case of WorldWideScience.org they believe the benefit of having global access to global content “accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching  of global science sources.”

Give WorldWideScience.org and share what you think about globally sharing.

WorldWideScience.org is continually seeking participants with national or international science databases or portals who would like their source searched by WorldWideScience.org. If you want to share, contact webmaster@worldwidescience.org.

Over the past several months, my mind has tied the words “gossip” and “open innovation.” I recently deciphered why my mind made the ties. The ties could be as weak a spider’s web or as strong as a sailor’s knotted ladder. As a reader, you make your own call. First, I will take you down my mind path then I will reveal what I discovered as the common thread.

I am interested in the psychology of social networking and the like, so I was drawn to an article in the Oct/Nov 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind titled, The Science of Gossip: Why you can’t stop yourself. It is a great article, by the social psychologist, Professor Frank T. McAndrew (Knox College), discussing the basis for gossip as an important bonder for social groups, as well as a necessity for the ability to thrive in prehistoric environments. Think about it, if there was not someone gossiping (sharing knowledge) about that bright red poisonous plant, our lives could be very different now. McAndrew also suggests that gossip can also be used to support unwritten rules in a group or society, in essence a creating social laws that are enforced by others.

You are likely thinking “All well and good for our ancestors, what does it have to do with me and my life?” Here is how gossip translates to knowledge sharing, per McAndrews, “Successful gossip is about being a good team player and sharing key information with others in a way that will not be perceived as self-serving… .” I think this sounds like sharing lessons, sharing successes, and sharing how-tos, all necessary to creating a successful work environment, something NASA knows about. Just in case you are thinking about “rumors” verse “gossip,” the article presents definitions that discerns the two–gossip shares factual information; a rumor shares non-factual information.

The next information bit tied came from my reading of this article in Psychology Today, March 2, 2009, How “Open” Should Innovation Be?: The enabling factors that can transform open innovation at your company, by Moses Ma. Ma makes some good points about what open innovation is and is not which I think are very constructive uses for NASA. Ma, says that “…openness in innovation isn’t about opening the kimono to potential competitors or about irrevocably committing to the open source model… it’s really about three enabling factors that can transform the collaborative process at your company, especially around innovation.”

• “First, it’s about increasing the diffusion of innovation by making both internal and external corporate boundaries more porous.” Ma says open innovation is about sharing information peer-to-peer, top-down, bottom-up, and internal to external. In other words, “360 degree innovation.”
• “Second, it’s about developing more refined non-binary trust models that let you digitize the paperwork of innovation.” Ma suggests that by “digitizing innovation,” via an “electronic IP policy server” you can create an “enterprise social extranet” that allows “you to more reliably locate partners you can trust and who won’t let you down.”
• “And third, it’s about creating open standards for automating the innovation process just like Obama hopes to do with health records.” After first having standards on your data bases and content management systems, you can then begin to automate processes for innovation, and then you can connect to other sources of information push content to your social extranet, thereby enabling open innovation with your trusted partners.

Perhaps you are beginning to see the thread between gossip and open innovation. Both are methods of communication whose use and benefits are frequently misunderstood, or should I say overlooked. Humans have am innate need to share knowledge (AKA wisdom). Because most of us no longer need to worry about basic survival needs (I am thinking about how most US lives vs. the poorest parts of the world), what we share via gossip has changed over the years of human existence. Now we gossip (share knowledge) about information that makes our personal and work lives easier, like saving time via recommendations, and making a process or event more efficient via lessons shared. Even more recently, we learned to gossip even quicker and more efficiently via the onslaught of online communication tools. “Word-of-mouth” is the term that is frequently used today to refer to the passing of information person to person, thus replacing the term “gossip.”

Open innovation is another method to share information that can bring fright or delight. The Moses Ma article on open innovation really brought home for me, practical implementation ideas that can elicit a mind-shift about open innovation activities. In many ways, NASA gets caught, like many Federal Agencies, when it comes to the type and nature of information pasted internally and externally. I know there are many documented regulations and policies outlining information sharing and communication. Those should always be followed.

Of the “okay-to-discuss” information, I believe that NASA is working on some of the suggestions presented by Ma. I can think of the Extranet site that the knowledge management group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was working on while I was there; Chris Kemp, CIO at NASA’s Ames Research Center, is working on the Nebula project which could lead to automated processes for innovation; and finally related to 360 degree innovation, there was one pilot/research study on Agency-wide social networking (NASAsphere, see other blog posts about the project) showing the potential use and power of social networking in NASA, and there is currently released Spacebook for employees and is just getting started.

These are my thoughts. What are your thoughts about knowledge sharing via gossip and/or open innovation? Do you know of other examples where NASA is using open innovation? Do you have any NASA examples where you heard something via word-of-mouth and it saved you time or keep you from a mistake? Please share.

Asked by a friend of mine, Tim Young, of Socialcast, if I was interested in presenting (May 2009) at a new conference called Glue Con, on social networking and using the NASAsphere study as an example, I said “of course.” Since data analysis is boring alone, I wanted to craft a good story and weave in the study results. Before writing my presentation, I researched glue–where it came from and how it works—out of curiosity mostly. During my readings, I discovered that glue is similar to human behavior in social networking.

Find full presentation on slideshare.net

Here are the conclusions I came to:
Glue has:
• Different types of adhesives
• Mechanisms of adhesion
• Testing bond resistance
• Failures in adhered surfaces

Human behavior in social networking has:
• Different personality types, different types of relationship bonds
• What makes people connect?
• People create weak or strong bonds based on experience and trust
• People test the relationship bonds daily
• Sometimes relationships fail

Relating the above thoughts to the NASAsphere pilot as an example, I tied the process and implementation of the pilot back to the elements of glue. In NASAsphere, an adhesive layer was created by building trust into the network, as well as setting expectations of participation. Mechanisms for bonding were described by NASAsphere participants, when asked “is social networking just for Gen Y, or can anyone do it?” They mentioned “attitude and openness,” “willingness to embrace (new things),” “‘ageless’ attitude,” and an “attitude to can overcome fears,” amongst other things. Testing the bonds really comes down to the activity level and results of the group of people. For NASA, one of the results is big — 93% of answers were by people from a different NASA center. Another result is the growth from zero to 278 in 60 days because of the viral invitations from participants to NASA co-workers.

Next month I will talk about gossip and social networking.

I think this is an awesome model for NASA. Think about all the people in the public that have sometime in their lives had a NASA encounter, a NASA love, or is or have been part of the NASA mission. What great stories to add to the NASA history.

So here is what GM is doing…GM developed GMnext online community with the tag line – “Driving Change.” Great tag line says the psychologist. From there people are asked to be part of creating GM living history wiki The reason…”General Motors has touched the lives of millions of people all over the world: why not take advantage of this unique site and add your story to theirs.” “Visitors to the Wiki are constantly adding new stories about favorite cars, career highlights, and other GM milestones that have affected them and their communities.” There are sections titled “I was there” and “Tell us your story.”

I can’t help but think how awesome it would be to have someone like Jack Boyd at NASA Ames Research Center (been there like 40 years, probably not accurate forgive me Jack), talking to a younger generation about what it was like when “I was there.” On a personal note, I remember taking my son and daughter to view the “Return to Flight” launch at the NASA Ames Exploration Center. That was an amazing “I was there” story because, not only did NASA over come tremendous hurdles for the launch, but also because that launch seems to have inspired my son’s interest in space and space exploration.

NASA has touched and inspired so many people around the world why not take advantage of it.

Many NASAsphere participants also participate on OpenNASA, so I figured this is a great place to post the release notice. The success of the pilot was a group effort and a great experience for me. I am grateful to those people who support open communication and communication technologies in NASA. While I can no longer say that I am a contractor for NASA, I can say I am still a friend of NASA and desire to help in anyway possible. One way for me to contribute to the success of NASA, is to share the findings and experiences from the NASAsphere pilot with you. In my opinion, they are meaningful to the organization and to the supporting cast of employees and contractors.

Get a copy of the report at: NASAsphere Report

Below are some experts from the report.

WHY SOCIAL NETWORKING at NASA?

Because NASA is more that just one expert and one center. New ideas and new solutions for NASA’s complex missions require input from a geographically dispersed community of knowledge workers. By providing an online social network, NASA creates a collective intelligence and learning community for and by NASA knowledge workers that disseminates mission-related information broadly and quickly. In order to investigate how NASA knowledge workers would use and apply online social networking in the NASA environment, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Knowledge Architecture and Advanced Technologies team developed and implemented a social networking pilot, called NASAsphere.

Get the report here:

Here are some of the highlights represented by numbers:

• Participants grew from 78 to 295 people by the end of the 60-day pilot.
• 541 answers/comments occurred on 79 questions.
• 93% of the questions answered were by people from a different center than asked the question.
• 52% of the participants completing the survey recommended implementation for civil servants and contractors.
• At least 2 people from every NASA center, including Wallops, and Headquarters, participated.

So what is happening now? Well I am not sure exactly. I do know that there was a recommendation to the NASA’s CIO office to implement NASAsphere with a subsection of NASA centers. I guess there will be more to come.

I wish all the NASA employees and contractors well. I miss you.

During the conference, I attended this really great keynote talk by John Kao.  He is the author of Innovation Nation .  He taught a popular course on the subject at the Harvard Business School for 14 years, and he has also served as a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.  He is a world recognized leading expert on the topic of innovation and in fact other countries are hiring him to help them create an innovation strategy for their respective countries.  He is currently working with Finland and has worked with leaders in Shanghi.  This is exactly one of his points everyone else is creating an innovation strategy except the US.

One of the points Kao made in his keynote was his opinion that the first and last US national innovation strategy came when Dwight Eisenhower created NASA in 1958. The launch of Sputnik in 1957, spurred the US to create an innovation strategy.  According to Kao, the creation of NASA drove US to change the way it approached and focused on education–specifically on science, engineering, and math–thus creating the US as an innovation nation.  However, that was the last time.  Currently, no one from the US is knocking on his door for ideas on how to create a US innovation strategy.

John Kao also shared his Cobert Nation interview from October 4th, 2007 which gives you some sense of his ideas www.colbertnation.com

What do you think?  Has the US lost the “innovation nation” label?  What is NASA’s current role in creating a new innovation strategy or innovation nation?

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!

During the pilot of NASAsphere (pilot investigating and testing out social networking in NASA), I started really thinking about tipping points again. I can’t say that one person or one thing made the tipping point in this project, but I definitely feel like we are experiencing a tipping point in NASA related to social networking. NASAsphere has just completed the original planned pilot period with an amazing level of participation by NASA employees/contractors. We started with 87 people on a list and after 30 days, participants grew to nearly 288 people (as of June 26th, 2008). NASA employees/contractors are flattening NASA center and organizational boundaries to talk about work ideas and questions. The NASAsphere participants were experiencing a first hand the ability to ask a question and get NASA collective intelligence in the answers.

Before staring the NASAsphere pilot, I thought NASA employees/contractors could benefit and find use in connecting with each other via on-line social networking. I thought technology pilots in NASA have been useful, but are frequently on the flat side, meaning people “test” it out and then are done participating in the pilot. To really see if social networking could work in NASA, I knew I needed to do more to set the stage to make it more interesting, and to make it less about a technology pilot and more about people. I purposefully incorporated key elements into the pilot, like allowing employees to easily invite colleagues without barriers, set “rules of engagement” and then allow participants freedom to post, as well as brand the off-the-self product to make it meaningful to participants—“sphere” has a physical connotation of planets, orbits, etc… and then also a social meaning like “sphere of influence.” And then I started sending invitations to people I knew, and so it goes.

We received word, and we are able to extend the pilot a little longer in order for the purpose of testing additional hypothesis and functionality that NASAsphere participants discussed using NASAsphere.

Could this really be a tipping point?

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.

NASA is a federal agency that relies heavily on collaboration and collective intelligence to meet its missions. A shuttle launch involves several NASA centers. That takes collaboration. To implement and establish the International Space Station takes a tremendous amount of collaboration with international partners. NASA has proven track record of successfully meeting its missions.
However, we as employees frequently feel disconnected and out of touch with information and each other. There some 3,000 internal NASA web sites that employees and people inside the NASA firewall can go to. There is one main employee Intranet called InsideNASA; but there are also Intranet sites an every NASA center for them to describe their own process, documentation, events, etc… . NASA has lots of document repository systems to hold what knowledge management calls “explicit knowledge.” But, those still leave employees feeling empty. Where is the connectedness? Where is the interactive nature of collective intelligence? In comes NASAsphere.

NASAsphere is designed to allow employees (loose term to also include contractors like me) to socialize around questions/answers and ideas and commenting in order to reach the collective intelligence held in the heads of NASA employees. In knowledge management, that stuff is called “tacit knowledge” AKA the stuff you don’t get from a document repository. Tacit knowledge is where the rubber meets the road in terms of useful information and knowledge that helps people do their jobs better and generate innovative ideas to build a better space ship, satellite, or rover, or whatever.

So, how is it going so far? Off the chain! I am blown away at how many people are actively participating and the ideas and questions that are flowing. We stared out with a base pilot participation set of 87 enthusiastic people that said they wanted to take part. Four days later we have 194 people on the list. For a NASA web technology, that viral growth is amazing. We started out allowing participants to invite three colleagues. Then there was a posting and comments that said “three is not enough, I want to invite more.” So we increased the limit to 10. You may be wondering way we have a limit at all. This is a pilot and we have an official limit. I want to see if we can make our limit explode with demand.

I want to thank all of the participants and the vendor as well. We are using Socialcast which is a very up and coming company really making a mark. You got to love a company tag line like “Knowledge is Social.” They get it. Thanks a million Tim.

More later. Cheers!!

The views and opinions of author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the United States Government or any agency thereof.