NASA Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations

Robbie Schingler — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:15:29 +0000

Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations for National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Participatory exploration was first introduced in 2007 at the NASA Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center and was prioritized into the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063), highlighting its necessity to NASA’s continued public relevance in the 21st century. We have written a paper for NASA senior management that discusses the role of “participatory exploration” as a way of “aggregating and leveraging people’s contributions in ways that are useful to other people” which can be applied to NASA programs and projects to engage the American public in the exploration experience and to identify opportunities for the direct involvement of the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners. The paper includes specific recommendations which we have summarized below. We’ve posted the paper on openNASA for your consideration and encourage you to share your thoughts on Participatory Exploration as well. Please share your thoughts via the comments below or on if you have specific ideas or recommendations, via the ideas forum.

Link to Executive Summary

Link to Full Paper

Eliminate the obstacles to working with the public

– Encourage open-source adoption

– Leverage the re-competition of NASA’s website

–      Implement single sign-on

Increase the availability of NASA knowledge and data

–      Create open APIs for NASA data

–      Improve internal knowledge-sharing between technical and business groups

–      Develop a rich, extensible, and user-editable directory of employee information

–      Implement categories and “tagging” on all NASA web content

–      Provide hosting for open, public research notes

–      Refine policies on controlled sensitive space-related information

–      Streamline information release policies

–      Encourage participatory exploration early in a mission as a Level-1 requirement

Modify communication practices:

–      Integrate participatory exploration into the Agency’s Strategic Communications Strategy

–      Encourage open publication of all internal Agency communications

–      Deploy industry proven Web 2.0 communication tools and processes agency-wide

–      Benchmark against successful organizations that have adopted Web 2.0 strategies

–      Provide a structure to train employees to interact with newly-contacted communities

–      Consider corporate blogging and community-building skills when hiring staff

–      Build and create formal processes to leverage voluntary collaborative communities

–      Highlight and build on examples of successful crowdsourcing at NASA

–      Open up IT ports for utilizing collaborative tools on internal NASA networks

–      Avoid over-defining the use of web tools through policy

Ensure support for widespread implementation of participatory exploration:

–      Create a Participatory Exploration Group at NASA Headquarters

–      Encourage relevant initiatives at the Center level

–      Provide a budget to create the necessary infrastructure and community

Open NASA » jessicaculler

NASA Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations