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

1. How do we generalize what we mean by participatory exploration beyond independently motivated technophiles, and
2. How can we design projects that actually scale gracefully with massive participation?

I’ve heard public participation callously referred to as ‘free labour’, but the truth is that increased participation is often correlated with additional overhead to manage those contributions. Management tasks scale with volume, precisely because the vast majority of contributors are non-experts (by design). The NASA CoLab team had numerous discussions with NASA projects who loved the idea of public participation, but felt they didn’t have the bandwidth to support it.

Certain participatory projects have models which do not require this kind of oversight. What are some of their characteristics?

• Projects where participants with different levels of expertise can teach/learn from each other independent of mission scientists.
• Projects where the output has no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer (could be art, but not necessarily).
• Similarly, projects where the application is more general than the realm of space science (for example, image processing, machine vision, or compression algorithms), and participants can engage on the level of their own fields of expertise without a bottleneck inside NASA.
• Development of technology products like mobile phone applications, screensavers, atlases, and virtual worlds.
• ‘Remixing’ NASA content in music, documentaries, or visual art.

Most of these ideas are still not general-audience. In fact, we might inevitably find that the most general participatory projects are one step removed from NASA. Perhaps it is the products people make with low level NASA data and documents, that have the most potential to engage broader audiences.

Ironically, most of these come back to data accessibility. Open, standard formats, policies which default to higher levels of openness than they currently do, and increased timeliness of release will. These will all play a crucial roles in seeing scalable participatory exploration become a reality.

What are some of your thoughts on general audience, scalable participatory exploration projects?

As a so-called young person trying to build a career in science, I’ve been told numerous times I’ll be doing so at the expense of more senior positions, and more pay. When I look around me for good examples, role models, mentors, I frankly have not one senior person in my professional life at NASA who has encouraged me in pursuing a path of pure science.

What I do see is all my friends and colleagues slowly realizing that they are faced with an either-or choice of having greater impact on the directions we go, or continuing to be hands on scientists. Now, this is clearly at its heart a question of philosophical proportions, but it is also one reinforced in the structures of the organization. By distinctly separating the doers from the decision makers, and by involving so much overhead in every action and decision that being part of that process is a full time job, there is a huge gulf between these two communities, which not only creates poor career opportunities in the sciences, but it also makes for much worse policy decisions ostensibly in support of science.

People often say that they like science, but that they want a career where they can interact with people more. They say science is lonely. But you know, I dont think I buy that. Most of us sit at our computers all day regardless of if we’re writing code or sending emails. Science can be as social as management, policy or infrastructure if you take that on as an element of your work; and, if you hide behind your computer all the time, management and policy can be as lonely as people think science is.

I dont think people really mean “lonely.” I think they mean they don’t want to be shut out. They want to be part of the conversations about what we’re doing and how we get there. But ironically, sadly, it’s often a zero-sum game, and the smartest people are being seduced into management by having their hopes and dreams mangled by the policy-makers who have come before them. It’s a worthy fear that, in the limit, all our scientists will have been “promoted” to managers, and for all the great ideas we have about where to go, no one will be left to actually take us there.

“A couple of years ago, I assigned a case study on NASA’s approach to knowledge management to several teams of MBA students as a final exam. As part of the exam, the teams were expected to make recommendations for how NASA should revise its approaches to knowledge. One MBA team suggested a major change in direction. Their recommendation went something like this: “NASA should abandon its current systems and approaches to managing knowledge and adopt a series of wikis instead.”

The author doesnt actually refer to any NASA-specific practices or challenges, and didnt seem to have even taken the time to speak with NASA about these ideas. However, he goes on to explain that while the utopian vision of wikis is great and all, it wont work for NASA. Why? “It would seem irresponsible,” he says, ” to treat all knowledge equally where lives and very large amounts of resources are at stake, as they are on all NASA space missions.”

This kind of thing drives me nuts, as it’s a response I often see to the idea of making NASA’s content and processes more transparent and accessible. How could we let a bunch of teenaged hackers develop code for the space station?

Well, guess what. Inviting contributions from an unrestricted audience doesnt mean decisions about those contributions dont go through the same quality control and approval processes as closed, proprietary work does. If anything, it means that maybe more of the “bugs” (conceptual or technical) will have been found ahead of time.

“… It is not a good idea for NASA to adopt a fully democratic approach to knowledge… [in] situations in which there are clear right answers and where some people are more likely to provide those answers than others.”

This is exactly the kind of thinking that wikis are designed to weed out. space exploration and settlement is one of the most important long-term challenges of our species. We can’t stick to what we already know or think we know. Every mission or spacecraft ever lost was the result of applying what we thought were “clearly right answers,” from the people we were told were “supposed to be” providing them.

If we want any chance of innovating outside the constraints of our traditional thinking, and breaking through age-old challenges of space exploration such as launch technologies, cost, and life support on other planets, we need to be open to answers from unexpected places. Wikis are just one of a suite of technologies
NASA should be employing to make room for and embrace those inputs.

The strongest messages that came out of the discussions was the absolute requirement for an underlying architecture for virtual environments and immersive 3D experiences that is independent of the content or browser technology used. This would underpin all 3D content on the web, and allow it to seamlessly integrate with online technologies that exist today.

This is an ongoing collaborative process. You can find the rest of the report, in both PDF format for easy reading, and wiki format for easy contributing, online here.

We are also in the early stages of organizing a weekend workshop at NASA Ames for December on virtual worlds and virtual environments. If you have ideas for speakers or topics, suggestions are most welcome. Please contact me.

last year i did a series of interviews with a cross section of developers, engineers, managers, and lawyers at Ames about open source. from there, i compiled the rationales they offered as the motivation for their interest in open source. i think it’s worth noting that none of these are unique to NASA per se, but i do consider all of them strong reasons in their own right for open source release and/or development, and certainly together they present a strong argument for encouraging open source release as long as there is no explicit reason not to.

1. Improve the effectiveness of collaborations with other NASA Centers, space agencies, universities, and contractors
2. Cost Reduction: Leverage the free and open source development process for projects that normally cost millions of dollars in development and testing
3. Improve quality and functionality of existing products
4. Provide opportunities for broader involvement in the space program
5. Distribute NASA’s public software to as wide an audience as possible.
6. Encourage adoption of common practices and open standards
7. Provide an opportunity for others to add value beyond what was planned or unexpected.

the order above is roughly commensurate with the relative relevance most people cited.

i would like to see a world in which the default release for government information of any kind, not just software, is open. while i realize that may not be immediately feasible or practical, there are concrete steps we can take to at least move incrementally in that direction. while general education and awareness are foundational to any strategy, streamlining the release process itself is something that would significantly ease the overhead of learning about and going through the open source release process. more thoughts on that another time.

in general, we want to be as hands-off as possible. it should be up to groups and individuals collaborating on the site to decide when and if their content has gotten to the point that they want to (or that it justifies) being copyrighted or patented. however, as the sponsors of the time and resources that go into building and supporting this collaborative environment, NASA would expect a license to use any copyrighted or patented inventions or content.

this is exactly what happens with government contracts today where new IP is created. the contractor is given first rights to patent a new invention, but if they elect to pursue a patent, the government must be given an indefinite license to practice/use that invention.

although ‘indefinite right to use’ is a standard clause of government contracts (it’s a direct requirement of 1980′s Bayh-Dole act), what’s different here is that the content in question has been developed in a public forum. thus, it is already open content. given that, it’s most likely this collaborative site would encourage the use of creative commons licenses, which allow those who came up with an idea to retain their copyright but allow others certain rights as well– to use, re-use, and/or re-mix according to certain conditions you specify.

does retaining the right to use or practice IP created on this site require a new kind of CC license? it is a bit of a unique situation. traditional government licensing practices specify the indefinite right to use because otherwise the content/invention would be inaccessible to them. but open/public content under a CC license is available for anyone to use. so NASA shouldnt need to explicitly retain that right.

the gray area arises when people take ideas or projects from this site and patent or copyright them (or some close derivative). the current CC license that would ensure derivative content remains open is the share-alike license. however, what NASA would like to do is instead more closely approximate the traditional licensing scheme– requiring only that derivative works be made available to NASA, in order to leave room for commercialization or other forms of business development as appropriate. but then again, in some ways the viral nature of this requirement goes beyond even the current government licensing stipulations.

it seems to me that if it’s decided to only require that the government can continue to use the content as it exists on the site, then existing CC licenses are sufficient. however, if the government wants the rights to use content derived from the site, then a new kind of license may be required.

it’s exciting to look at new models for collaboration with and within government. what we’re talking about is an extension of traditional collaborative relationships, which are usually contractually bound and occur behind closed doors, by formalizing a way to instead collaborate in open and informal ways. its not clear to me if this situation, which will come up for other government agencies as well, does or does not require a new twist on the existing CC licenses. but having a way to formally support open collaboration with government would be a hugely exciting step.

more info about the meeting (copy and pasted from announcement email):

my rough intention is to discuss the future of virtual environments as a platform and their role in human society (think: next 100 years) and key trends that this will leverage and extend. i think this is useful because as virtual worlds in general grow and mature, the opportunities for supporting space exploration will also grow and mature, hence thinking beyond where we currently are to where we see things going in the future.

from there let’s back up and think about how these capabilities do/should relate to space exploration, where any gaps are in terms of ongoing research/development, and where NASA and the space community have a comparative advantage in contributing to these areas. let’s discuss both underlying platform development issues as well as activities within these environments.

our goal here is to propose a cutting edge research program that will both help to advance the state of virtual environments as well as leverage those environments to support exploration and settlement.

some food for thought. feel free to contribute to this agenda. we will aim to start right at 10am and finish by 1130am.

visit the NASA CoLab salons page for the SLURL and details on getting to the meeting.

as most people know we are working on putting together an open source development site for nasa ames. these tools would support active open source development, as opposed to just release, by providing technical tools as well as a collection of written resources and documentation about the institutional, legal, and technical challenges, existing precedence, best practices, and general community support and interaction.

for a long time i’ve thought that we should create one comprehensive open source space community site, with the written resources and community interaction as the overarching element of a site that also hosts numerous individual projects and the respective tools to support this (wikis, issue tracking, subversion, etc.).

i’m having second thoughts about this combining these two. The intention of this effort is really to be an enabler for nasa projects and programs to better understand their options, the rules and regulations surrounding those options, how to navigate them, how to find support and encouragement, and basically to do what they want to do more easily and, hopefully, more effectively.

I dont see why we should try to constrain or purport to even try to offer “the” perfect workflow. once people are enabled with the knowledge, i believe the CosmosCode site can offer suggestions and links to a variety of options, one of which could be an offer to host these projects. there is still, after all, the unmet need of a project hosting site whose contributor agreement doesn’t require the user to indemnify the hosting entity against potential liability incurred as a result of their software. i’m happy to be one of the places that does meet this requirement, but dont see why others couldnt also do it, perhaps offering different toolsets more appropriate for different projects.

the second reason i think we may not want to try and host encourage all space-related software projects to be hosted on one site is because i dont think you can draw a clear envelope around “the space community” or “space related software” in the same way you can draw one around say, a community of people developing plugins for firefox. space-related is a much more open and fluid concept. while flight software or mission operations software has a clear “space” theme, something else like biology software designed to analyze results from biology experiments on the ISS is also “space related” but doesnt have a clear common interest with the mission ops software. we should be running around wildly creating community where it simply doesnt exist.

i’d be happy to hear comments of feedback from people on this. but for now, this is the direction i am going to be moving in. my main focus is on the enabling information, and ensuring project hosting is available which meets the needs of government, but not necessarily aim to be the primary provider of said hosting.