Before I get into a specific roadmap, a couple prerequisites need to be installed for successful open participation to happen:

• First and foremost, breakdown perceptual barriers. Help people to see that their participation is possible, valid, and valuable, be it at a university, a small business, or in a garage. Instill the Carmackian philosophy of “ITERATE!” that has made rapid development of software so successful and is used in hardware development at Armadillo. Like my high school Science Seminar mentor Mr. Ron Le May always says–”Do anything, do it wrong, do it better. Repeat.” Thinking about a problem and justifying why it’s too hard to do for two months doesn’t get you nearly as far as trying something rough, learning from it, and iterating for two days.
• Manage projects. Have open project managers (someone at NASA and/or a capable non-NASA participant) that know the field and are committed to engaging outside participation. They will help ensure participation happens and happens effectively.
• Benefit Americans first, keep the investors happy. While some open projects could greatly benefit from worldwide participation, NASA is funded by American taxpayers and the fruits of that funding should therefor benefit Americans first where applicable. This will guarantee that an Open NASA is sustainable, as its investors will feel and see their money going to productive use for their own benefit. It also creates opportunities for congresspeople in non-Florida/Alabama/Texas/California/Maryland states to benefit their constituencies and want to support Open NASA. As a result, it may be necessary to restrict participation of some projects to only American entities. While not fool-proof, a simple verification form and log-in system could help to limit and allow access to the right audiences where necessary.
• Use the Internet as the primary medium for participation. Although this prerequisite may seem obvious, in comparison with conferences, academic journals, grant opportunities, industrial partnerships, privately recruited efforts, and other forms of participation with NASA, the Internet has the largest and broadest potential audience to reach people who can help drive innovation and technology development and its cost per participant is thus much lower. The Internet can also stimulate additional innovation through mutation (“let’s try this instead”, or “I misunderstood and something else happened”), differentiation (“they already did that, but let’s try it a different way”), and competition (“we can so do this first”, or “we can totally do this cheaper”).

These things said, here is a candidate participation roadmap we have been considering for Aerogel.org. For reference, we are currently most of the way through 1 and partway through 2, 3, and 4 on that project. Thus as apparent from our experience, the roadmap is serial-ish, but all steps could (and maybe should) be approached with a degree of simultaneity. Each step is design to widen the target audience by creating a stronger foundation upon which harder-to-involve participants can become involved.

1. Empower. Create transparent reference content first. Provide people with as much information as possible about the underlying science, the technology of interest, how it works, what’s been done, what’s happening now, and where problems and challenges lie . Those with the interest and resources now have the information to start getting involved.
2. Invite. Utilize social media and online collaborative tools to create a community of researchers/experimenters interested in a given topic. Combine this experience with the original tutorial/reference media to create a live reference and collaboration platform. Facilitate rapid dissemination of results, discussion of problems, and questions with RSS, user profiles, forums, and live feeds. Minimize work being reproduced and understanding being rederived. Seed the effort with top experts and existing or related researchers in the area through targeted invitations but make open to all.
3. Reduce. As in the do-it-yourself (DIY) community, create a space on the platform to encourage and communicate how to create, simplify, and/or access the basic tools necessary to do the research.
4. Recruit. Use the state Space Grant Consortia to outreach to schools and industry in each technology space to help increase awareness of what technology opportunities are available for open participation. Direct them to the appropriate online media.
5. Breakdown. Open project managers could break big problems down into little problems that many people could solve, or proportionally direct/sign-up participants to work on the same problems where more bandwidth is needed (“you four clean up the garage, you two clean up the kitchen, everyone else find and something else to clean”).
6. Incentivize. Open project managers could set goals and reward those who attain them first or best. Create coveted titles and awards. Use prizes to leverage costs. Small things could go far. Think micro X Prizes or Centennial Challenges. Even better–create prizes that are the tools needed to do the next level of the work (“prize for achieving highly aligned growth at 20 cents/square centimeter is a thermal evaporator with which you can scale your results!”). Create opportunities for participants to become involved with larger institutions based on merit. Offer merit-based scholarships and/or grants to promising researchers.
7. Solidify. When good results are obtained, differentiate them from speculation and conversation the same way the academic community does–publish. Match projects with good open journals and provide participants with the knowledge and tools to be able to transition their results to open academic publications. Open project managers could then monitor, compile, prominently display, and make easily accessible important results to advance work.

What do you think?

I am interested in what we as a society could create by open sourcing all technologies–not just computer code, but chemistry, materials, energy, automation, and more.

As an experiment in this spirit, my colleague (and artist-by-training) Will Walker and I co-founded Aerogel.org, an open-source resource about aerogels (the “original nanotechnology”). The mission of the project is

“…to empower, inspire, and motivate people to pursue nanotechnology using open source methodology and to catalyze the discovery of new technological possibilities for aerogel materials in the process.”

To do this, we had to develop an approach to try to make what is easily an impenetrable subject to a newcomer into something digestible by anyone with the interest to learn. As part of this approach, we felt that making straightforward information about exciting science available to everyone is the best way to do so and simultaneously stimulates people to pursue science, engineering, and other creative endeavors.

So I’d like to start some “open technology” on Open NASA to transition some of the knowledge we in technological pursuit have learned to those who want to get involved. Some ideas I have:

• Open carbon nanotubes–how to grow, growth models, unsolved problems
• Open biotech–how to take what we know affordably to the third world
• (Somewhat ironically) open closed loop tech–how to close-loop manufacturing, consumption, and energy production (great for a spaceship, or a planet)
• Open energy–yes, garage innovations are left to be had, even in the 21st Century!
• and of course, open aerogel

What if we could even get NASA to open-source some of its technology development?

What do you think?