Thank you Delia for summarizing the outcome of the sustainability panel at the 3rd Annual AIAA Space Exploration Conference. I would have loved to have been there in person but I was attending the Project Management Challenge (PMC) 2008 in Daytona, Florida. Thanks to Twitter, I felt like I was at both

It’s been very interesting to watch the Generation Y message make it’s way through the NASA world, up and down the lines of management everywhere. Most exciting is receiving emails from leaders around the agency and watching the NASA organization flatten (a little) before our eyes! I personally never imagined at the beginning of all this that a) NASA would listen, and b) that NASA would be so passionate about improving, growing and changing. I guess looking back, it only makes sense - NASA is filled with thousands of employees who are extremely brilliant, want to participate and who are here to change the world through exploration - no matter what generation.

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recently a colleague sent an email out to an agency discussion group about open source, asking about rationales for open source release. his management didnt see the justification for his request to release his software under the NOSA. it’s interesting that although, as someone in the resulting discussion pointed out, NASA’s own charter states that it shall “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof”, open source software release is, in many instances, still seen as more of special case, than as a natural way to minimize overhead while maximizing the aforementioned dissemination (among other things).

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I attended BarCampBlock in Palo Alto yesterday, which could have been the largest BarCamp to date with over 800 people in attendance.

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp.”

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we had our third luna philosophie on july 30^th with bruce damer. he gave a great talk about the history of virtual environments and all the amazing work his company Digital Space has done with NASA over the years. It’s interesting to see how closely coupled that evolution has been to supporting the simulation of space environments. Ames Center Director Pete Worden attended the salon, and afterwards requested a briefing on virtual worlds and where we thought the Center should and could be directing research to move forward state of the art in this area. I’m organizing an in-world (Second Life) open meeting tomorrow (tuesday, august 7th) to have a discussion about this, and will follow up with a meeting at Ames. this work is also expected to go towards a director’s weekend workshop at Ames about virtual worlds, likely sometime in december.

more info about the meeting (copy and pasted from announcement email): Read the rest of this entry »

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.).

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