Launch Scrubbed, but Go to Post

So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.

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Tweet Success

I’m closing in on Mars! Who is going to sleep tonight? Not the team, too excited/scared/anxious seeing 5 years of work come to this last day.
– 7:45PM May 24, 2008 from @MarsPhoenix

Does anyone remember seeing that tweet from the “MarsPhoenix” Twitter account last year?  Probably not, because it was one of the updates posted before landing when relatively few people were following.  During the initial days of the account every post felt like shouting into the wind, hoping that people might take notice and listen.

By landing day (one year ago this weekend) 3,000 people were following the mission’s tweets through atmospheric entry and touch down.  The post-landing tweet, “Tears, cheers, I’m here!” reflected the scene not on Mars but in mission control where the Phoenix team literally laughed and cried knowing they had 90 sols of hard work and discoveries ahead of them. One discovery had just been made: a new way to communicate news of the mission using Twitter.

When I say, “communicate, ” I don’t mean simply pushing pithy updates to the public via the relatively new (at the time) Twitter.  To be honest, that was my original intent – to post updates on the landing  — but it quickly took on a different life.  You see, while you were reading the updates posted by MarsPhoenix, I was busy reading the @replies.  And the @replies changed everything.

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Open Innovation in Government

President Obama on his second day in office issued a Presidential Memorandum on openness in government.  This is a bold vision of creating a more effective, open government.  The approach outlined in the memo is guided by the core values of transparency, participation and collaboration.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Global Development Commons convened a panel on Tuesday in Washington DC about Open Innovation in Government.  Fortunately, the Global Development Commons streamed it live via www.ustream.com and you can see it archived here.

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Innovation doesn’t always mean “hi-tech”

CNN: Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven

Inventor Jon Bohmer won the FT Climate Change Challenge with a solar oven made from cardboard, foil, and an acrylic cover. It only costs $5 and can boil water without flame or electricity.
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NASA Culture (2 of 2)

The first time I ever thought of culture, I did so kicking and screaming. It was World Cultures class in ninth grade. Everyone had to take it. I didn’t know why I needed to take any kind of culture or history class at the time. My eyes were on the future, my head in the stars. Thinking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. 

Culture is cool. I get that now. And it’s important, too. It’s a unifying force and the unseen hand of progress and failure, tolerance and pride, beauty and injustice. It’s always there and might be the most important factor in our success as an agency and nation.

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Video: Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion

Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore well thought out and researched recommendations on improvements that can be implemented to make the center more open minded, collaborative, inclusive and innovative. They worked with the Joint Leadership Team (JLT), Employee Leadership Team (ELT) and Next Gen Groups, and used a team of senior leaders called the “Inclusion & Innovation (I&I) Council” to pull together seven Employee Engagement teams to work on the recommendations.  The seven teams were broken down into the following categories: information technology, recruiting and new employee experience, communications, mentoring, work/life fit, awards and recognition, and barrier analysis. The teams worked for months and their recommendations were presented to senior management earlier this month.  We’ve been looking forward to sharing the results on openNASA as soon as they were approved by senior management.  This video, which was created by the Barrier Analysis team and posted by Wayne Hale, is the first artifact to make its way into public domain.  It highlights many of the barriers an employee with an idea encounters within the organization, including management styles, institutional inertia, organizational silos, and complexity of processes.  The Barrier Analysis team did an excellent job identifying the barriers and developing implementable solutions to overcome those barriers (which are captured in a hopefully soon-to-be-released white paper).  We look forward to posting the rest of the work by the Barrier Analysis team, as well as the other engagement teams, as soon as we can.

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How to Make Participatory Exploration Happen at NASA

It was refreshing to read the previous post on OpenNASA that released a list of specific Participatory Exploration (PE) policy recommendations for NASA. The authors of the recommendations have witnessed first hand the problems with how NASA is managed, reacts, and is perceived by internal and external constituents. The hard lessons that my friends learned through the NASA CoLab experiment more than qualifies them as competent at offering specific solutions to some discrete and genuine problems within NASA.

Unfortunately, the PE Recommendations document does lend itself to some old criticisms as it carries over weaknesses of CoLab’s prior efforts to fix NASA. The suggestions only treat symptoms of an Agency wide disease, but they do not not offer a systemic cure. There needs to be cogent, material, and real offerings on how to change the minds and behaviors of NASA’s workforce from the top down. Instead of being told how to fix some of yesterday’s problems, NASA employees should be nurtured so the ideas of Participatory Exploration and Collaboration develop organically across the Agency.

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NASA Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations

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.

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Our Nation: Culture and Change (part 1 of 2)

Culture.

What does that word do for you? I hear it thrown around a lot when talking about change.  And change, unless maybe you’ve been living in a Thai jungle for the last 2 years or so, seems to at least be a hot topic on many people’s minds lately. 

(No offense intended if you have in fact been living in a Thai jungle and feel this image unfitting.)

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The Terrestrial Planet and Other Holy Grails

So I asked my wife what she though the impact of discovering an Earth like planet would be outside of our solar system. She traditionally rolls her eyes when I start into my discourses on space discoveries and technology. But when I asked her this, she said “I think that we would be on the first ship out of here!”

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