We’ve got a pretty interesting collection of folks here, so I thought I’d throw this question out to ya’ll.
What do you think we could or should be doing with the International Space Station that we’re not already doing or isn’t planned? Say that Congress comes up with an extension for the ISS past 2020. What would you do with it?
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.
Did you know archeologists excavating burial sites dated 4000 BC discovered that people used tree sap to glue broken pottery? And did you know that the Greeks invented several recipes for adhesives that included things like egg whites, blood, bones, milk, cheese, and grains. I discovered this historic information while developing a presentation on glue and social networking. Today, NASA uses heavy duty adhesives for the Shuttle fuel tank and tiles.
Asked by a friend of mine, Tim Young, of Socialcast, if I was interested in presenting (May 2009) at a new conference called Glue Con, on social networking and using the NASAsphere study as an example, I said “of course.” Since data analysis is boring alone, I wanted to craft a good story and weave in the study results. Before writing my presentation, I researched glue–where it came from and how it works—out of curiosity mostly. During my readings, I discovered that glue is similar to human behavior in social networking.
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.
A while ago (May 2008), I posted NASA Employees Test the Social Water that I was leading a social networking pilot for NASA. Well, after several more months, the report is cleared by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ready to be discussed in an open forum.
Many NASAsphere participants also participate on OpenNASA, so I figured this is a great place to post the release notice. The success of the pilot was a group effort and a great experience for me. I am grateful to those people who support open communication and communication technologies in NASA. While I can no longer say that I am a contractor for NASA, I can say I am still a friend of NASA and desire to help in anyway possible. One way for me to contribute to the success of NASA, is to share the findings and experiences from the NASAsphere pilot with you. In my opinion, they are meaningful to the organization and to the supporting cast of employees and contractors.
So for quite some time now I have seen the Lunar Lander as the project of choice that I see myself working on in my career in the mid-term. I have been getting familiar with the Constellation architecture since ESAS was released, and I am hitting the workforce at the Altair sweet spot. Plus, working at Boeing, Orion is out. Ares rockets don’t really get my blood going as much as the lander either.
Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.
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.
No seriously. We do. Want proof? Check out the “feedback” button we added to openNASA.com.
OpenNASA is an experiment in transparency, collaboration, participation, accessibility, and honesty. Central to everyone of these things is “feedback.” We have always appreciated feedback and encourage you to share your ideas but recognize that sometimes it’s not clear how to best give it. So we implemented the “feedback” button.
Heard of Twitter yet? Ever thought of Twitter in terms of a “communications strategy?” If not, this presentation may be for you. It discusses twitter as a strategy for customer relations, crisis management, reputation management, event activation, promotion, issue advocacy and internal communication. It also discusses some twitter best practices and offers some links to popular twitter tools such as TweetDeck, TwitPic and TwitterGrader. The general strategy is built around “Follow > Create > Engage.”
