Technological Tools vs. Human Interaction

Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in numerous discussions with enormous amounts of diverse individuals. At the same time, I have had the pleasure of participating in several group discussions focusing on the future of our Agency and how important openness, collaboration, creativity, and innovation are to the future.

During these various discussions it became apparent to me how inhibiting our technological tools can be. How limiting they can be and how they can clearly divide people from within. I wanted to take the opportunity to present my observations and open a discussion on this topic so that I may further understand how beneficial these tools are compared to the detriment they cause to a collaborative group.

Read more

how NASA is like … college football?

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can improve and promote communication at NASA, both internally and externally.  Well, ok, I’m not necessarily putting hours of thought into it, but I’m at least letting the thoughts meander around a little bit.

I thought that maybe I’d do a little research – you know, find some other huge government organization that stretches across the country, one that works on horribly complex technical projects while having an amazing reputation for fostering collaboration and teamwork… oh wait, does such a thing exist?

Read more

Gen Y panel at AIAA: The Reaction

Today I had the opportunity to represent younger generations at the AIAA’s 3rd Space Exploration Conference, on the Generation Y panel. Simply put, I’m in awe of the reaction.

Directly after the panel, and into the evening at conference social gatherings, numerous people came up to e and other Gen Y panel members to say that the panel really affected them and that what we had to say was very relevant. To be clear, some certainly had constructive criticism to offer (more below), but the reaction overall was extremely positive. People were actually thankful to be given the perspective of a younger generation, and were inspired by the ideas we discussed. Our 90 minute panel generated apparently 36 questions, which I later found out was the narrowed down number of questions given to the moderator; this was by far the most questions for any panel yet. People also loved the non-traditional use of powerpoint– and mentioned that they were inspired to try something different next time around! Go JSC team!! I revamped the NASA CoLab talk in the spirit of the Gen Y Perspectives powerpoint, and am glad I did so (change can happen ).

Read more

Burt from The Requirements Department

In this post, I want to ask a question that I hope many will want to chime in on. But first of all, thanks Karen for the comment on the previous post. Know any good cartoonists looking for a column to bring to life?   

In your comment, you wrote: “we and the powers-to-be need to call NASA into action”… I couldn’t agree more that what NASA needs is the ability to empower its people to take some ownership of the agency, to challenge the accepted norms and the traditions of a big bureaucracy- not because we or any one person necessarily has a better way of doing it- but merely for the sake of stirring things up, asking the tough questions, and connecting people together under a common purpose. 
Read more

The Last Hubble Servicing Mission

STS-125 will be the forth and last Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. Hubble has been able to catch the attention of the general public as the space asset which brings the universe into focus and in times when every last Shuttle mission is needed to complete the Station it was decided to keep Hubble moving forward. While these decisions have been politically heated there still may be some ambivalence and ignorance with respect to the general public. So, how do we get people fired up about this mission? this question was posed to the Next Generation Exploration Conference and they came up with a brand: iHubble. So, goodbye NASA nouns of Hubble, Shuttle, and Station, and hello to verbs like iHubble!

To contribute, please join the brainstorming.

Report on the future of Virtual Worlds and NASA’s Role

I’ve finally compiled a report on the open discussion we held a couple of weeks ago in Second Life to begin brainstorming where virtual worlds are going, and how NASA can and should shape its contributions to this important emerging technology. From the draft report:

Read more

BarCampBlock in Palo Alto

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.”

Read more

creative commons for government?

i was in a meeting today where we were discussing the legalities surrounding open government-sponsored collaborative websites. that is, a NASA site facilitating open collaboration between NASA employees and non-NASA individuals or organization. what happens to intellectual property that comes out of that site? can the ideas be copyrighted? patented? should the ideas, content or inventions that come out of these collaborations be required to be openly accessible? can they be used commercially? and whatever decision is made, how is this communicated and enforced?

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.

Read more