At NASA Ames, we live in Silicon Valley and are exposed to a rather atypical set of 20- and 30-somethings who spend their weekends at things like SuperHappyDevHouse, and cupcakecamps full of the who’s who of web 2.0. It’s easy to think sometimes that if we could just make all NASA’s mission data available in some kind of magical XML, the entire world would rush to make innovative products from it.

While there is a substantive demand and use-case for this data by scientists, academics, and geeks the world around, overall we’re talking about a small subset of the population. This brings up (at least) two questions:

1. How do we generalize what we mean by participatory exploration beyond independently motivated technophiles, and
2. How can we design projects that actually scale gracefully with massive participation?

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These are the slides from my talk at SEDS SpaceVision this weekend in College Station.  I don’t have talking points yet, but when/if I do, I’ll post them here as well - I just wanted to get the slides up as soon as possible. SEDS SpaceVision is the annual event for chapters of SEDS (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) in the US to come together to meet, talk, listen to speakers from the space industry, and network.  I’ve never had the chance to attend spacevision before, but since it was essentially in our back yard here in Texas, it was the perfect opportunity.  Thanks to Texas A&M for hosting!  This was about “participatory exploration” in context of both working at NASA and working with NASA.  The audience was the interested college students attending the conference (I have another version of the “participatory exploration” I give to NASA program/project managers about how we actually go about opening our programs/projects and making them “participatory”).  The goal of my talk was to let the students know a) how exciting working for NASA can be, b) how exciting the Constellation Program is, and c) that even if they didn’t literally work for NASA or for one of its subcontractors, there are still many ways to participate.  Each day, we are creating more and more avenues for people to participate in the NASA mission.  I’d love for readers of opennasa.com to share any other “participatory” efforts you know about.  I’m also interested in hearing about what you do for NASA, if you work in the industry.  If you have an awesome job, take a moment to tell us what you do!  It was really good to see a number of good friends at the event, including Will Pomerantz (twitter.com/pomerantz) of the X PRIZE and Ken Davidian (twitter.com/kdavidian) of the FAA.  Other notable speakers included Peter Diamandis, Bob Richards, and Loretta Hidalgo!  Check out Will’s blog post(s) about the conference at The Launch Pad and check out Ken’s commercial space wiki.   Note: This presentation was the ‘Feature Slideshow of the Day’ on slideshare.net on Sunday Nov 16: http://www.slideshare.net/ssod.  Special thanks to Karen Lau (http://twitter.com/k_lau) for the awesome CoLab logo.