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.
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.
Once Kepler finds the other Earths, it time to listen to their radio stations!
So here is the next big thing: Craters as huge satellite dishes for antenna feeds orbiting above them.
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.
A few weeks ago, the Joint Leadership Team (JLT) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) was treated to a day-long retreat of presentations from each of the Innovation and Inclusion (I&I) Council’s Engagement Teams. I know it seems like classic “NASA acronym soup”, but there was nothing classic about how far the audience was reaching outside of their comfort zone that day.
Perhaps the furthest-reaching team was called Barrier Analysis. You might be familiar with that team’s video, since as of now it’s received over 92,000 hits on You Tube. That’s right, it’s the one from Wayne Hale’s blog post and the NPR story. There’s even a good summary of its background here on OpenNASA. It has been great to see the conversation that has started among NASA employees and the general public alike. The other teams also had some very interesting (if not quite as controversial) contributions relating to the inner-workings of the JSC Community. They looked internally at challenges such as Recruiting, Mentoring, IT Infrastructure, or Work-Life Fit. Personally, I had the privilege of working with 12 others to study the latter, and in the spirit of being open, I’d like to share with the OpenNASA readers the results of our work.
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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.
Last April, representatives of the next generation workforce community attended the NASA Strategic Management Council (SMC) at Stennis Space Center to discuss strategic workforce issues. The SMC is a top-level meeting with the NASA Administrator and top senior leadership across the agency. Their attendance was the result of the Administrator’s strategy discussion at the March SMC at which the Assistant Administrator of the Office of Human Capital Management was asked to bring together a group of next generation civil servants to foster a discussion of issues concerning NASA’s younger workforce. The April SMC discussion focused on long-term strategic effects of current hiring practices and the upcoming gap in US human space flight on the NASA mission. An action was given to hold “cross-generational discussions” at the NASA centers, involving people from all generations, backgrounds, and experiences (both contractor and Civil Servant) to discuss four issues:
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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.”
With a recession, an oncoming Obama administration, Shuttle post 2010 utilization rumors, and other national flux, we ask ourselves: will we really go back to the moon?
The answer is yes, in only for one simple reason: We have nothing else to do. The Shuttle has enjoyed 100+ great missions. Mankind has lofted 12 space stations (9 Salut, 1 Skylab, 1 Mir, and 1 ISS,) we have built two fully reusable shuttleing spacecraft (Buran and Shuttle,) done space tourism, reusable suborbital craft, and most other things that people dreamed about back in Von Braun’s time. The marginal utility in discovery and inspiration decreases with each dollar spent. The price to launch a government kilogram to orbit remains the same, and in some cases increases. We have done every major accomplishment the ancients have dreamed about; well, everything they dreamed about doing in LEO.
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:
July 3 |
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7:08pm | Did you see the first moon pictures sent back by LRO and released yesterday? Check them out at http://tr.im/qPkc |
July 2 |
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4:09pm | The Soyuz move is complete. The station crew will spend the wknd prepping for the shuttle's arrival and enjoying some off-duty time. |
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3:45pm | @benstanfield The Soyuz move opens the Zvezda docking port for the arrival of a new Russian Progress cargo vehicle later this month. |
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3:20pm | Three space station crew members will move their Soyuz form one docking port to another. Undocking @ 5:26pET. Watch it on www.nasa.gov/ntv |
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2:59pm | @Twit_nut Landers and rovers will be visible. Depending on lighting conditions, we could see a very high level of detail. |
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2:58pm | @illumicdigital No firm date yet, but in the very near future. |
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2:56pm | RT @ NASAGoddard Zoom and move on the first images from the LRO Camera. Is that sweet or what? http://bit.ly/yXPCB |
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1:52pm | Arctic forest fires have an impact on climate change? Yeah, and NASA airborne scientists are in the thick of it. http://tr.im/qFpB |
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12:12pm | Great response for the STS-125 Tweetup, registration is closed. Confirmation e-mails will go out mid-next week; more details to come. |
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11:55am | Check out the Apollo Anniversary Mission Control Peeps! http://tinyurl.com/mm5zbw |
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11:49am | NASA's LRO Spacecraft Sends First Lunar Images to Earth: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has transm.. http://tinyurl.com/nx4z2v |
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11:13am | Anniversary Apollo Peeps |
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9:05am | You've got that right! RT ilzamacario @NASA that is so awesome!! Our planet is beautiful!! |
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8:36am | Whoa! Look at all this Saharan dust blowing off of Africa yesterday, as seen by NASA's Terra spacecraft. http://tr.im/qCKQ |
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8:22am | There's a new astronaut to the Twitter-verse. He's @Astro_Jose and he'll fly on STS-128. Bio infor at http://bit.ly/AstroJose. |
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8:21am | Image of the Day: Refuge: Situated as it is near the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, t.. http://tinyurl.com/m6cxx6 |
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7:52am | There's still time to sign up to attend the STS-125 crew Tweetup at NASA Headquarters July 21: http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup |
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7:10am | Earthquakes! - Live NASA chat & videocast with NASA scientists using space-based technologies. July 6, 8pm EDT. http://tr.im/qC0j |
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6:37am | Three space station crew members move their Soyuz from the Zvezda module to the Pirs Docking Compartment - watch live on NASA TV at 5 pm EDT |
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6:15am | @panicpack121 Atlantic hurricane season began June 1. For updates & info on NASA hurricane research ... http://tr.im/qBDa |
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6:07am | One month down in Atlantic hurricane season - see how hot the Gulf & Caribbean are, from NASA satellites. http://tr.im/qByj |
July 1 |
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10:00pm | Saluting Our Nation's Independence |
June 29 |
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10:00pm | Space Station Appearing Nationwide Over July 4 Weekend |