What does gossip and open innovation have in common?

I am like most people, I think, when it comes to taking in information. I hear new bits of information–via newspapers, journals, blogs, AP iPhone app, tweet, etc…–which generates a “ping” (that is the sound of the information banging around in my head and then being filed). Then I hear another bit of information and tie a virtual string to the new and old information. This sounds like a “pong.” Sometimes I am cognitively aware as to why my mind connected the bits together and other times I am not.

Over the past several months, my mind has tied the words “gossip” and “open innovation.” I recently deciphered why my mind made the ties. The ties could be as weak a spider’s web or as strong as a sailor’s knotted ladder. As a reader, you make your own call. First, I will take you down my mind path then I will reveal what I discovered as the common thread.

Read more

How would you utilize the ISS?

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?

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

The Benac Orbit, Kepler’s Follow On

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.

Read more

NASAsphere Pilot Findings Released

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.

Read more

Work-Life Fit at JSC

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.
Read more

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.

Read more

Report on “Cross-Generational Discussions and Activities”

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:
Read more

Follow > Create > Engage

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.”

Read more