Ideas on How to Open NASA? Spill!

Are you someone who knows exactly what it takes to make NASA the best agency possible? Do you doodle ideas on cocktail napkins and mail them to a NASA Center? Do you wake up early in the morning to watch Space Shuttle launches (like this morning’s 4:14 a.m. EST STS-130 launch) or stay up all night for mission coverage of Space Station? Do you wish you could wear a NASA badge and sit in a cubicle somewhere in the bureaucratic maze at a NASA installation?

Have we got a job for you!

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Hackerspaces and NASA

It was March 29, 2009 that Wired.com released an article that instantly made many technology enthusiasts, engineers, scientists and artist aware about a novel concept called “Hackerspaces”.  For those who do not know, a hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab, workbench, machine shop, workshop and/or studio where people of diverse backgrounds can come together to collaborate, share resources and knowledge necessary to build/make things that would not be possible on their own.  Hackerspaces is a grass-roots movement that I believe will one day do to hardware development what open-source is doing to software development; it will provide the infrastructure necessary to crowdsource the development of technology.

The Hackerspace provides people a third space (work-space, home-space, the hackerspace) where they can invent/develop new technologies, develop new skills, master old skills, collaborate with other like minded individuals to create something that is better than what they can do on their own, and much more.  The Hackerspace is Thomas Edison on steroids and I believe it will change the way technology is developed in the future.  It is still a dream but imagine having access to a nanotechnology lab or a biosynthesis lab.  Having the infrastructure that would give individuals access to experiment in high-tech work such as nanotechnology, biosynthesis is still somewhat far from occurring, but not a far fetched goal.  Why is it not a far fetched goal?  Simple, because more solutions can be generated when more people work on a problem.  Sure, many of these solutions will not produce fruit, but the mere increase in solutions will make the advancement of new industries exponentially faster.  Advancement of new industries is profitable; therefore, I believe that sponsorship of Hackerspaces will be looked at as a profitable investment for leading companies and institutions.

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Wiki Design: from Toasters to Spaceships

Participatory Exploration. Frednet. Lunar Boom Town. Open Luna.

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NASA Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations

Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations for National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Participatory exploration was first introduced in 2007 at the NASA Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center and was prioritized into the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063), highlighting its necessity to NASA’s continued public relevance in the 21st century. We have written a paper for NASA senior management that discusses the role of “participatory exploration” as a way of “aggregating and leveraging people’s contributions in ways that are useful to other people” which can be applied to NASA programs and projects to engage the American public in the exploration experience and to identify opportunities for the direct involvement of the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners.  The paper includes specific recommendations which we have summarized below.  We’ve posted the paper on openNASA for your consideration and encourage you to share your thoughts on Participatory Exploration as well. Please share your thoughts via the comments below or on if you have specific ideas or recommendations, via the ideas forum.

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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.”

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How Does Participatory Exploration Scale?

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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An *Official* Seat At The Table…

Yesterday, every Obama-Biden Transition staff member received a memo outlining the “Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy.  The policy applies to “official meetings” which are defined as a meeting with an outside organization or representative to which three or more outside participants attend.  The policy does not apply to non-public or classified information and internal memos, but it’s a real step forward in transparency by the transition staff!  Basically, what this means is that the American public are actually encouraged to take a seat at the table and engage in a dialogue about important issues and ideas — at the very same time the transition team reviews those documents themselves.  This is your opportunity to get involved.  If you take a look at the new website feature for this effort there are 11 documents posted already.  One of these 11 documents posted on November 23rd is regarding “Space Solar Power (SSP) — A Solution for Energy Independence & Climate Change.”

The memo also says that “this scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials.”  To date, I’ve been personally very impressed with how open a number of agencies and transition teams have been.  I’m looking forward to the transparency and openness propagating into the NASA review process!  

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Spacehack

Ariel Waldman has just launched a fantastic new website for the space community called Spacehack.  Spacehack is “a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, interact + connect with the space community and encourage citizen science” and lists projects from a broad range of topics including competitions, open source, data analysis, and education.  It’s definitely a valuable source of information for anyone who wants to get involved in the space community.  If you have a project that should be added to the directory, you can submit your project to be included on the site.

Why the Moon?

NASA is in the inspiration business. If you don’t know what I mean, take a trip to your local school and engage in a discussion with students. Ask them what inspires them. At the heart of most discussions, is space exploration.
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Social Media: What’s the point?

You may have heard the buzz about the @MarsPhoenix twitter phenomenon. @MarsPhoenix has become extremely popular with an online audience of 20,000+. What makes @MarsPhoenix particularly engaging is its stream of regular first-person updates about life as a spacecraft on Mars. One of my personal favorite updates so far is this one:

“I know it LOOKS easy, but you try following instructions sent from 182 million miles away!”

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