Have we got a job for you!

Get your creative juices flowing. Capture all your ideas. We’re listening. You have until March 19, 2010 to share your ideas with us about how NASA can be more:

1. Transparent,
2. Participatory,
3. Collaborative, and
4. Innovative.

We’ve deployed a cool idea-sharing tool to let you give input, comment on input of others, and vote ideas up or down. Your ideas will feed into NASA’s Open Government Plan. You need an account first, but that’s as simple as adding your e-mail and a password.

Go ahead. Give it a try.

And if you find any ideas by me in the system, feel free to give them a generous thumbs up!  (I’m just getting started….)

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” – John Gardner 1965

Let’s tackle those opportunities!

Crosspost on GovLoop and BethBeck’s Blog.

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.

Why Hackerspaces?

The term “open-source”  and “crowdsourcing” is huge now a days.  Right now these terms generally refer to work that is done virtually for software applications.  These terms do not generally refer to crowdsourced hardware development.  I believe that hackerspaces will one day play a role in making crowdsourcing of hardware a reality.

In recent history, software development has gone through leaps and bounds in capability because of the low cost required for an individual to start developing software.  This low cost has provided individuals the ability to create dot com start-ups such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.  Countless other individuals have contributed to the industry in various different ways as well.  Today, we are at a pivot point where microprocessor technology and software technology is developed enough that it is becoming extremely inexpensive to develop automated systems that integrate the computer user with the physical world (i.e. robots, home automation,etc).  The development and implementation of this technology is no longer required to be completed in institutions that have ungodly amounts of money to do the research and development.  Instead, motivated individuals will be able to enter the market cheaply by joining a hackerspace, and using the group’s infrastructure to develop new inventions and hardware technology.  I believe, that lowering the entry point to developing this technology will allow the robotics industry and other hardware technology to have an explosion in development in the not too distant future.

It doesn’t stop there…

A few groups across the world have already started working on the technology to make it possible for every household to have a small manufacturing plants, in much the same way many houses today have small printing presses in their homes (aka printers).  The most notable of these groups are the makers of the RepRap and the Makerbot.   The RepRap is a rapid-prototyper with the long-term goal of eventually developing a RepRap iteration that can fully replicate itself.

The Makerbot is also a Rapid-Prototyper, which was derived from the technology that was used to create the RepRap.  The Makerbot was developed at the NYC Resistor (one of the original Hackerspaces in the United States).  The goal behind the Makerbot is to create a rapid-prototyper that is affordable and easy to use by everyone.

As this technology develops and becomes main stream it will eventually be possible for one day to allow most homes to have a small manufacturing plant, that is metaphorically equivalent to the printer and the printing press.

When this technology develops I believe that Hackerspaces will evolve to give members even more capability than what is currently readily possible, because the concept behind Hackerspaces is to provide infrastructure necessary to work on projects that couldn’t easily be worked on with the personal resources of one individual.

How can Hackerspaces help NASA (aka Space Exploration)?…

In order for space exploration to prosper and become cost-effective robotic technology will need to be created and adapted to develop infrastructure that is necessary for human space exploration and industrial exploration.  Concepts like those behind the RepRap, will be required to be further developed so that it is possible to automatically manufacture goods as needed in space.  The RepRap technology in part has driven the conception of a previous future technology I proposed in “Future Tech: Spider-bots dial Home”.  I imagine developing Spider-bots that can manufacture themselves, manufacture other things and can also be used for surveillance and exploration.  Now if the technology required to do space exploration is developed in open-source/Creative Commons type methodologies, then groups of people will be able to work together in Hackerspaces, Universities and Industry to propel innovations forward that are created at NASA making space exploration cheaper.

How can Hackerspaces help Industry?…

The idea that the greatest innovation occurs outside the walls of an institution was made famous and profitable by Proctor and Gamble.  By working synergistically with the crowd, industry will be able to maximize innovation that exists outside their walls.  This partnership will profit both the individuals with the innovative ideas and the companies that take the idea from conception to market, or hack the concept into a different use that the original innovator never even thought of.  Helping develop hackerspaces and the tools necessary for crowdsourcing hardware development gives industry a source of innovation at the fraction of the cost of in-house innovation (it is a win-win).

Further, Hackerspaces provide a place for employees to further develop their technical skills, or the outlet to develop new technical skills.  The skills that can be developed at Hackerspaces, with the community, will likely be much more readily applicable to their daily work than knowledge gained by going to the university.  Hackerspaces, won’t ever replace the university, but they provide a hands-on learning experience that extends the experience gained from the university.

Disclaimer…

Hackerspaces are relatively new and their reach modest.  Perhaps my claims about the future of Hackerspaces are premature, but that is the potential that I see and that is why I am so passionate about helping make hackerspaces work.  It will be fun to see the dream of Thomas Edison on steroids come to fruition.

Help!

Hackerspaces around the world need motivated members and donations to make the dream possible.  If you want to help or join, I encourage you to look up a hackerspace near you at (http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces) to join or donate.  If there isn’t a hackerspace near you, perhaps you want to start one.  If so, there is a lot of information at hackerspaces.org on how to get one started.  New hackerspaces are starting up quite often.  If one is not available locally, make sure to go back to the list of hackerspaces to see if one is starting up near you.

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

These all deal with the concept that we are trying to take the brainpower of the interested public and use it to solve the technical, political, and business problems that confront our efforts to expand into space. Consider a tool that can facilitate this.

Look at Wikipedia. According to last year’s annual report (check it out in your spare time, Nick,) there were “approximately 100,000 active editors (defined as users who made more than 5 changes in the last month).” 100,000! That’s a huge number of people!

With the 11 million articles on Wikipedia, you can be sure that many of these editors are fueled to participate in a wide range of articles by the synergistic combination of articles that they can work on. In other words, editing in Wikipedia gets “sticky” (Check the definitions at the bottom)

So here is the point. Crowd Sourcing is good. Better Crowd Sourcing is better. Better Crowd Sourcing can be had by implementing a dedicated web based methodical structure that fosters and requires attention to the essential questions of systems design.

So I am hatching this idea for something that could be a Wikimedia project, specifically for designing things. It would work a bit like this:

You come to the wiki design sight and tell it that you want to start a new design. It asks you some basic questions like what your primary objective of need is, what kind of system it is (Vehicle, building, processing machine, etc.), Does it require data processing, etc.

The site shepherds your thoughts into a rudimentary top level systems architecture framework by asking you questions like: what does it do? And how might it do that?

It gives you some templates for functional and physical breakdowns, templates with high level headings for a system specification document, and you, the user get as detailed or a vague as you want at this point.

So then your site is live and anyone can come in and populate the content, like with Wikipedia, but unlike Wikipedia, some powerful organizing tools and templates are integrated with the content.

Some of the possible features:

• Integrated 3D modeling web app that helps with part numbers and hierarchy of parts
• Expired patent and journal search that lets you link relevant patents to functions or subfunctions
• Discussion and voting tied to specific elements of the system definition.
• Commenting on parts of the system definition (Saying things like: “This design is horrible. If it were 3 inches long it would have way more strength and only add a small amount of length”)
• Chat with other members of the project
• robust and targeted permissions to set “baseline” requirements, functions, components, interfaces, etc
• Automated quality check that alert users to possible functional overlaps, shortfalls, etc.
• Autocheck to make sure that users don’t give functions titles that are nouns or verbs as titles to items.
• Freedom of Information Act Request facilitation.
• Reuse of components, functions, etc from other projects. (Got an idea for something with wheels? Pick from a myriad of projects in which the wheel was defined already!)

The idea is that most people don’t know beans about systems engineering, requirements, or interfaces. Design by committee, forum posting, voting, or by blind feel with no knowledge or application of systems engineering is not an effective method of harnessing the domain knowledge that many people do have.

So who is with me? Let’s storm the Wikimedia foundation and get them to put this thing online so that we can go about the business of designing space vehicles in style!

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.

Link to Executive Summary

Link to Full Paper

Eliminate the obstacles to working with the public

–      Encourage open-source adoption

–      Leverage the re-competition of NASA’s website

Here at NASA, we owe quite a bit of credit to members of the openNASA community at Ames Research Center who really were at the forefront of the twitter phenomenon at NASA. Long before Twitter itself went mainstream and before the @MarsPhoenix stream garnered 39,933 followers and ranked in the top all time twitter accounts, CoLab invited Biz Stone (@biz), and other notable leaders in the web2.0 community, to the Participatory Exploration Summit on June 26, 2007. The purpose of that summit was to engage individuals, organizations and communities with NASA and discuss how the government could benefit from collaborative technologies, such as micro-blogging. The summit proceedings are worth checking out if you haven’t had a chance; a number of great thoughts are included, such as microblogging of astronauts from the ISS, designing missions collaboratively in virtual environments, and making the volumes of data NASA has more available to the public. This summit really jump started NASA’s use of the twitter platform itself and quite a lot has happened since then. Last December, we setup the @NASA account and streamed RSS feeds from nasa.gov. Today, that account has 4,498 followers! Just this past week, PAO at NASA HQ officially took over the @NASA account and will now be using it “officially” to share the latest and greatest NASA news. Given that we were never officially representing PAO, we didn’t use twitter to respond to replies or give it any sort of personality. Now it looks like @NASA is set to really take off (the @NASA profile page already has a new look and feel).

A number of people have been talking around the agency for sometime now about a “social media” component for the overall communications strategy. We’re not quite there yet, but each day it seems we get a little closer. Awhile back I posted some thoughts on social media, why we should care, what we could use it for, etc. This post is getting a bit too long, but in a few weeks, I’ll share what I’ve been thinking about since then in terms of a “social media” for the agency, but right now I’d love to hear your thoughts on how NASA can incorporate social media into it’s communication strategy. One thing I’m particularly interested in is if anyone has heard of any more “traditional” organizations (auto companies, retailers, service providers, or even other government agencies) who have developed, and shared, a “social media strategy.” If so, post a link!

Two final thoughts.

1. If you are on twitter, and are looking to connect with other space industry people, recently Mike Fabio (@revrev), community manager at the X PRIZE foundation, wrote a popular post highlighting some well known space twitter personalities. Another meme started shortly thereafter on onorbit.com that captures even more.

2. A few fun facts:
Twitter’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds who make up 25.9% of its users. Surprised?
Twitter average daily growth rate from September to November 2008 was 5%. Impressive.

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?

I’ve heard public participation callously referred to as ‘free labour’, but the truth is that increased participation is often correlated with additional overhead to manage those contributions. Management tasks scale with volume, precisely because the vast majority of contributors are non-experts (by design). The NASA CoLab team had numerous discussions with NASA projects who loved the idea of public participation, but felt they didn’t have the bandwidth to support it.

Certain participatory projects have models which do not require this kind of oversight. What are some of their characteristics?

• Projects where participants with different levels of expertise can teach/learn from each other independent of mission scientists.
• Projects where the output has no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer (could be art, but not necessarily).
• Similarly, projects where the application is more general than the realm of space science (for example, image processing, machine vision, or compression algorithms), and participants can engage on the level of their own fields of expertise without a bottleneck inside NASA.
• Development of technology products like mobile phone applications, screensavers, atlases, and virtual worlds.
• ‘Remixing’ NASA content in music, documentaries, or visual art.

Most of these ideas are still not general-audience. In fact, we might inevitably find that the most general participatory projects are one step removed from NASA. Perhaps it is the products people make with low level NASA data and documents, that have the most potential to engage broader audiences.

Ironically, most of these come back to data accessibility. Open, standard formats, policies which default to higher levels of openness than they currently do, and increased timeliness of release will. These will all play a crucial roles in seeing scalable participatory exploration become a reality.

What are some of your thoughts on general audience, scalable participatory exploration projects?

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!  

Read the full memo here.

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.

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.

I was no different. Growing up, I was inspired by the NASA story – a story filled with all the risks and rewards of exploration and discovery. At the heart of this story are people of integrity, perseverance, and persistence, who have made careers out of turning the impossible into reality every day. The more I learned, the more I wanted to participate myself. But it wasn’t until I was deeply involved in human exploration until I fully understood how valuable our space program truly is. Now, I can’t help but want to share the story with others.

But, the thing about space exploration is that it’s a complex story. When someone asks what NASA is doing, we often present a structured PowerPoint presentation with unreadable text and pictures of hardware crammed together on a chart as if we were paying by the electron. In our best monotone voice, we zap the excitement and romance right out of what we do. These presentations do not really represent the excitement, importance, and benefits of our nations investments in space exploration. The problem is that if we don’t get this right, and get it right in places far beyond the small community gathered at our normal space conferences, we may not get a chance to do much of anything our nation has planned for the future. The results of which would be much worse than any crisis that has ever faced our nation.

If you work in the space industry, public or private, I believe it is your responsibility to remind others why it is we explore. I had the opportunity to attend the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama this past week. If you were fortunate enough to be there, you heard some really eloquent speakers talk about the future of our space program. One panel in particular of interest was the panel on the Constellation Program which discussed how the program is enabling research and discovery, and maybe more importantly, answering the question “why explore.” David King, the Center Director of Marshall Space Flight Center, pointed out that Dr. Wernher von Braun said that it was “curiosity” that prompted us to explore.

“It is curiosity that sets man apart. It is curiosity that makes him learn. This has been true throughout history…. First curiosity, then learning; then advancement….the guy who is curious – the restless searcher for new knowledge never knows where his curiosity will lead him. All he knows is that some time, in some way, the knowledge he digs up will better the lot of his fellow man…. That’s why we want to — and why we must – explore space. It’s our next frontier, our newest challenge, and the greatest unknown today.”

John Horack, Director of the Science and Mission Systems Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, went on to say –

There are often many answers to the question “Why” that come in a variety of forms. There’s the marketing answer: “To inspire the next generation of explorers, only as NASA can.” There’s the Philosophical: “Because exploration is in our DNA.” The economic: “Just look at the spin-offs!” And many times we answer “Why?” with “What.”: “To improve our TLI injection capacity by 30% and to enable four people to access the surface of the Moon, anywhere, and return any time, with a stay of up to six months.”

So why are we doing this? What is the point? I wish I were more eloquent with words like Wayne Hale, John Horack or Mike Griffin – but I’ve found I work best in pictures. Recognizing that at this point in time, PowerPoint is still the preferred medium of choice for many in the space industry, I try to manage the stereotype associated with the “typical space industry presentation” by using power point differently. Wayne Hale and I put together a presentation on “Why the Moon?” Wayne Hale first gave this presentation at the Von Braun Symposium with the hope others would use it to share the story of human space exploration. If you find this presentation helpful, please use it, pass it on to others, and share the story. As always, we appreciate constructive comments – and will work to continuously update this presentation and post it on this site for your benefit. Enjoy!

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!”

I heard about Mars Phoenix… Saw something about that on the news the other day. What’s this Twitter thing all about anyway?

Well, to start, Twitter is online micro blogging service that allows you to write and follow short messages (up to 140 characters) via the web, email, IM or text. Each user can subscribe to status messages of other users. The Mars Phoenix mission made the news because the people behind the mission have done something particularly creative. They’ve use “social media” to give their spacecraft a personality which has allowed them to directly connect with thousands of people on a very personal level. Since landing on Mars, @MarsPhoenix has been interviewed by the media, has answered questions from individuals all over the world, and has managed to cut through the day-to-day noise and inform those otherwise to busy to pay attention to “just another NASA mission.” If you don’t believe me, just visit summize.com and read the transcripts from the ongoing online conversation. Here’s a link, I did the search for you already. @MarsPhoenix is the most popular application of Twitter for NASA, but a number of current and upcoming missions will be using this new medium as well – including @STS124 (which just landed) and @hubble. In addition, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of space people who are using social media tools to share the inspirational message about space exploration with others.

So what’s the point? Why should we really care about social media?

Good question. I’ve heard this quite a bit lately from everyone from scientists to marketing majors. It’s safe to say that many people are skeptical of social media – and understandably so. We’ve even discussed the negative implications of technology here on openNASA. When it comes to corporate resources, time, money, and effort to try new activities takes risk. From a marketing standpoint, there is a major concern about losing control of a brand or message. But as we see from @MarsPhoenix, that risk can pay off. When people are passionate about a topic, the want to talk about it and social media has become “the” way a growing number of people communicate.

Do you use it? What for?

Yes, you can actually follow me here if you are interested. But, to answer your second question, let me share a few examples of how I personally use twitter. I could just as easily talk about any other social media application as well, but I’ll use Twitter since we are on the topic.

There are several applications for Twitter. Some use it to keep in touch with their friends. Some use it s a professional tool, for information gathering and creating a conversation with a community. Some use it as a notification service for their podcasts listeners or blog readers about new material. And some just use it as an open chat platform.

Here are a few reasons I use it on a personal level:

1. Communication: It’s much easier than blogging (which I’m not very good at regularly doing) and I can quickly and efficiently share my thoughts, upcoming events, news, ideas, links or feedback with anyone who cares to listen. I can also follow others who are sharing information that I’m interested in.

2. News. Twitter users regularly link to useful sites or articles and this can be a source of breaking news even before other websites or the media pick it up. I subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific events/conferences, which allows me to receive and view content quickly.

3. Networking. The “social” part of social media – Twitter has a built-in function for me to meet others and get to know them 140 characters at a time. It’s a very easy way to connect with people outside of your usual circle. I can easily follow thousands of other people and listen in on conversations they are having. Twitter can be used as a networking platform to meet other like-minded people, such as those in the same industry as you that you may not have met otherwise. If you are looking for a contact in another industry, it’s also a way to meet someone.

4. Notes. Twitter provides you with an easy way to record important ideas or concepts you want to explore further. If I want to remind myself of something, I can mark it as a “favorite.”

5. Time Management and Analysis. Twitter can simply be used to keep a detailed record of what you are doing. This is particularly useful when I want to analyze how I spend and manage my time, or when I’m trying to summarize what I’ve done recently (or annually in the case of when I write my Christmas Cards).

6. Feedback. Sometimes I really appreciate an alternative perspective on everything from a good place to visit when traveling to what tool I might use to better do a job. Simply sending out a request asking for advice will usually result in some useful replies from other users. This collective intelligence can be used to make better decisions.

Okay, but what’s this about NASA using Twitter?

Using social media tools such as Twitter for professional application can be extremely beneficial. A few months ago, a few of us brainstormed about how we’d to improve NASA. Below is the list that we came up back then. Using social media tools like Twitter addresses each one of these items.

• Create a transparent and connected government
• Encourage a modern communications structure
• Employ innovative technology to collaborate on and solve our challenges
• Improve how teams integrate to solve problems
• Improve employee retention and recruitment
• Ensure full and free access to information
• Bring NASA to the American Public
• Share our compelling story with the Public
• Flatten organization structures
• Change our approach to advertisement and marketing

There is no doubt that we live in a complex and technologically sophisticated society and Twitter offers an easy and effective way to take advantage of that environment. Social media can be used as an effective tool whether the task is simply communicating our latest innovation or exciting mission, or collaborating on a complicated undertaking requiring the coordinated contributions of many talented people working together.

Here are some thoughts on how NASA ,as well as any other organization, can benefit from becoming an early adopter of social media on a bigger scale:

1. Leveraging Social Media.

Just by utilizing twitter, NASA can reach out to thousands with its brand. In terms of sharing a message with an audience, there may not be a more effective way than personally connecting with others. As the business world becomes more familiar with social media tools, and starts blogging, facebook-ing, twittering, or whatever is next – the same core skills in understanding how to reach stakeholders are similar. Learning how to do it on twitter is a skillset that can be applied to feature social media mediums.

2. Keeping Track of the “Linkerati” (Highly vocal and connected influencers).

“Despite the buzz and activity of Twitter.com, their membership of just over 1 million users seem a paltry sum compared to MySpace, Facebook , Bebo and others. However, Twitter is definitely on the bleeding edge of early adopters, specifically the “Linkerati” (as coined by Rand Fishkin). The Linkerati are the special type of early adopters who are very vocal on the Internet – be it twittering, blogging or doing a Yelp/Amazon review of your business or product. Current Twitter members, due to their Linkerati demographic, may have a higher than average say on influencing your brand.”Note: The above was very well written elsewhere, so I just re-published word-for-word from this great article

3. Two-Way Conversations.

A number of businesses such as H&R Block and Comcast are incredibly innovative in how they use twitter as a conversational & microblogging platform. H&R Block reaches out to Twitter members complaining about taxes and assist as customer service for those dissatisfied with their H&R Block experience. Comcast does the same and actually responded to a comment that I wrote a few months back when I was frustrated with their customer service. @comcastcares personally called the Comcast Houston office and had someone come out to my house immediately and fixed my problem two weeks quicker than would have otherwise happened. NASA, although not in the customer care business, can use Twitter to converse with stakeholders around the country who may benefit from the many educational materials NASA produces. @MarsPhoenix and @STS124 are great examples of how a mission can be communicated via conversation.

4. News Distribution.

Just like the New York Times or CNN, NASA can utilize Twitter as another distribution platform to send their audience updates. The best part is that it takes a matter of minutes to stream an RSS feed into a twitter account. Anyone can then subscribe via mobile or RSS for instant notification and have the news delivered to them in whatever electronic medium they prefer. This is definitely not very *social* media, but it allows yet another route by which to reach their audience in a relatively low cost method. This is how NASA currently uses the @NASA account – it streams the 12 RSS feeds from http://www.nasa.gov/rss website.

5. Reputation Monitoring.

NASA can also use twitter to monitor it’s reputation on a very personal level. It wouldn’t take much to monitor and track Twitter comments and then analyze them for trends. Understanding feedback about NASA via Twitter will give those planning future programs and projects, such as outreach programs, a first hand glimpse into what might work best.

6. Recruitment and Retention.

Sounds crazy, but it’s not. As the NASA community looks for new talent, they may consider using Twitter to both advertise a position or find the talent they require. This is pretty common for those looking to find logo designers, marketers, programmers, or freelancers – and I’m sure there are already companies out there using Twitter this way.

7. Directing Traffic.

Twitter can be used to direct traffic to the nasa.gov website. There is a viral nature to how news spreads these days.

8. Internal Communication Management.

Twitter can also be used as a company intranet that connects employees to one another. This is particularly useful when employees want to collaborate but are not located in the same office, city, state or country! Updates can be set to private for security reasons.

9. Event Updates and Live Coverage.

NASA can use Twitter as a means to inform its audience of upcoming events, such as launches. This is a hassle-free way of disseminating information. Twitters message size limit is perfect for real-time commentary, which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. I’m personally looking forward to following the first space mission when Astronauts twitter from space.

Wow, that’s interesting. There might be some value in using social media. Do you know of any NASA projects or missions that already use Twitter besides @MarsPhoenix?

Sure do! Here’s a list and I’ll keep updating this as I find out about others. If you know of any other project or mission twittering, please let me know. **Note that not all of these are “NASA managed” accounts.

• @NASA
• @MarsPhoenix
• @hubble
• @STS124
• @STS125
• @LCROSS_NASA
• @LADEE_NASA
• @LRO_NASA
• @TESS_NASA
• @NASAkepler
• @NASA_EDGE
• @NASA_MAAT
• @NASAGLAST
• @nasacolab
• @SSDiscovery
• @SSAtlantis
• @NASA_SDO_HMI
• @NASA_SDO
• @DESERT_RATS

What about space people that use Twitter?

There are a quite a few “space people” already using social media (especially on Facebook and LinkedIn) but here’s a list of eleven space people who use Twitter from all parts of the space world. If you want to find more, take a look at who they are following on Twitter.

• Keith Cowing (@keithcowing) – Editor of NASAWatch / SpaceRef
• Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) – Editor of The Space Review and SpacePolitics.com
• William Pomerantz (@PomerantzReport) - X PRIZE Foundation, Google Lunar X PRIZE
• Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis) – X PRIZE Foundation, Zero G Corporation
• Andrew Hoppin (@ahoppin) – NASA Colab, aerospace scientist
• Robbie Schingler (@medido) – Social entrepreneur and NASA innovator
• Tim Bailey (@tim846) – Zero G, National Space Society (NSS), Space Generation (SGAC), Yuri’s NightWayne Hale (@waynehale) – Former Flight Director/Space Shuttle Program Manager
• Leroy Chao (@AstroDude)– Former NASA Astronaut
• Ken Davidian (@kdavidian) – Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Commercial Development Policy Lead
• Robert Pearlman (@RobertPearlman) – Editor of collectSpace.com
• Nick Skytland (@skytland) – me
• I could highlight others but this gives you a flavor of who you might find on Twitter.

The concept of Twitter sounds great, but I’m not so excited about that “open and transparent” part. We do top secret work here! What about ITAR?

Twitter is not for everyone and those who choose to participate online with social media need to be professionally responsible and aware of corporate guidelines and in the case of us government folks, laws such as ITAR or the Hatch Act.

On a personal level, note that there are some privacy options when it comes to social media. With Twitter, for example, you can choose to “protect” your posts so that only people you approve can view them.

If your organization sees a value in using “social media” to connect, collaborate, share resources and information, but hasn’t yet warmed up to the complete “open and transparent culture,” there is a simple solution for them as well! The guys from Wordpress created Prologue – a template that works just like twitter. Using this template on an intranet, behind the firewall, platform, you can quickly setup an internal site for your office.

Cool – how much does that cost?

Like most great things online, nothing. Just install wordpress on your corporate server, add that theme, and you are good to go.

Oh, one last question. How do I make meaning out of the Twitter-sphere?

There are some really good resources that have been created to help you leverage the twittersphere. Here are a few of the ones I use daily:

• http://summize.com/ - The ultimate twitter search tool. If you want to take this all one step further, use Google Reader to convert your search to RSS.
• http://www.twitterfeed.com/ – If you are just becoming familiar with twitter and are having a hard time voluntarily posting your stream of consciousness online, may I suggest twitterfeed? This site takes an existing RSS feed and plugs it into twitter. Although not “ideal”, it is a good place to start.
• http://www.twitterholic.com/ - Find out who everyone else is following
• http://www.tweme.com - By using the # sign before a word, others can follow a conversation about a particularly subject or sub-conversation. Tweme.com uses the # sign to coagulate topics and then offers a sub-conversation search capability. As an example, search ISDC on tweme to follow the conversation held a few weeks ago at the ISDC conference in DC.
• Twitterberry for Blackberry – this application is invaluable for anyone with a blackberry.

Where can I get more information about all this?

I knew you’d ask! So here are a few articles worth reading if you have time:

• I encourage you to visit Loretta’s latest post at Wired.com highlighting the value of twitter to NASA missions. She’s much more eloquent and concise than I am.
• Here’s an insightful article about what Dell’s Bob Pearson is doing to deal with the changing world of online communication.
• Here’s an article on “what not to do” and corporate “worst practices“.
• Here’s an Editorial Policy Guidance Note from the BBS regarding their presence on social networks. In this policy, it emphasizes the importance of “conversations, participate online; don’t “broadcast” messages to users.
• Much of the content on how to use Twitter was inspired from the Dosh Dosh blog and Jeremiah Owyang. Both websites are a wealth of information
• If you already have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, but don’t understand the benefits/implications of tagging yourself, read this article about owning your online name.

Hey, I gotta run, but lets keep in touch! Would love to talk about this more.

Excellent and if you have a moment, I’d love to hear from as you well on how you are using social media in the workplace. How about we just meet up online? It’d be much easier for me to communicate in the future with you that way!