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!”
A lot of thought and discussion has occurred lately concerning how to improve our internal communications in NASA. Here at JSC, this discussion has culminated with the release of the 20 Year Vision proposal. I am both honored and fortunate to have met with some of the people who made it happen and look forward to working with them on the implementation of those ideas.
With that in mind, I think that some of my professional experiences elsewhere can be brought to bear on this topic. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked in the intelligence community (IC) for a few years as a missile analyst. If you think the NASA community is results-oriented, the IC takes it to a whole new level.
i was in a meeting today where we were discussing the legalities surrounding open government-sponsored collaborative websites. that is, a NASA site facilitating open collaboration between NASA employees and non-NASA individuals or organization. what happens to intellectual property that comes out of that site? can the ideas be copyrighted? patented? should the ideas, content or inventions that come out of these collaborations be required to be openly accessible? can they be used commercially? and whatever decision is made, how is this communicated and enforced?
in general, we want to be as hands-off as possible. it should be up to groups and individuals collaborating on the site to decide when and if their content has gotten to the point that they want to (or that it justifies) being copyrighted or patented. however, as the sponsors of the time and resources that go into building and supporting this collaborative environment, NASA would expect a license to use any copyrighted or patented inventions or content.
