Tweet Success

I’m closing in on Mars! Who is going to sleep tonight? Not the team, too excited/scared/anxious seeing 5 years of work come to this last day.
– 7:45PM May 24, 2008 from @MarsPhoenix

Does anyone remember seeing that tweet from the “MarsPhoenix” Twitter account last year?  Probably not, because it was one of the updates posted before landing when relatively few people were following.  During the initial days of the account every post felt like shouting into the wind, hoping that people might take notice and listen.

By landing day (one year ago this weekend) 3,000 people were following the mission’s tweets through atmospheric entry and touch down.  The post-landing tweet, “Tears, cheers, I’m here!” reflected the scene not on Mars but in mission control where the Phoenix team literally laughed and cried knowing they had 90 sols of hard work and discoveries ahead of them. One discovery had just been made: a new way to communicate news of the mission using Twitter.

When I say, “communicate, ” I don’t mean simply pushing pithy updates to the public via the relatively new (at the time) Twitter.  To be honest, that was my original intent – to post updates on the landing  — but it quickly took on a different life.  You see, while you were reading the updates posted by MarsPhoenix, I was busy reading the @replies.  And the @replies changed everything.

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The First *Human* Tweet from Space

In June of 2007, NASA’s Office of Space Operations and Innovative Partnership Program, NASA’s CoLab and the National Space Society hosted the Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center. The summit, among many other things, was really one of the first major catalysts for thinking seriously about how the agency could us the internet, information technologies, and gaming sectors to provide new and exciting ways to connect, engage, inspire, and educate the public about space exploration.  If you have a chance, check out the proceedings from the summit – there are quite a few ideas packed into the proceedings document prepared by Delia that may really play into the future success of NASA’s exploration efforts.

One of the things we discussed (okay, dreamed about) at that meeting was astronauts twittering from space (see page 1 from the proceedings).  Well, I’m happy to report that @NASA has really embraced and leveraged social media to offer a new perspective on spaceflight! This afternoon, Mike Massimino (@astro_mike) became the first astronaut to tweet from space with the following words “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!” This is a really big step for our space agency! I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to hear about the rest of the Hubble mission first hand from an Astronaut who is there.  As Mike said, this mission will truly be awesome.

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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.

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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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How Online Organizing Lessons from ’04 and ’08 Can Help NASA in ’09

Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ’04 and Clark ’04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.

Many 2004 campaign veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.

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Tipping NASA

I have always been fascinated with what makes a situation, person, or event succeed or fail. The psychology of it fascinates me. I studied psychology as an undergrad and in graduate school, but it wasn’t until I read The Tipping Point by Malcome Gladwell that I really became hooked on social psychology and specifically the power that people have to make an impact or be change agents.

Gladwell starts his book with a description of the successful come back of Hush Puppies. Yes, it is true Hush Puppies weren’t always popular and the brushed suede shoe line was down to 30,000 pairs per year in 1994. Then people started showing up in the trendy clubs and bars in Manhattan and it was on. People bought up the shoes from anywhere they could. Issac Mizrahi (before he was so famous and designed for Target) was wearing them, another designer wanted them for spring fashion shoot, someone created Hush Puppy boutique, as so on and so on. By the end of 1995, they had sold 430,000 pairs. Word of mouth drove the demand and ultimately the supply. Amazing!

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OpenNASA Opening Doors

I knew that I was joining a special group of people when I became a contributing author here because of the passion everyone has shown for making NASA the kind of organization we all know it can be.  I consider myself fortunate to be in the company of such a group.

I have learned a heck of a lot in a relatively short period of time about the various perspectives that people bring to the table from all over the space exploration community.  I expected and hoped that would happen, though.  What I didn’t expect was that participating in this electronic forum would lead to even wider, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

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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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