“Broadly speaking, for the last three decades NASA has changed its R&D strategy every 18 months. ”

Is that really true? I am assuming that is an exaggeration, but then again .

It does appear that NASA follows a mixture of strategies that in and of themselves would be good but because they are mixed don’t work in practice.

One of the biggest hurdle to “open” in NASA is a Top-Down philosophy to management and the desire to hoard information. That being stated, in general, I am not against the top-down approach (it has its place). However, it can’t be used when working with outside individuals and organizations who “chose” to work with NASA. You can’t “control” volunteers, it just won’t fly.

Thanks for the post. Hopefully someone who can do something about them reads your post.

RQ

Some of the insights from the CTO sesssion:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nasacto

If Spacebook is considered a success, and I have every expectation it will, then it is easy to scale up to Agency support (was a design consideration). It uses eAuth authentication, which is spreading through most web applications.

Joshua – I couldn’t find the pub.nasa.gov websites you are referring to. I have seen some SpaceBook wireframes and look forward to its success! Do you know the future plans for SpaceBook to be Agency wide (or replicated for other Centers?). Also, what is it written in, and is it forward compliant to active directory (for Single Sign On)?

In general, with any software project, I firmly believe to start small and see if people bite, then let your users tell you what they really want. It would be great to see a group formed which incubates a series of small applications, but for now, I guess they are side projects. The main point of the interactive x500 + side project app is to share my side projects with people, see others, find collaborators, and shelve some projects that are being duplicated elsewhere!

Also, I would love to see what the CTOs came up with. Please pass along the information, or if you want to ask one of them to guest blog on opennasa.com, that would be even better!

–Robbie

A partial answer to the X.500 item… dir.nasa.giv (internal) and pubdir.nasa.giv (public) provide much of the directory information you seek. A couple of groups are experimenting with mobile apps to query the directory. A project called Spacebook is being piloted at GSFC (just entered Beta) which probably covers the rest of the bullet.

/b