Introduction
Jessy Cowan-Sharp
visualization in virtual environments at NASA's Ames Research Center
under the umbrella of a project called NASA CoLab. I saw David's twitter
about the group, and it looks very exciting. I hope it wasn't too much
of a presumption to subscribe myself.
CoLab is a project to bring in "web 2.0" technologies and mentalities to
support NASA in becoming more open, transparent and accessible. The
motivating vision is the idea of 'Participatory Exploration'. Rather
than NASA telling you why space exploration is cool, we are working on
tools and mechanisms to get NASA's information and collaborations out
into the open, so we can all figure it out for ourselves (and because
each of our answers might well be different!). Part of this is about
technology, data, and software openness, and part of it is about opening
up direct participation in projects within NASA.
For many of us on the CoLab team, NASA is a unique testbed for pushing
openness in government in general. NASA generates some of the largest
quantities of data in the world, and is probably the agency able to be
most public with its information (as opposed to, say, intelligence
agencies, health departments, etc.). There are several initiative under
way at the agency to have an improved web presence and better data
accessibility. The largest challenge for most of the things we're trying
to do is providing tools and helping define policies that make it easy
for people inside the agency to say, "that makes sense".
To that end, however we can partner with, support or extend the efforts
of this group, please let us know. The Open Government Data Principles
are something we would be happy to circulate at NASA and build support
for, when the time is right.
If you're interested, you can read more about the CoLab project here:
http://colab.arc.nasa.gov and http://colab.arc.nasa.gov/cosmoscode. You
can also view the recently released proceedings from our Participatory
Exploration Summit held last summer here:
http://colab.arc.nasa.gov/files/PES-Proceedings.pdf.
Feel free to email me: Jessy.K.C...@nasa.gov
Jessy
David Orban
wrote:
> of this group, please let us know. The Open Government Data Principles
> are something we would be happy to circulate at NASA and build support
> for, when the time is right.
wrote:
> of this group, please let us know. The Open Government Data Principles
> are something we would be happy to circulate at NASA and build support
> for, when the time is right.
it is great to see that NASA is alert, and ready to take advantage of
initiatives like ours! I had the opportunity to participate at a
conference where Peter Worden confirmed that he will also be welcoming
international participation in the new distributed data processing
initiatives, which possibly will also involve online worlds like
Second Life (http://www.davidorban.com/blog/archives/2007/05/
pete_worden_inv.html)
Being based in Europe, I am also very interested to learn if you are
aware of similarly positioned initiatives at ESA. It'd be very
interesting to extend the collaboration, and the principles of
openness to their activities as well!
David