Megan Eskey, Web Manager at NASA/Ames Research Center presented her vision for what a more open NASA and open government in general could look like. The Obama Administration released the Open Government Directive in December (I had no idea) and all gov orgs are to have a /open site launched by this Monday! Not too shabby…NASA’s will be http://www.nasa.gov/open. You should be able to find it for any gov org with a web presence. I’m hoping this is the beginning of actual, easy access to the information that we technically own already. The goal for all of these sites is that they’ll facilitate collaboration, participation and openness.

NASA is using Life Ray (haven’t looked into that one) for their social platform. It’s open and should allow plenty of data sharing from NASA and from the public. I really hope this works out and the agencies keep the momentum on this. I can imagine there are more than a few gov’t officials who aren’t all that keen on openness and transparency. There are a few sites keeping track of the various efforts and, in fact, a Gov 2.0 LA attendee remote attendee (see Tim’s comment below) has used the tubes (and Yahoo pipes) to aggregate this info http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/02/06/opengov-open-feedback-firehose/.

Currently we can all visit http://people.opennasa.com for a glimpse of what’s available now..though, really, the nasa.gov/open site is up so perhaps the content has been duplicated.

If you work for a gov org (or any org I suppose) here’s a slide deck with steps for setting up your own open site: http://www.slideshare.net/meskey/opennasa-screenshots

If all of this is handled properly we (the people) should have our data available to us on any of our devices running any platform in perpetuity, across universes, etc…Of course, it’s up to us to keep the pressure on the folks we elected. We certainly can’t leave them to their own devices…we know what happens then.

Sunday, February 7th, 2010 @ 10:07 am gov20la, los angeles
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