More Closed Openness at NASA HQ

“Hacking for Humanity”, OSTP
“Hacking for Humanity”–never thought you’d hear that phrase, right? Well, Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank, and Yahoo! have joined forces to turn that into a reality and bring us Random Hacks of Kindness, an initiative that brings together the sustainable development, disaster risk management, and software developer communities to solve real-world problems with technology.”
Keith’s note: Nice idea. Sounds like a worthy cause. I have always wanted to see how one of these events works. Too bad no one outside of a small group of digerati at NASA knew about it until the last minute. This notice was posted at OSTP’s blog at 5:05 pm on 3 June 2010 regarding an event that runs from 5-6 June. That’s little more than 36 hours notice. On the event link referenced by the OSTP posting they make mention of a reception at the State Department on 4 June that required registration on 31 May i.e. 4 days prior to the first official posting at OSTP. In other words, only a select few even knew about this event. And even if you saw this posting at OSTP and followed the subsequent link to the event registration page you’d need a time machine in order to attend the reception.
In addition, there is no mention of this event at NASA’s main home page, news page, NASA CIO page, NASA IPP, Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs, International and Interagency Relations, Office of the Chief Technologist, etc. even though CIO and CTO staff at NASA HQ and several field centers are participants in the event — and all of these offices would certainly seem to have some interest in an event with the State Department, OSTP, and the World Bank – one with a global outreach context. Yet if you go to the RHOK website you see NASA’s logo.
Clearly, based on OSTP’s posting and the NASA branding on the RHOK website, this is an activity officially sanctioned by NASA. Yet no one at the agency seems to have been at all interested in getting people outside a small circle of usual suspects to participate. Yet another example of closed openness and minimal transparency at NASA. When this sort of stealth planning is standard fare at NASA, how the agency ever expects to practice what they preach with regard to being “open” and “responsive” to the public simply escapes me.
Keith’s update: Based on the registration list there were between 5-10 NASA employees at this NASA-endorsed/supported event. The focus of RHOK was the development of products for use in a wide variety of applications domestically and internationally. Given that NASA was officially involved, I wonder if the participants will be producing a summary report of their activities and links to the products that they developed. One would think that the NASA CIO would be responsible for this.