NASA IT Summit Day 1

“NASA’s first Information Technology (IT) Summit will bring together government and industry leaders to explore the outer reaches of information technology. The summit, which takes place August 16-18 at the Gaylord National Harbor in Maryland, will gather 750 participants and more than 100 expert presenters with themes on collaboration, social networking, innovation, infrastructure, operations and IT security and privacy.”
Information, agenda, and live webstream. You can follow the summit tweets via the hash tag #nasait on Twitter Search.
Keith’s note: So far the meeting has gone well. The event was very well organized and ran like clockwork. That said, some curious things emerged rather quickly as I observed the sessions and the audience. First of all, the 1,190 registered attendees are overwhelmingly white males aged 40-60. Second, although half of the audience was, at any given time, fiddling with their cellphones (and a few with laptops), only a dozen or so attendees were actually Twittering from/about the meeting. Given the discussion about future trends, social media, and new populations of stakeholders (audiences) this was rather troubling.
Also, unless someone else signed in on the media list, I was the only media representative in attendance. I assume that is what prompted Charlie Bolden to give me a shout out from the podium (“Is Keith here?”). Also, other than IT manager Brian Dunbar and photographer Bill Ingalls, I saw no one else from PAO in attendance. Nor did I see any education and outreach or social media staff from the mission directorates.