NASA CIO: More Closed Openness at NASA HQ

Random Hacks of Kindness Announces Its Third Global Hackathon

"On December 4 and 5, in over twenty locations around the world, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and The World Bank will host the third Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), their progressive initiative that brings together volunteer software developers and experts in disaster risk management for a weekend-long "hackathon" to create software solutions that can help mitigate or respond to disasters around the world and help save lives. ... "NASA is proud to be supporting Random Hacks of Kindness and promote wider usage of our open data to solve the world's greatest challenges," said NASA CIO Linda Cureton."

Keith's note: In advance of the previous Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) event in June 2010, NASA did absolutely nothing to inform the public in advance that it was supporting the event and that NASA personnel were participating - thus leaving the agency's participation to a few hand-picked individuals. At the time, NASA's CIO told me that there would be a summary posted of NASA's participation in the previous RHoK event. No such summary has ever been posted or distributed.

Once again, NASA has not issued a press release or media advisory for this new RHoK event. NASA's CIO says that NASA is "supporting" this event yet there is no information in this RHoK press release or anywhere at NASA.gov (CIO, CTO, etc.) as to the location(s) where NASA will be participating or the nature of NASA's "support".

How are people supposed to know about NASA's role in these events if NASA does not tell anyone? Or is this yet another event where only a few NASA personnel will participate - and never tell anyone what they did?

More Closed Openness at NASA HQ, previous post