NASA's Contingent at SXSW: Lessons Learned – For The Rest of Us?

Keith’s note: NASA employees Nick Skytland @skytland, Chris Gerty @gerty, Stephanie Schierholtz @schierholz. VeronicaMcGregor (JPL) @VeronicaMcG , and Doug Ellison (JPL) @doug_ellison (and others) are currently attending SXSW (South by Southwest), an “Annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin.”. There are several panels and sessions (like this one chaired by Nick Skytland) that deal directly or partially with space exploration. It will be curious to see if any of these NASA folks write travel reports or make blog postings that describe what they saw – and what they learned – or if they will simply post a few scattered Tweets instead. Indeed, NASA’s social media experts spend far too much time talking to each other – and less actually interacting with the public and other co-workers which (so I thought) was the whole point to begin with.
One would hope that they’d share what they learned – in some detail – (along with their presentations at SXSW) with the rest of the agency and the public. Curiously, Skytland et al only post their presentations (like the one for today’s session) made as NASA employees at opennasa.com – never at NASA.gov. Even though Skytland is travelling as a NASA representative, he uses his personal website address and not NASA’s. Many of the sites he discusses are not NASA-sponsored at all. You’d think that a NASA person would be giving a NASA presentation.
In addition, Skytland’s presentation is not Section 508 compliant – a requirement for all NASA presentations posted online.