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Coronavirus

Lots Of NASA@Work Ideas Were Generated. Can We See Them?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 17, 2020
Lots Of NASA@Work Ideas Were Generated. Can We See Them?

NASA Administrator Message: NASA@Work – As Only NASA Can, NASA
“As NASA teams worked on several national and local response efforts, leadership called on the entire workforce for additional ideas of how the agency’s capabilities can help with the national COVID-19 response. In just two weeks, we received over 250 ideas via our internal crowdsourcing platform NASA@WORK – about five times the average number of responses we’ve seen for other NASA@WORK challenges. Thank you to everyone who offered ideas as well as those who logged in to view, comment and vote on the submissions. More than 500 comments and over 4,500 votes were cast, demonstrating the widespread interest in collaboration the NASA community has to contribute to ideas.”
Keith’s note: So … will the public ever get to see these NASA@WORK ideas?
Bring Your Ideas to NASA@WORK, earlier post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

9 responses to “Lots Of NASA@Work Ideas Were Generated. Can We See Them?”

  1. Andrew JP O'Connor says:
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    I mean, these ideas have intellectual property rights attached to them so I doubt they can legally distribute anything about them at this point.

    • kcowing says:
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      These are all government employees so almost everything they do belongs to the government if they did this as part of their job. If there are ITAR issues there might be a reason. But what they were seeking is, by definition, meant to be used widely – and soon.

      • Andrew JP O'Connor says:
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        They could be waiting on provisional patent applications. Can’t release anything publicly before then.

        • kcowing says:
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          Well if these ideas have to be patented before they can be used – during the middle of a pandemic – then this is a pointless exercise since that process takes a long time in the government.

        • jimlux says:
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          Actually, no – you have to file your patent application within a year of first public disclosure.

          • kcowing says:
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            That’s what I thought – so this is not likely to be an impediment to releasing these ideas – especially if they were created by civil servants in the midst of a national emergency response to a global pandemic,

          • jimlux says:
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            One caveat – now that the US is “first to file”, rather than “first to invent”, if you disclose, then someone else can race down to USPTO and file a patent on your disclosure.

  2. fcrary says:
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    Today’s story about “a “NASA authorized edition” air cleaning device” made me think of something. As far as I know, NASA doesn’t do product endorsements. Even if it isn’t a complete ban, there must be a whole bunch of laws and restrictions on such things. So… In the case of those 250 internally-generated ideas, could NASA’s lawyers stepped in and pointed out problems with NASA officially distributing them? I’m sure some people would consider that to be an endorsement, and that might be a problem. Or even a liability issue. If a NASA employe came up with an idea for home-made, personal protection devices, NASA publicly distributed the idea, and it turned out to be useless, could NASA be sued? More to the point, would NASA’s lawyers want some time to consider that possibility before they approved any public release on the subject?

  3. Michael Spencer says:
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    Very often a project is initiated by some sort of design’ free for all’. The process is so common that a French word has been co-opted: “charette”.

    Here’s the picture you should have: we are in a fairly large room. There’s a big table. There’s a wall used to pin sketches. The number of participants is usually fewer than 6 or 8.

    The rules? There are no rules. Any idea, every idea, all ideas are weighted equally.

    It’s messy. There is a free flow of ideas. The process is awkwardly termed ‘ideation’. And as time passes, there is a gradual coalescence.

    In the words of Dave Bowman, “something wonderful”. https://youtu.be/yM25-lz1Yms

    Should this messy process be revealed publicly? I’m not really sure either way. But I don’t think that the desirable ‘wonderful’ end product will happen if every contribution is publicly debated.