NASA's Web Presence Really Needs Some Attention
Here's an easy fix for you @BettinaInclan – I just Googled "NASA Chief Information Officer" and got this. Your own website does not know who its CIO is. FYI @JimBridenstine pic.twitter.com/kA5soGJkOF
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) September 4, 2020
For all of Keith’s harping, and now the Administrator, still noting happening. This is turning into a real story.
It’s just more evidence on how government bureaucracies ignore both political appointees “running” them and the public. Only if Congress threatens to cut their funding will they notice and respond.
Things cared about are things addressed. Even in bureaucracies.
I’m not sure how much to blame NASA for this. Google has convoluted criteria for sorting search results. It’s not uncommon for the first thing on the list to be either wildly out of date or simply wrong. I know people who have tried to get them to fix something like this, and who have gotten exactly nowhere.
In this case, the second thing the Google search shows, the main page for the Office of the Chief Information Officer, gives the correct information. The biographical information on “NASA CIO Renee Wynn”, which Google list first, is a four year old article which was last updated a bit over three years ago. The information in that article was true when it was written, just as a New York times article written at the same time would correctly say Barack Obama is the President. I’m not sure how many people at NASA remember it even exists, but once added, these NASA articles just stay there in effect as an archive of past features.
Correction: I just went back to the article to double check the last time it was updated, and the NASA article on Ms. Wynn now says it was last updated in April, 2019 not August, 2017. And the date at the top (July 13, 2016) which was there when I first checked is gone. So something very messed up is going on.
Search engines often provide the most popular results first, and since most folks click on the first results shown they become more popular with the cycle reinforcing itself. This is probably one reason search engines are become less useful as this favors out of date information.
NASA provided information is provided not by a singular NASA but by NASA’s organizations and in many cases by its contractors. Over time NASA’s organizations and contractors change. Sometimes the NASA provided information changes. Sometimes its doesn’t. Often the new replacement organization does not go back to clean up the old organization’s information. Information is not provided according to a known or accepted knowledge information structure. If you want information on the Planet Mars, first go to the organizations at Headquarters or the field centers who have run Mars missions. Identify the Project names, Viking, Mariner, MER….look up the Project, then look up what each project told us. You don’t know what the projects are or were, and you don’t know who managed them? Then it might be best to find out your information about Mars somewhere else. You want current information about what is on ISS…you probably need to look up 25 years worth of reports and press kits that told what was launched to ISS on each of the 235 launches to date. If you want the structure fixed in some logical manner, then first you have to find all the old pages and delete them and then you need a new information structure and fill it in in a logical manner……Someone will need to be put in charge. It will not happen on its own.