Month: November 2011

NASA Launches apps@NASA

NASA launched apps@NASA (http://apps.nasa.gov), a website where NASA employees and contractors can download mobile apps that securely access NASA systems.  These apps enable our users to perform critical job functions at anytime from anywhere via personal and NASA mobile devices.  

This is part of a full suite of services that is provided by the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (NEACC).  The NEACC resides at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  It is supported by SAIC under the Enterprise Applications Service Technologies (EAST) contract of our Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P).  The NEACC’s role is to help NASA improve business processes and to deploy enabling technology needed to implement our Agency’s strategic plan. 

A wide range of services are available under NEACC’s Center for Internal Mobile Apps (CIMA).  This includes the ability to host, distribute, and provide support for internal mobile applications; the ability to develop internal mobile applications for NASA mission needs; and the ability to provide secure NASA-approved methods for authentication and access to Agency internal resources. 

Even though apps@NASA is only available to NASA employees and contractors (don’t you wish you worked at NASA?), the use of internal apps stores has a broad interest.  There’s a lot of debate in the IT community relative to the use of mobile devices in the workplace in general.  Whether or not IT providers are ready or not, mobile devices both enterprise-issued and personally-owned are in the workplace.  This service advances us a bit further beyond debate and into the world where IT service providers must enter – a world where the driving force of technology and customer expectations advance faster than policy and procurement cycles and the restraining force of security and legal issues like e-Discovery and records management keep our feet firmly grounded in reality. 

Managing diversity like this is where CIO’s tread carefully.  apps@NASA is a first small step for the mankind that work at NASA into a daunting world where customer expectations are measured in hours or minutes and not in 18-month software develop lifecycles. 

Linda Cureton, NASA CIO

 

 

Week One: NASA on Google Plus

Guest Blogger: Deborah Diaz, Deputy CIO of NASA

 

Information overload? How many accessible and scalable communication techniques in social media can be utilized effectively to collaborate … and in NASA’s case, push the frontier of space exploration? It’s now been one week since we launched the NASA Google+ account and NASA has seen an overwhelming positive response. We were impressed with the rapid growth of the NASA presence on the Facebook and Twitter platforms, we do have the data for each platform at the 20,000 mark. It took #NASA 469 days to reach 20,000 followers on Twitter, 276 days on Facebook, and only 4 days on Google+. As of this morning, between the three platforms, NASA has a combined reach of 2,264,854 (1,605,159 on twitter, 625,459 on Facebook, 34,236 on Google+). With NASA’s almost 35,000 followers on Google+, NASA is the third most popular non-Google page (http://socialstatistics.com/top/pages).

 

What’s more interesting than the number of followers on the Google+ platform, is how active the community has been. In the first week of use, NASA posted 53 times to Google+. These posts generated 18,854 +1’s, 7,969 shares and 1996 comments. The most popular post was the time lapse video from space (https://plus.google.com/u/0/102371865054310418159/posts/Bpb9wRt7SDp?hl=en).

 

There are a lot of possibilities for innovation through social media at NASA and this level of activity on this new media platform confirms there is still space to experiment and grow. In the next few weeks, NASA will continue to share our amazing and iconic imagery, but we are also planning on hosting hangouts with our scientists, engineers, and maybe even Astronauts! Our first hangout will be on Monday November 21st at 3pm ET with our Open Government Initiative. We’ll be discussing Open Source, Open Data and Social Media.

 

We’d love to hear what ideas you have on how NASA uses social media and invite you to share your thoughts here or on any of our NASA social media platforms.

 

Deborah Diaz

NASA Deputy CIO

 

 

NASA on Google Plus

 Guest Blogger: Deborah Diaz, Deputy CIO of NASA

 

Our world population has doubled in the past 50 years.  We had three billion in 1959, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987 and six billion in 1998.  A little over one week ago, the human population on planet Earth reached seven billion. This marks an important milestone for our species. Fifty years ago, shortly before John F. Kennedy issued his challenge to reach the moon, we had just crossed the three billion mark. This expansion is a testament to our ability to produce, grow, and connect. Perhaps the most important innovation tying us together since then has been the advent of the public Internet. As we’ve grown and become more dispersed over the planet, the Internet has allowed us to instantaneously connect and communicate in new and exciting ways.


Although we may still see the Internet largely as a productivity tool, or as a way to access information, it’s become so much more than that. It’s a collaboration platform that is bringing us together.  With the acceleration of digital convergence and increasingly pervasive use of digital devices to access all manner of information, the Internet has become a platform for participation.  Each second, the world’s information is increasingly sorted, sifted, and combined in various useful and creative ways by communities of people from all corners of the world.  Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+ are reshaping human interactions and helping us connect to one another.  

As an agency trusted with charting the universe and expanding human knowledge, NASA has long been at the forefront of using the Internet to communicate with and involve citizens in our mission of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. NASA had one of the first websites on the Internet in the 90s, obtained one of the first accounts on Twitter in 2007, and began Tweeting in late 2008.  We have now launched our NASA presence on Google+ as the first government agency on the platform.

This is an exciting step for NASA and we have already seen enormous interest from the Google+ community – we had over a thousand new followers in the first hour!  We look forward to exploring this new engagement platform and innovating how NASA shares information.  

 

Deborah Diaz

NASA Deputy Chief Information Officer