The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) needs public support and is exploring ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to do so. “There are more than 500 groups on Facebook that are associated with NASA, but not officially….”
- Next NASA mission: Twitter and Facebook, by Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, Jun 27, 2007.
“Now NASA is trying to reach out to the technology industry to help market itself to a generation of kids growing up online and who seem less inclined to study science or math.”
A big part of the agency’s sales pitch to third-party partners is access to enormous sets of data from various sources, including the Hubble Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope, which resides a million miles from Earth. Google, for example, has teamed with NASA, which provides it data from Mars for the Google Earth mapping tool.
Mike Linksvayer, chief technology officer of the nonprofit Creative Commons, suggested that scientists and other planetary societies use its alternative license for copyrights to disseminate photos and other works so that more of the public has access to it. People can access NASA photos and videos that are posted to the Web because all government works are in the public domain.
“I encourage NASA to open up its data via APIs so that it can be used in mashups,” Linksvayer said.
Examples
- AMES Research Center blog
- NASA Deputy Administrator’s Blog (at spaceref.com)
- CosmosCode (CosmosCode will be like a SourceForge for space software… allowing third parties to contribute open-source code to NASA projects…)
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