In 2007, a small group of people began an intentional, collaborative experiment in open, transparent, and direct communication about your space program. Our goal was to enable your direct participation in exploring and contributing to NASA’s mission.

Many of us have since begun new adventures. This site will remain as an archive of the accomplishments of the openNASA experiment.

Sean Herron

Last month, we submitted our 6 month report on NASA’s Digital Strategy to the Office of Management and Budget. The 6 month milestones for our Digital Strategy are the 2nd update we’ve made to the plan, following our 3 month milestones that we launched in August. There are a number of new things that we’re super excited to share:

NASA’s Digital Services Governance Framework
http://www.nasa.gov/agency/digitalstrategy/governance.html
The Digital Strategy is cross-cutting and involves dozens of leads and potentially hundreds of potential participants from across the agency. As a result, as we work towards implementing many of the goals of the strategy, its imperative that we also look at how we manage our overall direction and focus to ensure that the right people are getting involved and that we’re working efficiently together.

Our Governance Strategy, the majority of which was written by the awesome Sarah Rigdon in NASA’s Web Services office, plans to help us focus our efforts by establishing the following:

  • A Clearly Defined Scope of Authority
  • Core Principals to Guide Action
  • Established Roles and Responsibilities
  • A Target State

You can read more of the governance strategy at http://www.nasa.gov/agency/digitalstrategy/governance.html

An Agency-wide Inventory of Mobile Devices and Contracts
http://www.nasa.gov/agency/digitalstrategy/section5.html
We also developing an inventory of mobile devices and contracts at the agency which we expect to deliver to OMB shortly. NASA employees use thousands of mobile devices, from smartphones to mobile hotspots to pagers (yes, pagers - they still have some use in specialized situations!), to stay connected to their work around the globe. We’re in the midst of a major transition to a new service provider under the ACES contract, which has given the agency a great opportunity to look closer at the mobile services we offer to employees and make them even better.

Additionally, the CIO group at NASA has focused on our BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy as a major way to empower employees to stay connected to their work. As part of this, we’ve realized that mobile interfaces and responsive design are more important than ever in ensuring the services NASA offers both internally and to the public are accessible, usable, and extensible.

As always, our Digital Strategy is available in a number of formats, including HTML, JSON, XML. It’s also available to the public via GitHub.

We hope you’re excited as we are with the progress we’re making on implementing a Digital Strategy for NASA. As always, if you have comments, questions, or feedback for us, please leave us a comment - we’d love to hear from you!