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.

Welcoming the White House to Github

By Sean Herron, 24 August 2012
 Sean Herron

Yesterday, the White House open sourced its first project on Github, “We The People“, the popular e-petitions platform that powers petitions.whitehouse.gov.

It’s great to see other organizations in the government participating in the open source movement and releasing their code with the goal of engaging the public, improving the services they offer, and encouraging the sharing of public resources. As you may know, NASA has been extremely active in the open source community. Our open source hub, code.nasa.gov, currently lists dozens of open source projects at the agency, and our GitHub page hosts 11 public repositories (including the most recent, our digital strategy). We’re also big users of open source projects, such as nginx, Bootstrap, and Eclipse. In June of this year, we held our second successful Open Source Summit (this time at the University of Maryland).

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the We The People platform for possible uses at NASA, and now that it’s just a one-click fork away, it will be even easier to deploy if we find ourselves needing the functionality it provides. Kudos to the White House for joining the open source community on Github!

PS: Check out this great interview with the co-founder of Github, Chris Wanstrath, with O’Reilly Media discussing NASA, open source, and Github: