We've probably all heard this comment before: "It's not
rocket science!" But, what if it were
rocket science? What if the knowledge you needed was essential to sending a
person to the moon or keeping a satellite orbiting the earth? Well, NASA deals
with this and other kinds of specialized knowledge every minute of every day. In
2008, in response to a need to improve knowledge sharing across all aspects the
organization's workforce (e.g., NASA employees and contractors) and geographically
(NASA has 11 centers across the United States), NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory conducted a small pilot (NASAsphere) involving enterprise social
networking software to create an online social network for its dispersed
knowledge workers. The purpose was to understand how NASA knowledge workers
would use and apply online social networking in the NASA environment.
I wanted to share this story with everyone because I believe
it's a great example of how an organization can explore the impact of social
networking inside its walls among a select, critical group of knowledge
workers. NASA set some specific parameters, invited a targeted group of users,
and then let it go viral. You can read all about the pilot and its results in
this new report at http://socialcast.com/downloads/NASAsphereReportPublic.pdf.
It's rather lengthy, but you can find the salient points summarized nicely in
the Executive Summary. (There's even info on the technology specs behind the
software for you tech geeks out there!)
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