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A bunch of data nerds from inside and outside NASA will gather at a house in Cupertino, California called the Rainbow Mansion this Saturday to hack through the agency’s data jungles.
The event isn’t NASA-sponsored. None of the bureaucracy is involved at all. Instead, the event is being coordinated by a small group of people who just love the space program and want to help open up the agency’s troves of information.
“If we can build cool prototypes and demos and proofs-of-concept, other people will see that it’s not that hard,” said the event’s co-host Jessy Cowan-Sharp, a NASA contractor and proprietor of OpenNASA.com. “Maybe then it will be adopted inside NASA.”
The event is just one of dozens this weekend being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation as part of its Great American Hackathon. Each one is being organized by volunteers who want to make government data easier to access and more useful to the public. In Pittsburgh, the hackers will be working on making stimulus spending easier to understand. In Boston, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation data will be the focus.
Over the past several years, NASA has made considerable efforts to open itself up to the public. The agency’s public relations officials make extensive use of social media networks. Raw images from NASA missions like Cassini also make their way to the web. Many NASA datasets are available on the web and technical reports stretching back a decade have their own server too.
But while NASA has made considerable strides, many of these tools are still hard to find and use.
The challenge for Hackathon events dealing with complex data is how to pick a small enough bite to chew.
“How do you identify a project that’s doable in a day?” Cowan-Sharp asked.
The NASA data event will be kicked off by a quick introduction by Cowan-Sharp and her co-host, Robbie Schingler, on how they get useful stuff done in short periods of time. They run a site dedicated to developing microsoftware called TinyApps. Their motto: “Never spend more than 4 hours on a first release.”
Unlike a lot of Sunlight events, which focus on making data more publicly accessible, the NASA-focused event will also look at ways of making data flow better within the agency itself.
“We’re a bunch of government contractors and civil servants,” Cowan-Sharp said. “For us, the question is not just how can we take stuff outside of government, but how can we use these data sources to help each other collaborate.”
Image: flickr/rocketqueen
See Also:
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- NASA Satellite Maps 99% of Earth’s Topography
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WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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