By Sarah Rigdon, OCIO-NASA Headquarters
Think back three years. In mid-2009,
enterprise-scale social media services
were not what they are today, yet
many large organizations were already
aware of social media’s low cost ability
to address collaboration needs.
Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)
saw the potential for social media but
did not see many third-party applications
that met them. Social media could
improve business processes, encourage
collaboration and information sharing, and
build their community of stakeholders and
partners. Projects most often fail because
of barriers to communication. Social
media provides a space to communicate
in ways that teams otherwise would not
be able to do. Also, NASA’s innovation
stands to benefit from platforms that
facilitate the intersection of disciplines.
Emma Antunes, Web Manager at GSFC,
created the homegrown Spacebook social
network. It featured user profiles, group
workspaces (wikis, file sharing, discussion
forums, groups), and social bookmarks. It
was especially useful for small teams that
needed to collaborate without emailing
larger groups. And it was all developed using
existing contracts, IT resources, and staff.
In the past three years, the pace at which
NASA users have adopted Spacebook is
inverse to the pace at which third-party
companies have launched enterprise social
networking products. Spacebook has
provided valuable lessons in user adoption.
The OCIO decommissioned Spacebook
on June 1, 2012, and is archiving all user
accounts and content. John Hopkins,
OCIO Chief of Staff, sees the positive
side. “Something that we often fail to do in
government is…to not close [applications]
when they cease to be viable,” he said.
Emma Antunes agrees: “We need to be
agile and not be wedded to any one thing.”
In shutting down Spacebook, NASA uses
the lessons learned to build better tools and
make better use of existing resources.