Nick Skytland

Program Manager, Open Government @ NASA Headquarters

Skytland is an engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and advocate for space exploration. As Program Manager of NASA’s Open Government Initiative, he is continually working to help NASA embrace new technologies, increase public participation and innovate on how the Agency does business. Skytland has 10 years of experience at NASA, planning future exploration missions, designing the next generation space suits, developing open-source software, training astronauts, and encouraging new partnerships and collaboration with industry, academia and other governments. Skytland holds a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University in mechanical engineering, a master’s degree from the International Space University in Space Studies and a MBA from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business.

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Latest Posts by Skytland

Random Hacks of Kindness, 2-3 June 2012

| On June 2nd and 3rd 2012, volunteers around the world are coming together for the Random Hacks of Kindness Global Hackathon.  Born in 2009, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is the brainchild of a partnership among Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, HP, NASA and the World Bank.  The RHoK international community is over 4000 strong, encompassing not [...]

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100+ Reasons #SpaceApps Made a Difference

| The International Space Apps Challenge, held on 21-22 April 2012, was a very productive event. 100+ solutions were developed in less than 48 hours, and although a few teams are still submitting their solutions to the website, we wanted to provide a summary of the 100+ reasons what you did at the event made a [...]

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Preliminary Results from the International Space Apps Challenge

| 111 orgs, 25 cities, 17 countries, 2,083 pple, 71 challenges, 100+ solutions in 48 hours. This weekend, NASA successfully fulfilled a commitment on behalf of the United States as part of the Open Government Partnership Domestic Action Plan.  The stated goal of the event, per the US Action Plan, was to “promote innovation through international collaboration“. Space exploration [...]

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Cultivating Creativity

| “Our future depends on innovators who can bring together diverse talents and perspectives to imagine and implement new solutions and ventures.” In preparation for the International Space Apps Challenge, NASA was invited to lead a Salon at Vanderbilt University as part of the Curb Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership Scholars Program. The Curb Center Leadership [...]

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Media Coverage of the International Space Apps Challenge

| In 3 days, nearly 1,800 people (and counting) from around the world will come together in 24 cities (and online) to participate in the International Space Apps Challenge. The event is truly a global collaboration with over 100 organizations and government entities from around the world participating. During the event, “citizens from around the world [...]

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Introducing the International Space Apps Challenge

| Today we are proud to announce the latest developments for the upcoming International Space Apps Challenge! Last September, we announced that we would be hosting the two-day event as part of the United States’ domestic commitments to the Open Government Partnership. Since then, we have been hard at work planning the collaborative technology development event [...]

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We Choose Open Government

| Every once and awhile, we all need to be reminded about why we are here and why we do what we do. A few weeks ago, the NASA Open Government team visited the football stadium at Rice University to take some time out of all the things we are working on to do just that. [...]

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Help us Open Source NASA.gov

| The use of open source software, cloud computing technologies, and an integrated approach to search, video, and social media seems almost common-place in industry these days. Yet government websites aren’t quite there with the exception of a few noteable exceptions (not an exhaustive list by any means). This is why I’m so excited about that NASA has [...]

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The Future Brought to You by NASA

| Delivering information that is easily understood builds trust and confidence between government and citizens. One of the objectives of the Open Government Initiative at NASA is to help improve the accessibility to and understanding of the information and data the Agency releases. One approach to this is to better visualize complicated datasets, with a particular [...]

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