The first summit was so helpful to the Agency that we wanted to hold another, but this time with a broader focus. In 2012, the summit moved to the Washington, DC area and the aim was to advance the use of open source software throughout a wider government audience. The Department of Veteran’s Affairs and the State Department joined the discussion. The highly interactive summit highlighted a number of real-world examples, and help everyone involved make forward progress towards the goal of helping to improve innovation in government while driving costs down.

This year, we are holding the third Open Source Summit on June 25th and 26th at NYU in Washington, DC. Like the two before, this event will again bring together an exponentially growing community of open source developers and leaders from over 11 federal agencies as well as private industry. We will expand the conversation and focus on the following 3 themes:

• Open Source Communities: How they work. How to engage with them. How to manage them.
• Converting Closed Communities to Open: If you have a pre-existing development community and you are open sourcing the project, how do you manage this complexity?
• Creating a New Community: So you’re releasing a project or data into the wild. How do you find people who care and get them excited about it?

Eleven federal agencies have helped plan this summit to help ensure that the speakers and topics address the real needs of agencies and answer current questions that government agencies are asking. Tight budgets, a continual need to innovate, and the rise of open source make this a very relevant conference for anyone who is involved with IT in government or community engagement. Here’s a sampling of questions that you can expect will be addressed:

• How can open source allow me to reduce IT costs?
• How can open source allow me to create amazing solutions?
• Why are people working in open source communities?
• What’s happening with open source in my mission area (e,g.,health, defense, labor)?
• Is closed source no longer the easiest path?
• I have a project that I want to covert to open source. Now what!?
• My agency’s contracts teams are confused about the legal and contractual issues involved with procuring and using open source. How can I help educate them?
• How can I shift from a government-led model to a community-led model?
• What’s happening at the intersection of open source and open data?
• What’s happening with GitHub in government?
• What’s happening with Drupal in government?
• What are other agencies doing that I need to be aware of – or plug into?

You can expect a very engaging event, presentations from industry leaders, and
face-to-face access to open source practitioners who are in the trenches solving real-world problems now. If you are interested in the role open source plays in government, as well as how you can build and engage an open source community, we encourage you to attend and join us on June 25-26th.

Visit http://ossummit.org/

Anyways, as a senior of Staples High School, I have won, as a product of my years of high school servitude, a month of freedom before graduation to spend at any internship of my choosing. Through a wonderful amalgam of kismet, effort, Todd Khozein, and Ali Llewellyn, I began my journey with the NASA Open Innovation team.

I went in to this specific internship in a state of mild fan-girl-freak-out (it’s freaking NASA, man!). To be honest, I’m not quite sure what I expected. My imagination was running so fast it probably could’ve launched into space. All I knew was that there was the International Space Apps Challenge, and that I would find some way to dig into it with hands, feet, and elbows.

Find a way I did. Within the dawn of my first day as an official NASA intern, I was enveloped in the Open Innovation Team. My passion is for telling stories and working with data – it was decided I would become the team’s story-miner, responsible for discovering the stories behind the data and participants of the Space Apps Challenge. (It’s through this position I discovered that blogging could be used for Actual Important Business, and not just funny cat gifs.) In seriousness, it’s through being the team’s story-miner that I discovered that my words are a medium for spreading innovation. As a seventeen-year-old about to go off to college to “make something of myself,” it’s a powerful realization. My time at NASA transformed my language from a tool I have used all my life to express my needs and opinions into a sword that I can use to carve my way in life.

All I seemed to need was a push in the right direction, and a conveniently placed WordPress account – it makes me think that maybe this sword has been there all my life, but merely sheathed, and my mentors and friends at open.NASA were the ones who only showed me how to pull it out and let it gleam.

As I sit here at the end of my official time with NASA, I’m trying to reflect back on what I’ve learned. I learned that working from home, as I had to do from my small Connecticut residence, is both wonderfully relaxing and strangely challenging. (No, Kiana, you can’t watch 5 episodes of Supernatural in succession, you have calls to make.) I learned through the patience of the small yet indomitable Sarah Rigdon how to use Twitter and navigate the streets of Washington, D.C. in high heels. From all-around genius Sean Herron, I saw that deadpan sarcasm and technological savvy are traits to never be undervalued, and from “Jedi Master” Nick Skytland that yes, it is possible to spend 11 hours on a plane innovating and creating and still return excited and ready to continue innovating. (Yeah, I didn’t believe it at first either.)

From my now-forever mentor, Ali Llewellyn, the things I learned were both simple and profound. Always discover as many paths to take as possible, so that you can take the fabled “one less travelled.” Hugs are always appreciated. Just because I’m only a teenager doesn’t mean I can’t change my own world, and just because it’s my own microcosm doesn’t mean that it can’t change the macrocosm we call Earth, or even space. When you talk about meatballs at NASA, you’re probably not referring to Italian food. But most importantly, passion is what keeps your work alive. Passion is what will revolutionize the world.

Never let go of that passion.

Little did I know at the time that I was about to embark on an adventure that would be, in all sense of the phrase, an out of this world experience. Since coming to NASA, I’ve had the opportunity to work with countless brilliantly talented people, contribute to projects that are paving the future for exploration of the universe, and have more life-changing experiences than I can count. Along the way, I’ve had a cadre of amazing mentors and teachers who have given me more than I could ever give back.

All of which, of course, makes saying goodbye that much harder.

Today marks my last day of working at the place that was a distant dream just a few years ago. Although I’ll miss this place terribly, I look forward to see how many of the projects I’ve been fortunate enough to work on continue to grow and prosper. Initiatives like LAUNCH and the International Space Apps Challenge are stronger now than ever before, and it seems like every day more and more people are reaching out to us to find out how they can participate in mass collaborations around the agency’s data and open source code.

The work, however, is not over. I’ve been scrambling before my departure to integrate one of the solutions from a Challenge I wrote for the Space Apps Challenge (spacehub) on to code.nasa.gov, and due to some incredible last-minute help from one of its developers I’m hopeful I’ll be able to deploy it today before NASA IT yanks my server access. I’m also in the middle of a redesign of open.nasa.gov, the code of which is now on GitHub so that its development can be continued in the open. Beyond that, work continues to help make NASA’s data more open and accessible. The recent Open Data Executive Order empowers the agency to continue to be a leader in this area, and I know others on this blog will continue to think of new exciting ways to involve the public in helping shape the future of space exploration.

I am incredibly appreciative to the group of people who I’ve had as my “NASA Family” over the past few years. I’m terrible with words, but I hope they each know just how grateful I am for their incredible leadership, teachings, and genuine interest in helping me achieve my dreams. Leaving NASA was not an easy decision in the slightest, but I am excited to see where the world takes me in the future. I’m sure at some point I’ll be scanning my badge once again below the giant meatball.

Until then, I leave with one of my favorite quotes. A wise snippet of wisdom (purportedly) given by Alan Shepard, the first American in Space:

“It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”

At Space Apps Athens, it wasn’t such a far-off idea. Themis Karafasoulis of Hackerspace of Athens says, “When we found out that NASA thinks open, we were sure that we wanted to enter this project.”

Nine hackers, including electrical engineers and an aeroponics expert, came together to develop a solution to the Deployable Greenhouse challenge.

A group formed around a fascination with the new frontier of human colonization on Mars. Many of them had never met before, but they came together rather—well, there’s no other way to put this—organically. Aeroponics expert Panos Bairamis says, “Everyone had different ideas to contribute and so every time we had a problem, someone came up with a good idea. We really liked that.”

Popeye on Mars presentation

What to grow? They chose spinach because its cultivation is fairly typical, so the concept could be easily adapted to other plant breeds. With the design, they focused on creating a deployable greenhouse that is small, self-sustaining, and easy to use.

The Popeye on Mars team has gone on to win Best Mission Concept for the 2013 International Space Apps Challenge.  A local mediastorm has followed them since, including a few TV spots. “After our win, many people came to Hackerspace for the first time, and have learned about open source.” Panos is now offering newcomers to Hackerspace classes on how to grow with aeroponics, and the Popeye on Mars team continues to build on their work.

Panos added a cultural detail: “Here in Greece, when we want to say that someone is smart, we have an expression. We say, ‘He works at NASA.’”

Through the magic of participatory collaboration, everyone can work with NASA.

I’ll descend into street view and roam around places I’ve never been, or, more often than not, prowl the streets of my hometown. While fun, sometimes I can’t help but think that there ought to be some way for this incredible technology to have practical applications for the non-professional admirer, such as myself.

Luckily, a Space Apps team in Sweden had the same idea, and armed with the multitudes of global climate data NASA has provided the world for free, they set about making this idea a reality.

The NASA Greener Cities Project has three main goals. One, as previously mentioned, is to make use of the volumes of data NASA has provided on global climate data. Except Greener Cities goes a step further, incorporating a platform that allows users to add to preexisting data sets from their own experiences working with the land they monitor and farm. This first goal works cooperatively with the second, which is to support local agriculture in the general population. By making information regarding soil condition and air quality more accessible, Greener Cities encourages people to utilize the land around them for farming, even in urban areas. Lastly, the NASA Greener Cities Project hopes to spark an interest in the environment and programming in young minds, by giving them a platform to explore such concepts through revolutionizing the Greener Cities prototype.

The entire app was brainstormed and put together during the 2013 Space Apps Challenge in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Ultimately, the International Space Apps Challenge represents our latest efforts in working together – with YOU – to enable us all to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown. The first and second annual events have been an experiment within government to adapt to the changing external environment, embrace new technologies, engage with our citizens, and encourage collaborations and partnerships. This is the result of the government recognizing that we can be more relevant for our stakeholders and intentionally create a culture of openness as we attempt to evolve into a twenty-first century space program for a twenty-first century democracy.

See the full report here

Thanks to our colleagues at SecondMuse, our global and local partners, and our local event leads for the immense work that went in to this amazing collaboration. You inspire us. 

After doing some research on SVG images on the web, I came across FC Webicons, a set of social media icons presented in SVG with PNG fallbacks for older browsers that don’t support SVG images. As that code is open source, I adopted it to present NASA’s logo in a futuristic, resolution independent way…but decided, hey, it was so much fun, why stop there?

I’m happy to introduce today Gov Webicons, a set of 41 federal agency icons that you can use on your website with just two lines of code. Creating a dashboard of agencies? Include them all. Want to just update your own agency’s icon? Take out just the code and images you need and have fun living in the future.

Gov Webicons is open source and hosted on GitHub. I’d love to include additional federal agencies and can do so as long as there is a publicly available SVG version of their graphic online. Any tips on improving Gov Webicons or ideas for more agencies to add? Drop me a line in the comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Six students from the University of Pennsylvania’s Science and Technology Wing form a team, including undergrad Alain Hernandez, with several Arduinos, a Raspberry Pi, LED display, servos, and “an assortment of other hardware with no idea what we were going to do with them,” he says. Several challenges are discussed, including Spot the Station.

At the Space Apps Mainstage opening reception the night before, local legend Derek Pitts had invited the crowd to guess how many times they think the International Space Station passes over Philly. Up to seven times each day? And even urban watchers can see it without a telescope? They begin to brainstorm ways to bring this information to a wider variety of audiences.

Meanwhile, a team of six others had formed and were considering the same challenge. “In the spirit of collaboration,” says teammate Kai Ninomiya, “we decided to talk to the other group about our ideas—both to help us all with ideas and to avoid redundancy.” There is no team size limit, so they combine their powers.

In another corner, local high school student Himavath Jois reads the challenge descriptions over breakfast, considering his options. “Then, Leland Melvin came over to talk to me and brought me into the atmosphere,” he recalls. How often does an astronaut personally enlist your help? He can’t refuse, and the team acquires another builder.

This is the start to ISS Base Station, which has gone on to win Best Use of Hardware for extending the functionality of NASA’s Spot the Station alert system, further connecting people on Earth to the International Space Station.

ISS Base Station is part software, part hardware, and all art. An iOS app not only tracks the ISS but incorporates augmented reality to make it easier to spot and share its location on social media. In addition, a web app pushes data to the hardware piece, a statue that points to the station as it passes overhead.

The project connected several different skill sets, enabling the teammates to work most closely on their interests while observing others in action. Project manager Dan Giovanni helped connect each component and make sure the process ran smoothly.

Jois says skills learned with his high school robotics team helped him tackle the hardware component. “I’m not too interested in sitting in front of a computer for a long time and programming for hours on end, but I liked getting my hands into what I was doing.” Andrew Kondrath also helped build the demo using locally made K’NEX sets, two servos, and an Arduino. “All of the equipment probably cost less than $75,” he says. “It could be done much cheaper.”

Cartographer Patrick Hammons joined the team, initially drawn to mapping. “There’s a geospatial element to [Space Apps], which is unique among hackathons,” he says. It was also an opportunity to see the connection between an initial tracker map and the software and hardware. “Seeing how the software works from beginning stage to final product, I felt like I learned a lot more about it in that way.”

Local designer TK Rodgers had just recently heard about hackathons and couldn’t wait to get involved. Philly Tech Week was just weeks away at the time, and connected her to several opportunities, including Space Apps. “After finding out that the ISS is accessible to everyone on Earth if assisted by tech to know when and how to spot the ISS, I was completely sold on the project. Having both Leland Melvin and Derrick Pitts with us made space so much closer, and I wanted to be able to share a bit of that feeling with the rest of the world.”

The team is excited about their win, but also excited to continue the work. They hope to further outfit the hardware component, perhaps with custom 3D-printed parts. The goal is to fortify it for standing up to wear in science and tech classrooms, or as a public art installation.

“I saw a lot of really cool and innovative projects, both at the local event and on the challenge website, and I know that was only a fraction of what was accomplished at the challenge,” says Kondrath. “It’s amazing what people can accomplish over a weekend.”

She said that every time I learned a new word, from that point on I then owned that word. I could put it in my pocket for safekeeping, she said, to take out and then use whenever I wanted.

This weekend was the National Day of Civic Hacking. I spent Saturday morning in Arlington, VA, speaking with developers whose projects included making rescue missions safer for firefighters and decreasing the amount of homeless on the streets. Later, I ended up at Google in DC, where another #hackforchange event was taking place. One of the most memorable projects there came from a high school sophomore and his brother, who developed apps that ranged from finding a far-parked car to sending out texts to preset emergency contacts when one’s phone died.

As a child, my pockets had been used for words. But in these hackers I saw that they had pockets big enough to fit many words, strung together by inspiration to form ideas and projects. And not only could their pockets fit these ideas, but they took that innovation and used it to construct products that would ease the life of the average human.

I think that was the most striking thing for me. So often people succumb to cynicism – it’s easier to not care about the issues that face the planet, that face humanity. This makes way for those with the selfish agenda – politicians seeking to gain a good reputation or corporations grasping for whatever they can wring from the public. Despite all that, the National Day of Civic Hacking showed me that real people do care about making the world better. These hackers devote their time and effort to these apps for free, simply in the hope that one day their creations will make the world a better place.

Sitting here at my desk in Connecticut, I hear words like “change,” “revolutionize,” and “innovate” every day. One can forget the true meaning of those words the more they are casually thrown about in conference calls and emails. But the National Day of Civic Hacking proved to me that there are people in this world who do not numb their humanity, but take the tools they have developed and strive forth to build something lasting and meaningful for their fellow man.

For the USDA, this mission included raising awareness about the viability of hyper-local agriculture, specifically in but not limited to the United States. They accomplished this by creating the Backyard Poultry Farmer challenge. The concept was simple: by promoting localized agriculture – such as a chicken farm in one’s backyard – the USDA hoped to revolutionize a system in which healthier food would become more viable to greater numbers of people. The challenge had thus been set, and all they needed now was a team that would champion it, the pioneers to give it the renown it deserved.

Enter Bulgaria with the ChicksBook team.

The story of ChicksBook begins with a company called ISG Technology. In the summer of 2012, Atanas Keranov began work at ISG Tech as a junior net developer, where he met Pavel Kolev, a two-year veteran of the company and fellow net developer. Hitting it off, the pair decided to test their new-found creative chemistry by entering in a Bulgarian programming competition organized by Telerik Academy and PC Magazine, as the two-person team KeyDown. KeyDown went on in that competition to win two out of the three rounds they competed in.

Coming fresh from this successful run, Keranov and Kolev decided to try their hands at Space Apps 2013. However, they knew from their experience in the Bulgarian competition that they needed specialists on the graphic design and web development front if they were to successfully create their app in time. So, the duo opened up their team to the applications of any graphic designer who shared their enthusiasm for the concept of Space Apps and their willingness to work almost for free. Thus, they found Stoyan Ivanov, who ended up participating in the challenge only virtually. However, this did not stop Ivanov later from almost single-handedly creating the design for the ChicksBook website and app in just two days.

To ensure that they would have a working model online by the end of the challenge, Keranov and Kolev called in Ivan Zhekov, a web developer who they knew could push their project to completion. Kiril Nikolov, already a friend to Keranov and Kolev, was known to both men as a superb source of enthusiasm and positivity; this, coupled with his hand for development, made him the essential ingredient to the formation of what was soon to be the ChicksBook team. Thus assembled, they struck off to conquer Space Apps Sofia.

Now, the only matter was to pick a challenge. Luckily for the team, this was not as difficult as expected.

The Backyard Poultry Farmer challenge almost immediately caught they guys’ eyes – why on earth were chickens important to NASA? But after a bit of investigation, they realized this challenge was the one for them. In Bulgaria, local agriculture is far more common than in the US. In fact, most of the team members have grandparents in Bulgaria who actually raise chickens in their backyards. Using this cultural relevancy, they found a way to help both their community and the world by creating a platform that addresses the practical challenges and applications of raising poultry. They created their app using an API that allows for both Android and iOS mobile applications. The team remains grateful to Telerik Academy for their extensive support in helping gain knowledge and experience in software development.

So, can I add you on ChicksBook?