The Emerging NASA Brand

"With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

If Abraham Lincoln had said this on CNN today, it would have held as true as it did 150 odd years ago. The only difference being the channels that now influence and measure public sentiments.

Horse and buggy--along with town criers--then; television debates, and the Internet now. Same principles, different media.

Government 2.0 with its counterpart Digital Citizenry depends on the digital give and take between government and the citizen.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA by most, is an interesting government agency in that they mostly get heavy media coverage when things go wrong.

As in, how many shuttle missions were covered before one of them went terribly wrong? Except, of course when things go extremely well: as in landing on lunar surfaces and such.

However, in-between these two extremes, the day-to-day smaller successes and lesser setbacks are rarely covered to any great extent by television or the press. Just not interesting enough, I guess.

Therefore, if Muhammad does not want to come to the mountain, it is time for the mountain to make a digital stab at coming to the citizen. And NASA is really doing that.

The experimental initiative at NASA is called CoLab, with the stated goal of acting as "advisor and consultant to groups within NASA, building direct and open collaborations between the public and NASA scientists and engineers...[and] use technology to facilitate public contributions to NASA activities."

John Bell of Ogilvy PR recently pointed out that great "emerging" brands like eBay, YouTube, and Netflix are "authentic, adaptive, relevant, transformative, fresh, immersive, and social." And now it seems like Peter Gray, the NASA CoLab Program Manager, must have has ripped a page out of eBay's playbook when he recently bandied about the much used--by these emerging brands, that is--buzzwords like "participate, collaborate, and innovate," when he talked about CoLab. Sounded like an emerging NASA brand, in fact; and Government 2.0.

NASA CoLab is trying some innovative things to reach out to the public. There is currently a co-working space in Silicon Valley open seven days a week. Eventually they hope to host co-working spaces in major U.S. cities that are "the NASA equivalent of an Apple Store" as Mr. Gray put it. That would be very hip indeed.

Additionally, the "Luna Philosophie" series, held at San Francisco's Yahoo! Brickhouse incubator (in coordination with the full moon, no less), is a series of open conversations on different topics broadcast using USTREAM.TV. CoLab has also participated in national conferences, and held Camp CoLab brainstorming sessions with NASA staff about how to change and adapt CoLab across the ten or so different NASA facilities around the country.

And more to the digital point, there is also an elaborate NASA presence on "CoLab Island" in Second Life, providing information about all sorts of activities with an additional emphasis on having "launch parties" and the like. However, despite this high quality (and perhaps necessary) presence, because Second Life has very few habitual users, it may not have the desired effect of reaching the multitudes.

It is a work in progress, no doubt, and it isn't yet an outstanding model of government "CoLab-oration" with its citizens. Nonetheless, seeing as this is the vision and product of an agile, lightly-funded staff, CoLab must be given a lot of credit for experimenting with new ideas, reaching out to the public, and doing more than most any other government agency in taking advantage of new media.