NASA Engineering Network (NEN) in FCW
The NASA Engineering Network (NEN) in mentioned in a recent Federal Computing Week Magazine Article that talks about NASA Lessons Learned systems.
The NASA Engineering Network (NEN) in mentioned in a recent Federal Computing Week Magazine Article that talks about NASA Lessons Learned systems.
There are many unique aspects of capturing business for your company in government compared with private industry. First of all contracts must be publicly announced, allowing newcomers to the field to be able to find new opportunities. For NASA the website to monitor is the NASA Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS) website. You can search using specific criteria or register to be notified of new business opportunities in a certain area.
So once you identify an opportunity how do you go after it. Initially the government posts a synopsis describing the details of the contract. After determining that some of the work in a given contract is in your area of interest the next step is to see if there is any restrictions on what type of businesses can go after the work. A very common thing to do is to only allow small businesses or small disadvantaged businesses go after the work. Some common types of small disadvanted businesses include:
I’ll get into more into this subject in a later article.
Below are the podcasts from Explorers Post 631 - Computer Technology that resulted from a lesson about Blogging, RSS, and Podcasting.
As an advisor for an Explorer Scout Post 631 (Computer Technology) I occasionally have to teach a lesson to the students. Last week I choose Blogging, RSS, and Podcasts. A rough outline of the lesson I taught was:
Now I just need to create the podcasts for the recordings they made.
As the BBC is reporting it appears as if Google and NASA have teamed up.
Google, the do no evil company, as a government contractor. While they mention doing work like sensor design and engineering analysis, I see the most potential for what they could bring in the Data Management arena. This could have the potential to revolutionize the way NASA handles their data systems. In the past projects at NASA get funded and awarded to different contractors, who then create the data systems they need to support their projects. The contractor typically does not share any of this data unless it get specifically mentioned in the contract, which isn't that common. As a result one of the biggest weaknesses in NASA's IT systems is the inability to search accross the plentitude of data systems. It is impossible to apply Data Mininng, Trending, and Analysis technologies to this data. In the words of the CAIB Report,
"In its investigation, the Board found that the information systems that support the Shuttle Program are extremely cumbersome and difficult to use in decision making at any level."Perhaps Google is the type of company that can overcome these challenges? It's what the "Good Guys" would do.
Some official and non-official NASA RSS Feeds include
Here is a zip file containing an example web page implemented in CSS taking advantage of the NASA look and feel. This example page doesn't include allot of the more intricate aspects of the NASA Design Guidelines but should at least be a good starter for your own implementation. When I get some more time later I'll try to make a more beefed up version of this.