the success of the things that come out of NASA are a reflection of the knowledge of and collaboration between thousands of brilliant people.

NASA’s work is organized around Missions. When a Mission is stood up people from across the center are brought together to work on the project.

Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”

In some places, Knowledge Management is about creating systems that get around people’s knowledge deficiencies. At Goddard, it really seems like it is about empowering people to share and reflect on what they know best.

Social Media Can Enhance Learning (but relationships matter)

the focus is on the individual’s learning processes, structures, and needs, rather than content management systems

The important thing to note is that whether you collaborate or simply connect, the strength of your ties will have an impact on what you are able to do. If you really want to be able to get rapid, trustworthy answers or enhance or accelerate results on a project, it will be important to develop those strong ties.

Social media has a lot of potential, but you need to think about how to facilitate different kinds of (online and offline) relationships between people so that their thinking is improved, innovation occurs, they can get quick answers to complex problems, in order to enhance and accelerate business outcomes.

Learning in Public is Hard, but Worth It.

If you share what you know and what you don’t know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money.

Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.