Yet another achievement for our last space shuttle, Atlantis, she was responsible for launching the Galileo probe to Jupiter on STS-34. The was only the second time a probe leaving our local neighborhood was launched from the space shuttle, the first having been the Magellan probe to Venus that was launched by Atlantis during STS-30 earlier in 1989. Galileo’s path would take her around Venus in 1990 and then around Earth twice, in 1990 and 1992, in order to use the gravitational assist to build up enough velocity to get to Jupiter. Even along the way, she had plenty of work to do, examining asteroids and determining if it was possible to detect life on Earth from space. This was accomplished through a series of experiments devised by Carl Sagan during Galileo’s first flyby of Earth. And it was not a trip without problems, either, as her high-gain antenna failed to open. This forced us to rely on her low-gain antenna, which was only intended to transmit at 8 to 16 bits per second (whereas the high-gain antenna would have transmitted at 134 kilobits per second, over 8000 times faster). The NASA engineers, resourceful as always, were able to boost this to 160 bits per second by utilizing compression and receiver upgrades. Just before arriving in Jupiter orbit, Galileo launched an atmospheric probe that made a death dive into Jupiter, collecting 58 minutes worth of data about the weather and composition of the atmosphere. In total, Galileo returned about 30 GB of data and around 14,000 images before performing her own dive into Jupiter (to prevent any possibility of introducing Earth bacteria to Europa).

Juno, with the benefit of 20 years of additional engineering advances, will perform almost as many orbits (32) as Galileo (35) in just a single Earth year, and will perform much more sophisticated science. Once she arrives at Jupiter, in 2016, she will provide a better estimate of Jupiter’s core mass and precisely explore the planet’s magnetic and gravitational fields. She will also fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge of the atmospheric composition. You may ask why we really care. Why would we bother using our resources to send another probe to Jupiter, rather than exploring our closer neighbors? But Jupiter was probably one of the first planets to form in our solar system, and its giant mass has a huge effect on the rest of the planets, including Earth. By understanding Jupiter, we will learn more about how our solar system, and our planet, formed.

The science is exciting, but even more exciting and immediate for me is that NASA has invited me down to Kennedy Space Center to learn more about Juno, and Jupiter, from the experts and to witness her launch on August 5th. As part of NASA’s Tweetup program, where they open up events to some of their social media followers in an effort to increase awareness of NASA’s work, 150 people have been invited down to KSC for a two day event around Juno’s launch. My first NASA Tweetup experience was for Sun-Earth Day at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, earlier this year, and I am honored to have been selected again to go down for this launch. At GSFC, we were able to participate in NASA Edge, their unscripted webcast, as well as take a tour of the GSFC facilities and go down to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to observe the sun and meet with other experts. I can only speculate on what we will be involved in at KSC, based on previous (shuttle) launch Tweetups, and I am so excited to find out!

Space Points came out of a discussion at SpaceUp Houston in February. The idea is that it’s a kind of game where you get points for sharing your excitement of space exploration in many ways. It’s going to be a big topic of discussion at the upcoming SpaceUp this month, and I’m hoping to get there so I can take part. Of course, I’m already starting some work in the arena through another project I was brought in on.

When I was at the tweetup for Sun Earth Day 2011 at Goddard Space Flight Center, I met a ton of really great folks, both NASA tweeps and enthusiasts like me. Some were just getting into the community, others ran podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, and anything else you can think of. Earlier this week, I hooked up with @jonverve to talk about how to create a crowdsource website for space mission data. In the space of just a few days, with the help of several other tweeps, we have outlined a system that will let anyone enter in details about missions and mission events, while using a reputation and moderation system to assure that good data makes it through and bad data is weeded out.

Now this plays into the Space Points idea, because if you’re helping out by entering in good mission data, you should get points for that! But for the mission data system itself, you need to keep track of who is entering good data and who is not, as well as giving out rewards. When you combine both, I think about reputation economies, like Whuffie in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Of course, he had the benefit of a science-fictional brain implant that facilitates reputation tracking. That makes it a difficult problem, but not an impossible one, and one that I have thought on and off about for years since I read the book. I’d like to think that Space Points could be the start of a social economy like that, but I’m definitely not the only one who has thoughts on what it should be, and my idea may be a little too big, or too uninteresting. I don’t have a problem with that at all, though.

In order to make the mission data project a little more modular, and a little easier to connect with a Space Points system later, I decided that I should make the reputation system (which I am, predictably, calling Whuffie) a separate application from the mission data application. I was thinking that Whuffie could actually be the backend database for Space Points, if desired. All it really needs to be is a database and API for posting transactions for users and accessing balances. To start with, the only trusted application is the mission data application, but it could talk to any number of applications down the road. Going in the other direction, Whuffie could be trashed later, and the mission data project could be connected to a different backend for tracking reputation. Modular systems are just easier to work with.

The problem here is that I feel a little bit like I am stepping on toes, mostly through misunderstanding. Space Points is someone else’s idea, and while it’s supposed to be a group effort, the initial work that we’re doing on crowdsourcing mission data doesn’t fit squarely into that group and we’re racing ahead a bit to get an implementation in place, which is going to happen before the real discussions (at June’s SpaceUp) on Space Points start to take place. So I’m working on systems that might interface with Space Points before that concept really exists. Or the systems I’m creating might become the backbone of Space Points if others want, but that still means that the choices I make now could influence Space Points later.

In part, it’s my fault for using the #spacepoints hashtag, but I do that because I want to make sure that we stay engaged with the larger group. But as much as we’re pushing for a site for crowdsourced data, I don’t have any illusions that what I am doing is going to be some kind of canonical implementation of Space Points. Yeah, I’ve registered a couple domains and a Twitter handle, but I’ve done it because nobody else had yet and there was a squatter moving in. And, regardless of how Space Points happens, I want to keep the crowdsource project close to it so I was going to stick it in a subdomain, at least for now. But the domains and the Twitter handle go with the Space Points project, wherever that goes and whoever is leading it. It’s like when I registered domains hours after a company merger was announced many years ago because the company hadn’t thought to do it before announcing!

I don’t do it to take control, or materially benefit. I don’t necessarily want to run the project, and I hope anyone who feels like I’m pushing my way in understands that. I want to contribute in any way I can, and I like developing software platforms to do interesting things. I tend to move along quickly when I’m working on a fun project, but I’m also willing to throw out any of the work that I’m doing if it doesn’t fit later. I enjoy doing the work for its own sake. Yeah, I certainly like running cool stuff if I can, but I’m more interested in seeing it done than being the one who does it.

One of my friends, Snipe, wrote an excellent, if slightly crass (you just need to know her) article about the concept of a Social Media Marketer. These are people who are supposed to be experts on social media, and are supposed to coordinate a company’s presence in the online social realms. Too often, they’re also the ones tasked with being the sole representation for the company in this space. I can’t even start to describe how far from reality these companies have strayed. There is no one person in a company with two or more employees who is completely conversant on all aspects of the business, otherwise there would be only one employee. This means there is no one person who can represent your company to all people. So if you’ve created a position of Social Media Marketer, what you’ve done at the very least is set that person up to fail. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve completely destroyed the credibility of your company in the social space.

Years ago, before Twitter and Facebook were even a thought, I read a book that should be required reading for all leadership teams. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes very clearly how the traditional public presentation of a company, through public relations, official spokespeople, and very rules for employees that keep them on a very short leash when talking about anything to do with their work, is an antiquated notion and entirely wrong for the Internet. Even before 140 characters became the new standard for a message, it was obvious that the ability to connect with anyone in the world instantly forced a change in the way companies communicate. People don’t want to talk to corporate entities. They want to talk to other people. They want to know that the person at the other end of the conversation is not just working off a script that has been handed to them. If I have a question about the meaning of something in a document, I want to talk to the author of the document. What I don’t want is to talk to someone who is either trying to give me an answer without the knowledge it requires, or is trying to be a middleman for a conversation with the person who does have the knowledge.

This is not to say that there is no place for corporate communications and public relations. Press releases need to go out, the mainstream media needs definitive information, events need to be arranged, and all of this needs to be done by professionals. This means that there’s certainly a place for an official Twitter stream that is branded, or a Facebook page that is run by the communications department. And there are some excellent people out there who do a wonderful job putting together campaigns that utilize social media or are potentially viral. But that is not social media, even if it uses Twitter. It’s another extension of corporate communications, and you should not expect it to be anything more than that. Social media, by definition, is between people. That means that you have to let your people speak for themselves. If you hamstring them in any way, other than providing very general guidelines about what not to say (like internal financial figures, or confidential project information), you will never have success in social media. People can spot a phony even over email.

It may be surprising to hear this, but most people like, at least in some way, what they do for a living. Sure, there’s always office politics, or the task that nobody really wants to do but everyone knows has to get done. But in general, your employees like their job and like your company. When someone outside asks a question about the company, they want to answer and help people. When someone puts up incorrect information, they want to correct it. Nothing frustrates them more than management that has told them that the only people who may speak about the company are those who have it in their job description. You know what? It’s everyone’s job description to help the company succeed, so let them. Because if you go the other way and hire someone to “handle” social media, you’re going to reinforce that only the official company spokespeople are to be talking about the company. The market will recognize this as well, and you will have done nothing but remind them that your company is nothing but a faceless entity.

Do you want to do more about social media? OK. Hire a coordinator. Hire someone who will encourage employees to get on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and anywhere else they can think of. Find someone who run internal classes about what not to say, and make sure they tell everyone to say as much as they can as long as it’s not confidential. Set up a peer group where your people can quickly check a fact about the company or find the right person to answer something they came across. There’s nothing special about it. Just tell your employees to go out and be the people they already are.

And read a book.