Collaboration Colloquium: Dodson Talk, Feb 3-Silicon Valley Campus - Carnegie Mellon University

Topic: Collaboration in the Virtual Institutes

Speaker:   K. Estelle Dodson
                CTO, Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Program
                NASA Astrobiology and Lunar Science Institute

Location:   Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley (NASA Research Park Building 23) Room 118
Time:        Wednesday, Feb 3, 2010, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Directions: http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/about-us/directions.html

Slides:       

Abstract:

The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) are two "virtual" institutes administered out of NASA Ames Research Center. These virtual institutes comprise teams distributed across the country engaged in coordinated investigations with researchers located at hundreds of universities and organizations. Spanning a period that saw the birth of Web 2.0 and the current explosive growth of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, these two NASA institutes have a broad perspective on building and running collaborative communities.

This talk will give an overview of the collaborative infrastructure of these virtual institutes and share what we have learned over 10 years in building and connecting a distributed community. It's not enough to make technology available to members, it requires relationship building, training, continuity and many other organizational and human factors for success. We will address what technologies have worked under what circumstances, strategies for technology and process adoption and where we see the future of collaboration.

Biography:

Estelle Dodson has been leading collaborative technologies for NASA’s virtual institutes for 10 years and recently co-founded the Center for Collaboration Science and Applications (CCSA) in partnership with NASA Ames, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and Lockheed Martin.  Her love of science, technology and communication started in grade school when “texting” with her Dad at the computer lab through an acoustically coupled modem at home.  She has a degree in biology from at UC Berkeley and took courses in LISP and fortran for fun.  She has authored articles on web based science education and immersive environments for collaborative research and worked on a team to build a “Hyperwall” tiled display running on a unix cluster.