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By Michael Eggebrecht
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center took a leap into social networking this week with the launch of Spacebook, an employee intranet that features user profiles, group collaboration spaces and social bookmarking.
The site was in beta-testing during April and May, said Goddard's Web manager, Emma Antunes, at the Government Technology Research Alliance (GTRA) conference June 9. "So far, people are excited," she said. "I'm getting the first reports of how they're using it, how they're not using it, what they want."
Growth should come organically, according to Antunes, who developed the center's original intranet and has twice served as chairman of NASA's webmasters working group. In beta testing, she reached out to 50 individuals, but 80 logged in, "which meant that there was some good viral-people getting the word out."
Goddard is a Greenbelt, Md.-based laboratory that develops and operates unmanned scientific spacecraft and has 3 million square feet of research, development and office space. Antunes stressed the value that social networking can have in the scientific process. "A lot of scientific problems-the thorny ones-are solved by scientists in unrelated fields," she noted. "Getting folks to talk to each other is what's so exciting."
That can also generate fear among staffers as the communication hierarchy breaks down. "That's the thing about social networks," she explained. "You're supposed to let anyone talk to anyone else, and that can be a little scary for people who prefer to have a chain of communication go in a particular way."
Security concerns about social media were a pressing concern of many at the three-day GTRA symposium in Hot Springs, Va. Spacebook, however, is using NASA e-authentication, which means that authorization and authentication won't be a problem. Antunes worked with IT security and the human capital management office and will be using an existing process for misuse of the site.
But the risk of misuse as very small, according to Antunes. "I've got the things in place in case people do bad stuff, but I'm more concerned with, how do I get them to do stuff at all?" she said. "Getting people interested and sustaining them so that they come back tomorrow and six months from now and a year from now-to me that's the interesting and hard part."
Ensuring that there's enough initial user-generated content is a priority. The four current forums are a management announcement board, a general discussion group, a place for new employees and an equipment exchange forum, which Antunes called "a Craigslist for equipment."
Assuming that interest grows, what will Spacebook 2.0 look like? "We're looking at a 'my workspace' area where you can have widgets and more mashable kinds of apps that you can put in there," she said. "Spacebook 1.0 doesn't include blogs-Spacebook 2.0 would. Part of that was that we did our design first and the technology second."
Antunes worked with paper prototypes, which allowed business users to focus on functionality and the data. With an actual live application, she said, people get hung up on interface controls and colors. But while the process worked well, "it also means that now we have some opportunities to add some things that weren't in that first design," she added.
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