Well I am very excited about the Open Government Directive.

At NASA if you reach for the stars and land on the moon, you are likely to get in trouble because you didn't arrive at the stars. However, if they same group reaches for the top of a skyscraper, while fully capable of reaching the moon, they would get rewarded for reaching the top of the skyscraper.

One thing that has to happen for NASA to go open, on a policy level, is redefine the ITAR rules. When band-aids are subject to ITAR rules, just because they are flight equipment; well you know the rules are not very useful. Now, I am exaggerating, I don't know if band-aids are subject to ITAR, but I think that they would be.

While the ITAR rules are being changed, NASA could prepare to publicize all information from experiments, hardware, computer code, etc. that is does not affect national security or our competiveness. It can do this by identifying everything that is not nationally critical. (It is my understanding that the ITAR rules are being looked at right now.)

All new projects that are funded by NASA, that are not nationally critical, should be developed in an open format.

How do we get people to agree and implement this?

At NASA people only take action when there is a risk that they want to mitigate. Taking risk for the possibility of obtaining a better approach or result is therefore bad, because the goal is to minimize the risk. Therefore, if a potential risk is artificially created through policy for not taking a calculated risk; people will naturally choose the risky approach that has the best possible outcome.

I hate to suggest creating artificial risk; however, our culture demands it.

It seems that the website has a lot of very good information and the website is very visually attractive. I like the mix of colors.

At first glance nothing stands out. Everything seems to have the same level of importance. I think that the path/link to an overview about the ISS should stand out. This way when new people visit the sight they can easily spot where they can get the "ISS for Dummies" overview.

Also, it would be cool to have the url be http://www.nasa.gov/iss...but this is just an idea.