Data Nerds In Space!
posted Friday Dec 11, 2009 by Jon Wurm
Well, they aren't really in space but they do have something to do with NASA. A bunch of people commonly referred to as "Data Nerds" are gravitating together this weekend at a house in Cupertino, California known as the Rainbow Mansion. Host Cowan Sharp and co-host Robbie Schingier will start the event off with a quick introduction on how to get stuff done in a short amount of time. That makes sense considering that this gathering will only last for one day and who better to kick things off than two guys who run a website about developing microsoftware known as TinyApps.
This event is part of the Great American Hackathon, sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, that recognizes NASAs efforts over the past few years to make its data available to the public on the web. The Data Nerds feel that they can find ways to take that data and make it easier to use and understand for the general public while streamlining the data flow then passing this on to NASA in hopes that it may help them as well.
If we can build cool prototypes and demos and proofs-of-concept, other people will see that it's not that hard, said event co-host Jessy Cowan-Sharp, a NASA contractor and proprietor of OpenNASA.com. Maybe then it will be adopted inside NASA.
To find out more about what NASA has been up to and what the Data Nerds will be working on check out OpenNASA.com, NASA Missions and NASA datasets. They are trying to achieve a lot in a short amount of time but if they can successfully harness the power of community they could end up just like Linux but hopefully better.
