Steve Rader
Harnessing the Powerof the Crowd - NASA's Crowdsourcing Tools Available to NASA Projects

Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Building 8 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Note change in location)
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Over the past 4 years, NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation has been working to find and use the most effective methods of "crowdsourcing". CoECI has done this via contracts with companies that have effectively established large crowdsourcing communities that are able to deliver products through the use of prizes and challenges. These products include innovative ideas & approaches for solving problems, algorithms, software, videos, graphics, and models. Over the past 10-15 years, crowdsourcing has become a key tool used by industry to amplify its efforts and research and development and is widely used across companies like P&G, General Electric, and ExxonMobil.

This presentation provides an overview of crowdsourcing and how and why it is effective. Additionally, the presentation outlines the crowdsourcing platforms (companies) that are currently contracted to NASA and are available for any NASA projects to use. These include NASA's internal crowdsourcing platform NASA@work, which is available to anyone at NASA at no cost. They also include NASA's contract with Harvard/TopCoder, Innocentive, and Yet2.com. The presentation provides examples of how these platforms have been used successfully to contribute to NASA projects around the agency.

Steve Rader currently serves as the Deputy Manager of NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), which is working to infuse challenge and crowdsourcing innovation approaches at NASA and across the federal government. CoECI focuses on the study and use of curated, crowd-sourcing communities that utilize prize and challenge based methods to deliver innovative solutions for NASA and the US government.

Mr. Rader has Mechanical Engineering degree from Rice University and has worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX for 25 years. He started his career as an environmental control and life support systems flight controller for Space Station Operations. Mr. Rader moved into flight software engineering where he developed delay tolerant communications software for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as wells as ground and flight command & control systems for the X-38 emergency crew return vehicle. Mr. Rader led the development of NASA's Constellation Program's interoperable Command, Control, Communications & Information (C3I) architecture. After the Constellation program, Mr. Rader supported the Mars design reference mission definition and a number of analog missions studying space mission operations and design. Mr. Rader began studying crowdsourcing communities in 2011 and joined the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation as the deputy manager in 2013.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Dan Smith

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040