You do not have to be a rocket scientist to work alongside NASA scientists anymore. NASA has launched a new website, code.nasa.gov, geared towards involving the community in all sorts of projects being developed at the agency. Their efforts hope to make a platform to streamline the open-source development process and take advantage of the community’s proven highly effective contribution.
According to NASA, this project will see three phases. The first provides an online directory of all current projects NASA is working on, along with related useful contacts and guides to make it easy for the public to partake in the open-source process. This stage will be followed by the creation of a forum designed to ease communication among public participants and NASA professionals.
Their third phase really brings it all together. They are committing to supplying development projects with as many tools and mechanisms need to be truly effective. Organization will undoubtedly be the most useful tool to release this type of idea energy. Code.nasa.gov will do this by employing distributed version control to easily update software changes. It will track important issues within projects, it will allow for continuous integration, facilitated documentation, communication, planning and management too keep track of all the brainy goodness.
To make the use of the community contribution from the start, they will also create and host tool, service and process chains. All for the purpose of making the open-source process smoother while also more efficient.
Who knows when we will land on an alien world, but your contribution could help us get there.
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