PSFK Conference San Francisco Speaker Andrew Hoppin

We’re excited to have Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA CoLab, joining us at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 on our “Collaboration & Co-Working” panel. Alongside Ezra Cooperstein from Current TV, Andrew will be discussing how collaboration can be utilized to engage communities (even ones as big as NASA!).

First, who are you and what do you do?

Though a planetary geologist and environmental scientist by training, I came back to NASA in 2006 because of my experience as a social entrepreneur, Web strategist and grassroots political organizer. There, I helped create NASA CoLab, which builds collaborative communities for NASA, online and offline, in service of a more transparent and efficient Federal government.

I also recently co-founded Brazil’s first online political technology company, and Mission Ad Network, an online advertising network for Socially Responsible businesses.
My volunteer work includes representing the Space Generation Advisory Council at the UN, and the advisory board of the New Organizing Institute.

You’ll be speaking on our Collaborative Co-Working panel -can you sum up your views on how collaborative work is changing how companies engage with their customers, staff, partners, and the community?

Collaborative co-working puts more people on the creative “edges” of workgroups by fostering informal but vocationally relevant peer-to-peer interaction across boundaries of bureaucracy, organization, and in the case of NASA with Second Life, physical geography. Cultural cross-pollination results, making organizations more contextually aware, nimble, and responsive. Co-working creates more human points of contact within an organization, melting bureaucracy away and generating creative juice from the meltwater. Now, after more than a year of building communities for NASA through online, offline, and virtual reality co-working at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, we’re turning our attention to bringing these practices to other NASA Centers around the country, and collaborating with colleagues at other Agencies to share this learning across the Federal Government. There has been a lot of rhetoric about “change” in this year’s Presidential Election; we like to think we’re helping to build the DNA necessary to implement rapid change into the Federal bureaucracy.

Five sites that provide you with inspiration?

Open NASA
CharityFocus
BarCamp
X PRIZE Foundation
Twitter

Thanks, Andrew!

NASA CoLab

Hear more from Andrew at PSFK Conference San Francisco 2008 - get your tickets now!