Reflecting on the NASA IT Summit

I spent all of last week at the Gaylord National Resort Conference Center outside of Washington, DC with fellow NASA technologists and NASA I.T. partners.  I can give you a full play-by-play, but Alex Howard already did a commendable job of that.  I strongly suggest you read his post for a solid overview.  What I prefer to do here is give you some of my reflecting on thoughts on this event.

First and foremost…it was a great event.  Despite the lack of available wi-fi (but awful wi-fi is pretty much a given at most tech conferences these days).  Bringing together NASA tech community and thought leaders to the same building for 3 days of sharing ideas and thoughts was an idea that was way overdue for NASA.  One of the things I’ve been most pleased about NASA since returning this past April is the sense of community that is now in place.  It certainly wasn’t there before.

From a conference programming perspective, everyone who saw Vint Cerf’s presentation will tell you that his talk was easily the best hour of the week.  You can see the video below. 

Vint led off the second day of the conference and after hearing about his ideas about interplanetary network design, my favorite conversation piece for that day was “should this guy be working for NASA?”

I’ll leave you with a Wordle cloud of my conference notes from the week.  I typically jot things down in my iPhone note apps over the course of a conference, and its fun to take those notes, convert them to a Wordle cloud and reflect back upon the themes that were circulating about.  I’m extremely prominence that the word Open had over the course of the summit.