“Digital anthropology to me is the study of behavior in digital environments. As a digital anthropologist, I research a variety of aspects pertaining to digital behaviors and build strategies, user interfaces/experiences and recommendations for clients based off of the analysis and insights. Digital anthropology doesn’t really *affect* our everyday lives, so much as we affect it. Similar to space exploration and physics, digital anthropology can help our understanding of our place in the “cyber-verse” and how for every interaction there is a unique reaction.”

“I was watching When We Left Earth on the Discovery Channel, a series documenting the Apollo missions. I couldn’t help but be completely wide-eyed while watching it and I remarked to a friend about how I would love to work for NASA, but how I had no idea if they needed someone like me – I had been a digital anthropologist for years with no formal science background. My friend put me in touch with someone at NASA and by serendipity, the day I reached out to them, they had just written up a job description for someone *exactly* like me. I was really passionate about being able to direct community strategy and advise on digital communications, so it wasn’t something I could simply walk away from once I left NASA. The space program globally needs a lot of help and it means a lot to me to actually be able to contribute to something that means so much for humankind.”

“There are a *lot* of challenges for the space industry around the social web. Non-social technologies, NASA is great about embracing – supercomputers are running and there’s programs dedicated to cloud computing like NASA Nebula. Listing off a few of the challenges I see around the social web and space industry:

• Understanding that open source is more than just releasing data, it’s about open communities and open collaboration. Too many open source resources don’t have simple platforms like message boards to allow people to converse about the data and actively contribute to it; many just have an email address for reporting bugs to.
• Navigating the social web as a bridge between personal and professional and not shutting down personal blogs or seeing the use of social web tools akin to playing Solitaire. This applies more to NASA, as it’s a wide-spread government issue that I recently discussed here.
• Viewing the web as the platform. Often, people who are not digital natives (I believe the average age of people at NASA is 49) get overwhelmed and skeptical about using multiple services. It’s natural to initially view using 10 services as being 10 individual efforts, and thus to only focus on whatever service is most widely used. The reality is, the platform with the most users is the entire web: using the web as a platform, allows you to cover across many services without 10x the effort.
• Using the social web for more than just an extension of your job. Tied to the overwhelming and skeptical feeling mentioned above, if the space industry only views the social web as something to use to do outreach, they will continue to not fully understand or use it. At NASA, I was unable to truly get people to use Twitter and educate them about it until they started using it for themselves and not just their program or mission.

As for making space exploration sexy, I think the robots and rockets are doing a fabulous job at turning people on already! *winks*”

“The future of space should really be for everyone. Private/commercial entities are making huge headway this year while interest in citizen science is beginning to pick up speed. Space programs around the world are emerging and NASA is still kicking ass in the amount of discoveries/data they collect as well as the money they’re able to provide for citizen science projects. The important thing is that no one has a monopoly on space exploration anymore.”

“Oh, this is a super hard question for me. I can’t pick just one! The LCROSS mission is pretty cool, as it’s literally slamming an SUV-size payload into the Moon to look for ice crystals that could make our ability to build an outpost there a lot easier. I recently learned more about the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which, in summary, took a “baby photo” of our entire universe when it was being formed and measured it to be 13.73 billion years old, as well as measured the amount of dark energy within it – this was important as beforehand there were still a lot of theories that there was no sense of beginning/end to the universe and measuring dark energy helps explain why things appear to move away from one another. The Spitzer Space Telescope is also pretty amazing in what it has accomplished. It was able to give us some of our first pictures of our entire galaxy through the use of infrared. Without infrared, we are simply unable to view our galaxy due to the mass amounts of space dust.”

“CupcakeCamp started as most random ideas in San Francisco do. Friends joking about creating various things until someone actually does. My friends were joking about making a CupcakeCamp, based off of the BarCamp phenomenon (essentially a “user generated conference”), and so I decided to actually give it a shot. CupcakeCamp is an event where people can buy or bake cupcakes to bring to the event, or they can just show up and eat cupcakes. It’s really just an event for cupcake lovers born out of the tech scene. There have definitely been a lot of unique and interesting cupcakes – too many to mention.”

“I often say my life is really just cupcakes and rockets. Outside of that, I can’t stress enough how significant living in San Francisco is to everything I do. I have amazing friends who are all some of the best people you can find in the tech industry. Living in San Francisco has given me an environment that encourages people to actually create and contribute to amazing things and balances it with the ability to hack and experiment and fail without fear.”

“I always have a lot of projects brewing and some never see the public light of day. Mostly, I’m continuing to work on Spacehack and develop it into more of a community than its current directory state. CupcakeCamp is coming back to San Francisco again this year soon. I continue to review sci-fi movie gadgets for Engadget. I’m trying to revive a space-related education event for the tech scene. My personal projects are still to learn Python and Arduino. All my other projects are private for the moment being. *smiley face*”

“Insatiable.”