NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People

The principles of openness and transparency have been embedded in NASA's operations for more than 50 years and have always been critical to achieving the Agency’s mission. As NASA continues to embrace technologies, it can now provide the means for the agency to take these openness practices to the next level and into the 21st century. We recently published version 2.0 of our Open Government Plan to serve as a model – not a manual – for what a more open NASA might look like today. The Plan collects the many new activities that exemplify the evolution of openness in NASA’s policy, technology, and culture – and provides citizens the opportunity to respond and engage.

To learn more about what we do and how we work at NASA, visit What NASA Does. You can also learn more about the NASA Open Government Initiative.

Federal Digital Strategy Overview

On May 23, 2012, President Obama released a Memorandum calling for all government agencies to “identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience.” In response to this directive, the Federal CIO released a strategy entitled "Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", which aims to deliver the general public and our government workforce access to government information and services on demand and on any device.

The Digital Strategy focuses agency efforts in four broad areas:

• Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
• Ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure, and affordable ways.
• Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation across our Nation and improve service quality for the American people.

General Principles/Attributes

The strategy highlights incorporate these general principles and attributes:

• Information-Centric: Ensure that government information is open, accurate, available anywhere, anytime, and on any device, and shared within and between agencies as well as with the private sector.
• Shared Platform: Helps us work together, both within and across agencies, to reduce costs, streamline development, apply consistent standards, and ensure consistency in how we create and deliver information.
• Customer-Centric: Influences how we create, manage, and present data through websites, mobile applications, raw data sets, and other modes of delivery, and allows customers to shape, share and consume information, whenever and however they want it.
• Security and Privacy: Ensures this innovation happens in a way that ensures the safe and secure delivery and use of digital services to protect information and privacy.

We would love to know which data sets or digital collections of information you find most valuable for expanded access and receive your feedback on our plan. You can provide feedback either by submitting an issue on Github or sending us an email at opengov@nasa.gov.

Access the Digital Strategy

You can access NASA's digital strategy in a number of ways. The navigation bar on the left provides links to the sections of the plan which NASA has provided responses to. You can also download these responses in JSON and XML. The entire plan is also available for consumption on Github

Digital Strategy Links

May 23, 2012 Memorandum: Building a 21st Century Digital Government
Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People