Elanso

Having tracked the rise of co-working for a while now, we’re really looking forward to our Collaborative Co-Working session at PSFK Conference New York. Entrepreneur and scientist Andrew Hoppin will be one of our panelists, sharing his insights on how he’s helped implement a collaborative, open system of working and training at NASA. Here’s a bit more about Andrew and where he finds his inspiration.

First, who are you and what do you do?

Though a planetary geologist and environmental scientist by training, I was asked to return to NASA in 2006 because of my decade of experience as a social entrepreneur, Web strategist and grassroots political organizer. There, I created NASA CoLab, which builds collaborative communities for NASA, online and offline, in service of a more transparent and efficient Federal government. As in this example, my life’s practice is to connect people, organizations and communities to one another in novel ways that empower them to make a profound difference for one another. I’m also working on towards making human beings a multi-planetary species sooner rather than later, for within that vast new context I believe we’ll innately do a far better job of caring for our home planet and for each other. And it’ll be fun.

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 is putting 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. It’s Biz Stone’s (Twitter CEO) “crushed ice theory” at work– with more surface area, the crushed ice melts faster. Co-working exposes more surface area within an organization, melting bureaucracy away and generating creative juice from the meltwater.

Five hyperlinks to sites that provide you with inspiration:

www.opennasa.org

www.charityfocus.org

www.barcamp.org

www.xprize.org

www.twitter.com/ahoppin/with_friends

Thanks, Andrew!