#21 Ryon Stewart and Christine Jenkins – Crowdsourcing at NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation - part 1

Welcome back to Cool Collaborations for Season 2. To kick things off with a bang, I’m joined by Ryon Stewart and Christine Jenkins from NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. Both Ryon and Christine are Challenge Coordinators at NASA, which means they bring crowdsourcing methods and expertise to bear on problems facing NASA and agencies across the United States. In this first part of our conversation, Ryon and Christine talk about their backgrounds and how they came to be Challenge Coordinators, how the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation has enabled the used of crowdsourcing, and then we dig into crowdsourcing itself with examples of what kinds of solutions have come from the crowd. 

To find out more about the Center of Excellence and crowdsourcing projects at NASA, here’s a few links you might find interesting. 

• Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation 
• NASA Tournament Lab
• Ryon Stewart, Open Innovation Development
• Christine Ragno Jenkins, Business & Technical Integration
• Be part of future NASA Challenges by subscribing to the NASA Crowdsourcing Listserv

Tune in for Part 2 of the conversation with Ryon and Christine in the next episode coming out in only two weeks. Be sure to subscribe to the Cool Collaborations podcast with your podcast provider and share it with a friend you think would enjoy listening. 

Your host for the Cool Collaborations podcast is Scott Millar. Scott is the principle of Collaboration Dynamics, where he often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.