For NASA Chief Technology Officer for IT Deborah Diaz, problem solving starts with community.

Her community just happens to be the world.

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Deborah led the team which created NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge in 2012.  Although Space Apps is the largest hackathon in the universe, it’s unlike any other.   This free event welcomes coding newcomers, including storytellers and artists, as well as tech experts.

In Space Apps, participants in worldwide locations form teams.  Teams can be friends, families, colleagues–or total strangers.  Using NASA’s open data, each team collaborates on a project that can solve a problem.  And these problems can literally be anything in the universe!  Issues impeding Mars colonization, air quality and drought conditions on Earth are all fair game.

But teams face a time limit: 48 to 72 hours, to create a prototype.

At 2016 Space Apps Pasadena, Deborah shared the story of creating Space Apps, talked about innovation and previewed NASA’s new “Datanauts” citizen-science program.

On this episode of Over Coffee®, you’ll hear:

• What first inspired Deborah to choose science as her life’s work;

• The steps she and her team had to take, to get Space Apps accepted as a “hackathon for good”‘

• Why she chose to invite participants whose soft skills differ from those in traditional hackathons;

• How Space Apps has grown since its inception in 2012;

• How some of the 2016 newcomers worked together, worldwide;

• Some of her favorite solutions from previous Space Apps events;

• How a student participant’s Space Apps project is now being utilized aboard the International Space Station;

• What she, herself, is learning as she mentors others;

• How she’s seeing the world change through new technology;

• What an innovation developed at Space Apps for the ISS may mean in the medical field in the future;

• Deborah’s vision for Space Apps 2030;

• How NASA’s new Datanaut program, for citizen scientists, was created;

• The differences Deborah found between the East and West Coasts, while working to attract more women to participate in hackathons;

• How NASA’s new Datanaut class is working;

• Some resources for data newcomers who would like to learn to code.