Communications dashboard (control rooms, take a cue from Facebook®!) Chapter 1

Papers published via IEEE and AIAA conferences have presented an overview of how social media could benefit NASA working environments in general [1] and proposed three specific social applications to benefit space flight control operations [2]. One of them, Communications Dashboard, would help a real time flight controller keep up with both the “big picture” and significant details of operations via a cohesive interface similar to those of social networking services (SNS). Instead of recreational social features, “CommDash” would support functions like console logging, categorized and threaded text chat streams with enhanced accountability and graphics display features, high-level status displays driven by telemetry or other events, and an on-screen hailing function for requesting voice or text stream conversation. Moving certain voice conversations to text streams would reduce confusion and stress in two ways. Within text conversations, there would be far less repetition of content since text conversations have visual persistence and are reviewable instantly, e.g., there's no need to brief new participants to a discussion - they just read what's already there. Remaining voice traffic would stand out more clearly, and quieter voice loops means fewer “say again” calls and less distraction from visual and mental tasks, thus less stress. (Most flight controllers monitor 4 or 5 voice loops at once.) Links could be created from console log entries to chat selections so that underlying details are readily available yet unobtrusive. This would reduce the confusion that rises from having multiple and sometimes divergent copies of the same information due to cut/copy and paste operations, attachments, and asynchronous editing. This concept could apply to a plethora of real time control environments and to other settings with lots of information juggling. This paper explores the dashboard concept in further detail and chronicles the first phase of a NASA IT Labs (Information Technology) project that could lead to a working system.