1. To sustain NASA's knowledge across missions and generations
   KM activities will identify and capture the information that exists across the Agency
   
   
2. To help people find, organize, and share the knowledge we already have
   KM processes will help to efficiently manage the Agency's knowledge resources
   
   
3. To increase collaboration and to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing
   The Knowledge Management Team will develop techniques and tools to enable teams and communities to collaborate across the barriers of time and space

For more information on these undertakings, review the Strategic Plan For Knowledge Management at NASA.

You have a great idea for an Earth-orbiting satellite that will seek out and collect 10% of all on-orbit debris, chemically bonding it to the satellite, thereby making shuttle and Space Station operations safer and delivering a significant cost savings to the tracking operations at the Deep Space Network. You see an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) and decide to submit a proposal. You already have a group of folks you know would be good; some at NASA Centers, a clear industry partner, and researchers at universities in Russia and Canada. At the kickoff videoconference for the AO, you were given access to the Program and Project Management portal, which gave you many of the collaborative capabilities you need to work with your team.

As you start working online, you realize you also need to involve a chemist. The portal links you to a directory of experts across NASA, you narrow your search to a chemist at Goddard who has recent experience on a flight instrument; you can read her publications and see the notes and webcast video clips from an international workshop she recently led.

You want to send out some information to your team, so you go to the portal and establish an online forum for ideas on the technology innovation and set up a robotic agent to search for articles and postings on chemical bonding. You really need to talk to your team face-to-face, so you schedule a desktop videoconference for your team and DSN and shuttle experts (you found the experts in the directory and can schedule across everyone's calendar), then you reserve a room and time for a working meeting at Langley for a follow up discussion. You see your team members putting up lots of ideas and many postings coming from the "knowbot" agent, it's like having extra people researching for you!

As the proposal effort proceeds, your team uses the portal to publish and retrieve ideas, working documents, and links to related information. (In the background, you know the system is marking certain documents for long-term archive, as well as ensuring you will be ISO and ITAR compliant.) At a critical design point, another knowbot in the system notifies you that a specific lesson learned on a previous project may be applicable given your current design parameters. You review the lesson and the decision tree and design trade-offs related to it, and realize that the flight environments are different, so you're probably okay. You note the lesson and its attendant data should be reviewed again at PDR; you can include the author of the lesson at your review. Congratulations! You win the proposal and you begin working on moving from your proposal concept to actual implementation. You already have a working environment that you are familiar with and that contains all your research and documentation. You can hit the ground running.