Last Friday, NASA astronaut Ron Garan and Mashable hosted a Google+ Hangout session to anaylse why, in the tech-driven 21st century, critical issues like insufficient access to safe water and poverty remain.
They say that with distance comes clarity and when mulling over some of the planet’s biggest problems, perhaps there is no greater distance than that afforded by the International Space Station (ISS). While orbitting the earth during his 178-day mission on the ISS, astronaut Ron Garan started to think about the need for more meaningful collaborative efforts to address certain issues after viewing the manmade border between Pakistan and India from above.
This argument for collaboration and, in Garan’s opinion, data sharing was the central topic of a Google+ Hangout session he and Mashable hosted last Friday, 11 October. Titled #TheKeyIsWe, the session was a follow on from Garan’s appearance at the Social Good Summit earlier this year and identifies how ineffective implementation of these two areas is hampering global humanitarian causes:
- many collaborative efforts are still built around hierarchical structures;
- lack of effective collaboration leads to a competition for resources; and
- the absence of well-managed data-sharing blocks the free flow of news pertaining to certain issues and silos information.
Check out the entire Hangout session below or head to the dedicated Google+ page to join in the conversation about global collaboration:
Author: Anna Rees/RESET editorial
