User:Darenwelsh

My day job is at NASA. I train astronauts how to perform spacewalks (EVA), I write procedures for those spacewalks, and I help them execute their EVAs as a flight controller in MCC.

During my training in the EVA group, I was appalled with how difficult it was to find documentation and training materials. Coming from a prior job in software development and testing, I couldn't believe how little effort was put into revision control of these documents. Anyone could easily modify or even delete critical information. There had to be a better way. Why didn't they do it like the rest of us? When we want to learn something, we search on Google and Wikipedia.

After years of trying to find the right people who could envision the same system as I had in mind, Jamesmontalvo3 joined the cause and helped make it happen. Since 2012, we have been developing and using an in-house semantic wiki using MW and several extensions. Once we had enough working examples of how powerful this tool can be, we gained approval and support. Now (2013) the MOD EVA group uses the wiki as the core of its knowledge management and we are working to set up multiple instances of similar wikis that can integrate for all of MOD. There's even discussion of how we could make this tool available to astronauts aboard the ISS.