“We want to be where everybody else is, we want to be part of the party, too,” said Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Part of what we are looking at is what are the benefits internally [with social networking],” she said.

Those benefits now include accelerated peer-to-peer communication and problem solving, collective intelligence built by capturing knowledge from individual workers for re-use by others, and providing context to communication to help with decision making.

Holm wants to go from just one person working on a problem to perhaps thousands.

"The way people are sharing information now is through the social connections they are making and there is a lot of tacit knowledge there."