Linda Cureton has been named the new chief information officer of NASA, Federal Computer Week reported Tuesday. Cureton is currently the CIO for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and will replace Bobby German, who has been the acting NASA CIO.

She is a strong supporter of social media and helped create NASA's Spacebook, a Facebook-like tool for internal collaboration. In a recent post on her blog, Cureton talked about the pressure on CIOs to manage risk:

"As we continue on in our mission to inspire, discover, and explore, we will do so by balancing the sometimes competing forces of intellectual judgment and intuitive possibilities," Cureton wrote. "Too much risk aversion yields little reward. Too much innovation could be wasteful or even dangerous. It's amazing that we are so creative and innovative in our youth and as we mature and gain experience, life beats it out of us."

One of Cureton's first tasks will likely be to oversee competition for $4.2 billion in IT contracts for NASA.

For more on the Cureton appointment:
- see this Federal Computer Week article

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