The steering committee of the Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network hunkered down in a San Francisco hotel room following the Network's first annual meeting in 2006, to analyze our progress along a carefully planned strategic roadmap. Our mission was to build the capacity of the nation's science museums to engage public audiences in one of the most important emerging research fields of our time – nanotechnology – a field that one day, with careful stewardship, could help us better diagnose and cure disease, produce a sustainable energy economy, and achieve a quantum leap in computing power.