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Radical Transparency at NASA Via Second Life
An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Rowe over at Wired has an article about a couple of young scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center working to open source the space program through software development and other ways to allow the public to participate in real NASA programs. According to Robert Schingler, the NASA CoLab project manager, 'CoLab is building an infrastructure to encourage and facilitate direct participation from the talented and interested public...' Apparently, the group holds weekly meetings on their island in the popular online virtual world Second Life."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...but is second life really the place to do it? It's not a very secure system, which is not a problem for open meetings, except that it would be easy to interfere with them. And it's an awfully bloated piece of software to have to install for what you're going to get out of it. Wouldn't it make more sense to just stream audio and have the meeting on irc on a +m channel?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Smell that, gentlemen? That's the smell of 100% genuine Astroturf!
Crow T. Trollbot
Female Astronaut 1: "I love him."
Female Astronaut 2: "No you don't ho! He's my man.
Female Astronaut 1: "Ah yah, you die and you goda hell!"
Female Astronaut 2: "Ah, no you dinit!"
It's the NASA we have come to love and enjoy.
Does someone get voted off the island at the end of each meeting?
I'm not sure that I want to see seven foot tall wieners running around NASA.
I never been into the game, but wouldn't it have some capacity to passing along body language (either cued by keyboard or sensed in real-time)? If so, one might actually have a passing chance of doing some good old fashion interaction, using the full panoply of our mammal-technology tricks.
Body language, or any significent emulation thereof (emoticons don't bloody count -- you, shut up!), is required if insecure human beings are to be included in the chats. Otherwise, as with IRC, IM and e-mail, people who don't like themselves read all sorts of non-existent hostile tone into the exchanges and then get all uppity or cry or go on a school shooting.
Avatars, despite teh gayness of the nineties, may still have a function to fulfill.
These stories are free but worth money.
You know, that's what I thought too. "Oh, goody, yet another corporation/agency/whatever thinks that Open Source is just a way to get unpaid labour." I don't know... maybe I'm just jaded because of previous bad experiences, but it always leaves a bad taste.
Does it mean that NASA and their contractors will also open-source (or put under a Creative Commons, public domain, etc) _their_ research? Or is it yet another "well, you can do some free work for us" scheme? If I contribute code to say, some control module, will the rest of the schematics there be made public, or does some corporation get to patent it, get it paid by pork-barrel politics, _and_ get the software for it for free?
And reading about virtual meetings in Second Life sure doesn't make it sound like something serious. It sounds more like some "let's pretend that we're hip and fly and on their level" idea a PHB might have.
On the flip side of the coin, I'm wondering how many actual free work will they actually get. Most working OSS nowadays is actually paid work by the likes of IBM, Sun, etc. Check out some of the credits or change logs in Linux some day. Fanboys paying lip service are a dime a dozen, people who can actually produce high quality code... tend to be paid for their work. There are already gazillions of projects on Sourceforge that discovered that, ESR's bullshit be damned, there _aren't_ hordes of hackers just begging to come do some free work.
Mind you, space stuff might generate more buzz, but I still have to wonder exactly how much.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If I understand SL right, this commendable effort on the part of NASA is going to be accessible to either adults or children but not both?
:)
Can a SL location like this be accessible to children *and* adults at the same time?
Kids are (often) interested in 'space stuff' and should be encouraged, same for adults
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Really. Every single one of these "news" posts about Second Life is stupid, pointless, and overblown.
Second Life is not news worthy. Period.
I'm seriously more interested in how Second Life has become such a huge thing where even government agencies bought land in there and are holding meetings there. When it first came out I pretty much thought that it will just crash and burn like most other MMO games that came out at around that time.
So, they want to adopt transparency, but they make themselves accessible to only the fraction of computer users that have Second Life installed? Is there something I'm missing here?
Only if we fail to invent caretaker robots first.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Who cares where they meet? Would it be worthy news if they met in #ossnasa on irc.freenode.net? What on Earth is it about Second Life that makes it such a supposed revolution in human communication? Anyone would think telepathy had been commodified. Flirting and real estate? Enough, sheesh.
The PR person for Second Life must be a Goddess. It is amazing how many articles are written about this game.
But knowing this, this really seems like a good move from these people from NASA. It is hard to get the word out about the projects you would like to work on with the community. It seems any business or university that does anything in Second Life is going to get an article written about them thus increasing interest. As irritating as it is to see another Second Life article...kudos to the guys at NASA for doing whatever they can to spread the word.
That being said, they should probably find a more efficient way of exchanging information than Second Life.
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It seems folks at NASA is treating the whole CosmosCode as some video games. Come on NASA, if you are intending to use CosmosCode for real projects, shouldn't you include some safety mechanism and auditing features to make sure no software buy is going to kill some future astronauts, especially after the deaths of Challenger 1 and Columbia crew? On second thought, it is just another way for NASA managers to shift blames like the previous disasters did.
Lovely that this is what NASA's been reduced to! A bunch of kids holding meetings on Second Life. Wouldn't have anything to do with desperation as the budget is cut would it now? Come on, admit it, you've never heard of a worldwide physics or aerodynamics symposium being held in second life. Compared to real life it's still a cumbersome toy, not the virtual reality that people wish it to be. It has it's place, but serious science isn't it.
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I do not believe the idea of using Second Life to facilitate direct participation is sound. Second Life is not open source software, and it runs on proprietary clients. Any time the game becomes unpopluar, CoLab will automatically be shut down along with the game, and there is nothing NASA can do about it.
Although I believe it exploring alternative ways of running NASA projects, using taxpayer's money on projects that literally decide the lives and deaths of astronauts with software that NASA has no control of is short-sighted, dangerous to astronauts, and it will cost more in the long run, especially when planning a project alone can take years.
I just don't get the whole secondlife thing. Exactly how is it better than IRC ... or AOL chatrooms? It's graphic? Okay... so you need a really expensive computer and lots of bandwidth to play...
... do what?
... for free?
What, you can't play it? Oh... so you mean you just cruise around jerkily and congregate either on purpose or randomly.
Oh, okay... so you pretend to be a hot girl and
Oh, okay... so you design "virtual clothes" and sell them to people who want their avatars to load slower?
No, wait... you make "geek island" and invite all the lonely geeks on their computer to come and try to solve real problems?
Phase 1: Press release including Second Life
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
Ever since van Braun teamed up with Disney to get kids interested in space, NASA has had this tradition of lame "education" programs. The idea is that if you get people enthralled with the idea of space at an early age then you don't need to make any sort of compelling argument as to why we should be bothering with space exploration. When the kids grow up NASA tells em it is all about the science and exploration is just maintained for the intangibles it supplies. Essentially, it's a big bait and switch.
Now, am I the only one who has read Dennis Wingo's MOONRUSH? He not only explains what space exploration should be about (hint: a lot of the resources on earth come solely from ancient meteor impacts.. why not go to the asteroids directly, or to somewhere they are not degraded by geological events?) but he also describes an architecture for doing it that is cheaper than anything NASA ever does and actually makes sense: assembling spacecraft at the ISS and putting another space station (much smaller than the ISS) at the L1 point.
I remember reading about the Apollo era arguments over what was the best way to go to the Moon. van Braun was of the opinion that doing lots of launches to Earth orbit, assembling ships there and then heading off to the Moon was the only sensible option. Other engineers were of the opinion that going direct from the Earth to the Moon was the safest approach and therefore the best option. Of couse, this limits the size of your vessel to something that can fit in a single rocket and be lifted by it directly to the Moon.. and so we ended up with these impractically gigantic rockets that now rust on NASA's lawn. Oh, and in the end they didn't even do a direct flight, they did lunar orbit (if you're going to do lunar orbit you might have well done earth orbit too, where it is actually useful as a staging position).
All in all, NASA is a testimony to what happens when you let nerds manage themselves.. they form endless committees and argue over what colour to paint the bikeshed.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Assuming they get the non-profit discount, the island cost at least US$980 up front with a recurring fee of US$150 each month.
Second Life | Land: Islands.
Too much? Good deal?
Here is a conference paper we presented on this topic in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web here:t 2001_web.html ... We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to The Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhou
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
NASA is doing open source space exploration using Second Life. If only the RIAA and Microsoft teamed up to stop them this would be the most perfect Slashdot story ever.
Hardware by: Lowest Bidder
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What could possible go wrong?
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After seeing this, and hearing lots of things about Second Life, I figured I'd give it a go on my Mac (Mac Pro w/ Radeon x1900) and found that the application crashed twice after about 30-40 minutes play time. It does seem like an interesting idea though, does anyone else have similar problems?
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There are a whole lot of NASA Open-source projects. For example, see http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/ and http://opensource.gsfc.nasa.gov/ .
Going back some time, all software developed for the US government, including NASA, had to be released for free in source form unless specially exempted (i.e. for military or strategic reasons.) At some point, this government-wide requirement went away -- I'm not sure when or why. If anyone remembers, please speak up.
Some people have funny ideas of what constitutes "open source" and "transparency" I suppose... from http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php:
System Requirements
The following hardware and software is REQUIRED to run Second Life successfully. If your computer doesn't meet these requirements, you may not be able to participate in Second Life: PC Minimum System Requirements: * Internet Connection*: Cable or DSL * Operating System: Windows XP (Service Pack 2) o OR Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4) NOTE: Second Life does NOT currently support Windows Vista * Computer Processor: 800MHz Pentium III or Athlon, or better * Computer Memory: 256MB or better * Video/Graphics Card**: o nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better o OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better Mac Minimum System Requirements: * Internet Connection*: Cable or DSL * Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or better * Computer Processor: 1 GHz G4 or better * Computer Memory: 512MB or better * Video/Graphics Card**: o nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better o OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better
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One small thing I liked: in the observatory there is a "Linux Soda" machine, with a variety of flavors (Fedora, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc...) for the asking.
Theaters, meeting rooms, movie screens and the like all seem like a waste in Second Life, but the potential to "visit" places you normally could not visit seems like it could be useful.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
I wouldnt call Second Life players especially talented
NASA CoLab is a broader project than just the Second Life facility... See http://colab.arc.nasa.gov/
To my Dearest NASA AMES Toodie,
"you are screwed!"
Director Generalisimeo Andy will have your, et al., heads in 48 hrs EST. By edect from Heir Bush.
Sig Bush
Sig Bush
Sig Bush.
Toodles
yeah, a bunch of slashdot armchair engineers telling nasa how to do business. fan-fucking-tastic.
Even internal to my NASA center, it's impossible to get source code... I fought for years to get source code to a part of a library that was broken and no one would pay to have it fixed... when I finally got the code it was only partial code and all of the comments had been stripped out.
I've also been told that I'm not allowed to contribute to open source projects in my spare time... I'm not even allowed to mail code snippets to mailing lists to answer questions without clearance from an intellectual property lawyer first. In their view, my intellect is their property.
This policy is such bullshit. Taxpayers pay for the software and grad students and people in industry should have access to it... that's why the constitution bars the government from owning copyrights. But JPL won't let academia, other NASA centers, contractors, etc have their software without a fight. Some people don't even let code get out to other sections at JPL.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
My impression was that there was a maximum number of people that could be signed on into any specific area in Second Life - was it 40?
Let's assume that the NASA meeting has a dozen attendees. That means that this "open meeting" would only be open to 28 people if this is the case.
Please respond if you know the maximum figure (i.e. it's not 40). But even if its 100, 200, then surely this is less open than, ooh, a streaming videocast with a couple of question-collectors in the audience who will pick up messages emailed/IM'd to the meeting and pass them forward? or am I missing something here?
You need to be more specific. The people who plug permanently into the neural connectors are doomed, because the rest of us will just go around disconnecting them from life support and, uh, acquiring their stuff. Darwin at his finest!
For a look at a real community-driven effort to improve the way NASA will spend roughly $300 billion over the next 30 years on manned space exploration, please look at the Direct Launcher proposal by a group of NASA insiders, other aerospace engineers, and space enthusiasts. Send copies to your congresscritter, and your fellow geeks.
e w.asp?tid=5016&start=1683 for the current, very active discussion around this concept.
See http://www.directlauncher.com/ for the original proposal, and
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-vi
I doubt thery'd let "open" stuff into critical systems.
NASA errors on the side of very old OSes and hardware because the stuff has been tested zillions of times.
I say enough of this. When in the hell are we going to build something that actually goes someplace? On the other hand, John Pike said the new Space Vision is a program to replace hardware with artwork.
Hardware: A new type of airplane to evaluate a new concept. If it doesn't contribute much at least it will be cool to fly at airshows (i.e. QSRA, X29).
Or a spaceship...
Here's the requirements for the Linux client: Minimum requirements:
* Internet Connection: Cable or DSL
* Computer Processor: 800MHz Pentium III or Athlon, or better
* Computer Memory: 256MB or better (strongly recommend more!)
* Linux Operating System: A reasonably modern 32-bit Linux environment is required. If you are running a 64-bit Linux distribution then you will need its 32-bit compatibility environment installed.
* Video/Graphics Card:
o nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better
o OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better
**NOTE**: Second Life absolutely requires you to have recent, correctly-configured OpenGL 3D drivers for your hardware - the graphics drivers that came with your operating system may not be good enough! See the TROUBLESHOOTING section if you encounter problems starting Second Life.
For a more comfortable experience, the RECOMMENDED hardware for the Second Life Linux client is very similar to that for Windows, as detailed at:
Well what do you know, there is a public island! http://www.croquetcollaborative.org/ I had better luck connecting when I downloaded the client from their web site as well. I left a balloon with "slashdot.org" written on it. Now that I've found a public island I just need to run into someone. It might help if I didn't get all these UndefinedObject errors.