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Radical Transparency at NASA Via Second Life

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gaaames-in-spaaace dept.

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."

14 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. OK, who's the Second Life Publicity Whore? by Cr0w+T.+Trollbot · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It seems like every week Slashdot has a story on Second Life doing this or that or bla blah blah. What I want to know is: Who is the Second Life Paid Publicity Whore? After all, we're talking about a game with less than 1/10th the players of World of Warcraft, and yet there seem to be almost as many stories about it on Slashdot. Exactly whose palm is getting greased here?

    Smell that, gentlemen? That's the smell of 100% genuine Astroturf!

    Crow T. Trollbot

    1. Re:OK, who's the Second Life Publicity Whore? by geekoid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Second life has more impact in different ways then WoW.
      If people where meeting in Iron FOrge, it would ahve been in the story.
      Most people don't use WoW to plan things outside of WoW. Spare me your "this one time..."story. Please.)

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:OK, who's the Second Life Publicity Whore? by fat+man+with+a+monke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It seems like every week Slashdot has a story on Second Life doing this or that or bla blah blah. What I want to know is: Who is the Second Life Paid Publicity Whore? After all, we're talking about a game with less than 1/10th the players of World of Warcraft, and yet there seem to be almost as many stories about it on Slashdot. Exactly whose palm is getting greased here?

      Smell that, gentlemen? That's the smell of 100% genuine Astroturf!

      Crow T. Trollbot


      It also seems like every week Second Life is, in fact, doing this or that. Given that second life is the first of its kind, this isn't surprising. Remember the story last week about the casinos? (if you don't, i'm sure it'll be posted again sometime this week) Maybe if NASA had chosen to use WoW, this story would be about WoW. Shouldn't you insinuate that someone at NASA is getting their palms greased by someone at Slashdot so that they have stories to post about Second Life to keep their plams getting greased? Second Life is innovative sometimes, imitative sometimes, but frankly, it's always interesting to see people's new applications.
  2. That's what I thought too by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:That's what I thought too by DogDude · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ll code (and other documents, research, etc) written/created by government employees is, by law, public domain.

      Try telling that to our President. Please.

      --
      I don't respond to AC's.
  3. For children of all ages? by myowntrueself · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  4. Second Life First.. by delire · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Second Life First.. by The-Bus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because we're finally close to the "virtual reality" that used to sell so many magazine covers (and Lawnmower Man tickets) ten/fifteen years ago.

      --

      Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

  5. She must be hot by brkello · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
  6. Virtual funding, virtual meetings by syousef · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    1. Re:Virtual funding, virtual meetings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Hmmm!

      "Lovely that this is what NASA's been reduced to!"

      Reduced? Its budget was reduced far more in the last adminstration, and was allowed less innovation. Pete Worden, the new head of ARC, has a history of encouraging innovation since before he headed the DC-X project for SDI. That's what's at work here.

      "A bunch of kids holding meetings on Second Life."

      Having been publishing research on the subject of our team's NASA Colab project since 1988, I kind of like being called a kid again. I wish it were true!

      "Come on, admit it, you've never heard of a worldwide physics or aerodynamics symposium being held in second life."

      I hear of fewer and fewer of them at all, because of the cost of running and attending them. There have already been substantive business meetings on SL, and several excellent astronomy presentations that I know of. Their costs on SL are very small by comparison to those in RL. That, and improvements coming in SL, will encourage more of them, till we see many worldwide conferences, perhaps even some that would meet *your* august standards. :-)

      On April 12th, there *will* be a world-wide event, if not the sort you're looking for. It will be a celebration of Yuri Gagarin's flight into orbit, the first for humans. It is known around the world as "Yuri's Night". The SL celebration will be linked to RL ones around the world.

      "Compared to real life it's still a cumbersome toy, not the virtual reality that people wish it to be."

      Few in SL will say it has no limitations. The interesting part is how much can already be done, not what we can bitch about not doing, yet. It doesn't take a Phd., to move something out of the class of "toy".

      "It has it's place, but serious science isn't it."

      Odd that you should say that. It seems the idea that science is the only reason for NASA's existence is still firmly entrenched in some quarters. Our project at NASA CoLab is one in which we hope that a number of research people from NASA and the New Space companies will drop by to tell us where we've gone wrong. That way, we can get better! They'll be able to criticize better and better as a new project there, to make virtual worlds accurate simulators of scientific and engineering related phenomena, progresses.

      Perhaps by the time these "kids" have done the heavy lifting, august personages like yourself can take a look.

      Regards,

      Tom Billings

  7. Opensource virtual free labor game? by poopie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    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 ... do what?

    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? ... for free?

    Phase 1: Press release including Second Life
    Phase 2: ?
    Phase 3: Profit!

  8. Re:I love the idea... by Spikeles · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I thought NASA would be more interested in things like Croquet

    --
    I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
  9. NASA has had open source for a long time by Morty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.