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."

Comments

I love the idea...

[drinkypoo]

...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?

Re:I love the idea...

[FooAtWFU]

But are those features useful or conducive to the sort of collaboration and feedback that NASA is presumably seeking? Or are they a hindrance? IRC channels have reasonably well-developed moderation features and are particularly resistant to attacks by animated flying penises and the like. Interfacing with IRC channels is a pretty well-defined and simple process, and there are a variety of tools available. You can be in more than one channel/place at once. You do not need to worry about being out of earshot of a conversation accidentally and can view an extensive scrollback of past events. You don't need to worry much about awkwardness with gestures, what your avatar is wearing, or anything like that.

I can think of very few useful features that Second Life has and IRC lacks. The primary one would be images and videos. (They have hyperlinks for those on IRC.) I'm sure a 3D model or two could be made, but the Second Life construction system is not particularly conducive to detailed technical modeling, and they would only really be useful for publicity.

Re:The long history of NASA PR to kids

[QuantumG]

The ultimate stupidity, however, was that they ended up doing LOR instead of EOR anyway, when the choices were EOR or direct. LOR is harder than EOR cause you need a heavy booster. If they had just used medium lift boosters they could have gone to the Moon a lot earlier.. but they chased the tail of the heavy booster because they wanted to do direct and avoid any need for docking at all. I know hindsight is 20/20, but there were people saying exactly this at the start of the program.. and the russians had already shown that docking wasn't hard. I guess it really comes down to the Collier article. von Braun had made such a great case for building spacecraft in orbit that people couldn't see past that dream to the sensible argument that Apollo should dock together in orbit before heading to the Moon.

EOR is exactly what the russians are now offering with the Soyuz.. it'll only cost you $100 million for a trip around the Moon. Shame they don't have a lander. Shame they didn't do it in the 60s.

Good luck getting it though

[EccentricAnomaly]

All code (and other documents, research, etc) written/created by government employees is, by law, public domain. There are a few exceptions (for privacy and national security), and contractors are exempt. What you say is very true... The space act which formed NASA compells it to release it's code. But I work for NASA/JPL which tries to keep its code from other NASA centers through tactics like: 1. not documenting the existence of certain tools 2. pretending tools are undocumented when they are released 3. forcing people who request code to be very specific... i.e. if someone just asks for a program... they will get junk like binaries for a UNIVAC (I'm not kidding).

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.

Re:Good luck getting it though

[hey!]

That's politics.

My brother in law has been a government scientist off and on for many years. When the Reagan administration came in, he left to make more money in the private sector. When the Clinton administration came in, he returned to do research. When the Bush administration came in, he left shortly after to make more money in the private sector.

His problem is that his research is too potentially useful. But some administrations believe that when the government does something that might be useful, it takes bread off the private sector table twice: once as taxes, once as competition. It's hard to say whether he's fortunate or unfortunate -- perhaps more fortunate than he could be. He can make a good living charging for advice that he'd prefer to give for free, and would be required to give for free if he was a public employee.

The theory is that the private sector is much better at deciding what applied research should be done. I'm not sure that this is an idea that can be proved conclusively one way or the other, but one thing is worth noting. Most of the private sector clients my brother in law have are paying him to transfer US knowhow to other countries. I don't think the idea that useful government research hurts Americans makes sense in an era of globalization. It's one of the few ways of boosting domestic industry that the rules of globalization allow.

Re:That's what I thought too

[Moraelin]

I can't say it's a surprise, no. I'm just a bit disgusted, when someone is all pro-F/OSS as long as it's them only taking and never giving. As I was saying, I've had the bad experience of contributing some work on a MUD to a bunch of people who were rabidly pro-Linux and pro-OSS, as lip service goes... but also rabidly paranoid that they must keep everyone from getting _their_ code. Including my code, which was suddenly their property and trade secret. Admittedly, a MUD isn't the greatest project for bragging rights, but it left me a bit allergic to the whole thing anyway.

I dunno... it gives me a mental image of someone coming to a potluck dinner empty-handed. Again. And being very vocal about how cool the concept of sharing is.