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.

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.