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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?
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I'm not sure that I want to see seven foot tall wieners running around NASA.
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.
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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.
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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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 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!
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.
Yes, it is.
http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/
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.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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