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

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[FooAtWFU]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Hey, that's a funny kind of "transparency". But I bet this is about what this all will amount to...

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:I love the idea...

[Spikeles]

I thought NASA would be more interested in things like Croquet

OK, who's the Second Life Publicity Whore?

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

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

That's what I thought too

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:That's what I thought too

[DogDude]

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

Try telling that to our President. Please.

She must be hot

[brkello]

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.

Opensource virtual free labor game?

[poopie]

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!

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.