viz.

According to this story from Wired, NASA has developed a workgroup devoted to providing open source solutions to the organization’s programming needs. The project is called “CosmosCode,” and what I find most interesting about it is that the meetings that led to its creation were held in Second Life. Also interesting is the fact that the group meeting on NASA’s island were not all experts, but often featured anything from doctoral students and retirees.

Malcolm Gladwell: respected citizen

Malcolm Gladwell: scary criminal

Although there is no information in the article about the avatars the committee used, I don’t think it is trivial that the nexus of these ideas—open source, loosening of traditional disciplinary restrictions—is an online environment where people can depict themselves in any fashion that they choose.

I was rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink over the weekend, and I happened to glance at the acknowledgements. Somehow I missed them in my first read through—either because I typically skip acknowledgements, or because Gladwell placed them at the end of the book. In them he points out how a change in his hairstyle prompted a slew of changes in the way people reacted to him. After trading in his conservative haircut for a wild fro, he began to receive traffic tickets and on one occasion he was stopped by police officers in pursuit of a criminal who resembled him in no way except for the similarity of their pompadours. I’m not sure that this reaction has made its way to environments like Second Life. I’m sure that people in that environment respond to each other based on their chosen appearance, but the very acknowledgement of the fact that that appearance is chosen must affect those reactions. Knowing this, it seems utterly natural to me that NASA’s foray into openness and would be conducted in such an environment.