I should hope that for most educated people, the answer to that question would be "no".
The reason is because NASA is a government agency. Government can have a connection to civil society -- the non-state sector -- in what is *a* civil society, i.e. a liberal democracy.
But the concept of civil society obviously means "not the state".
I shouldn't have to explain this, or argue strenuously to get this across, and yet now that we have a Wired State that extends from Mountain View to Manassas with Gov 2.0 and all that implies, these boundaries are eroding -- and often deliberately erased and falsely portrayed (people like Jared Cohen revolving out of State to go work for Google Ideas is a good example).
This sort of confusion between state and civil society isn't a good thing. A state can be made by the people, for the people and of the people, but it still remains...separate from the people. "By, for, and of" the people is way different than "The People's Democracy," if you were ever in the GDR or any of the Soviet states. A state that confuses itself and non-state actors is a state that can go bad two ways: a) becoming too intrusive to the civic domain b) becoming too lax about laws and regulations that the people have placed on the state, i.e. accountabililty for conflict of interest.
Now, if we can get that much straight, let's try to go further. Is a project that NASA mounts that involves "open government" (sigh), that has volunteers from various enthusiastic collaborators, that gives its self the groovy sounding name Colab, that has open source software in it -- now, is THAT civil society?
Um, no. It's the government, with a groovy program that has interactions with civil society, but let's be clear that it's not the same thing, even if the people in it may celebrate themselves as the ne-plus-ultra of enlightened citizenitude, and if they happen to revolve in and out of government to various tech firms -- let's say.
OK, then. I think we can actually agree on this point for the most part, so let's press on. If a project in Second Life hosted by NASA Colab -- i.e. where the simulator leasing cost is paid for by NASA -- then appears, would you say it is related to NASA? If the NASA brand name is used in connection with it, would you say that NASA "owned" it in some fashion? Even if it involved "open government" and "volunteers" and "people putting in their own intellectual property" it's still under the government hat. (Under the Second Life TOS and on the SL platform the avatar name appears on each created thing, polygon or prim, texture, etc. and people still can claim their own IP in SL.)
Now, if you are still with me -- because I think this matters way more than just Second Life drama and politics so I hope you are -- let's say there is a Better World contest -- Linden Lab, the makers of SL, have an annual prize they give out of $10,000 to a group that has designed a project that better real life through the use of the virtual world. The nature of the prize would seem to call for groups in society that believe they can make a better world. The prize doesn't stipulate that you must be from a non-profit; you can be from a business -- and it doesn't say you can't be a government or state-funded. There isn't any restriction like that.
Even so, some people, like me, look at a modest prize like this for a very mighty idea, and say, you know, this prize should go to NGOs or individuals or small start-ups that aren't wealthy, that don't have access to whopping big pots of government money, because it's not the kind of sum of money that makes a difference. If you are a small group trying to make the Internet and virtual worlds accessible to the disabled because it amplifies their abilities, and you are a nonprofit, like Virtual Ability, the prize-winner in a past year, $10,000 means a lot to you and "makes a difference". If you were IBM, let's say, and simply had a better idea for disabled access in your business, that would be great, but $10,000 wouldn't be significant, given the kind of budgets you already have.
That context is important to explain, but it's also important to explain that in that better-world business that the Lindens claim they are in, they really have to be agnostic (and aren't, really) about whether nonprofit, business, or government actually is the sector that comes up with betterworldness.
So now we come to the specifics of the applicants last year and the call for community commentary, which I made on my blog. First -- a digression about artificial life that is an important community context.
The Lindens had among the runner-ups the sionChicken business which sells artificial chicken life forms to residents enabling them to have fun with a pet that responds to proximity and feeding and has a life cycle, and also breed the pets for rares and eggs of different colours. The profits from this business, which proved wildly popular, are probably in the high six figures for this year, and it applied for the prize simply because the people who made this business felt that the advances they made in improving scripts for artificial life (which were considerable, given that they went from laggy, problematic monsters to fun pets due to user feedback), and the fun and communities of farming and small business that they created during the real and virtual recessions, improved real life and virtual life. The lefty and snobby SLuminerati, of course, thought a capitalist business project even with science in it, that involved mass culture, middle American farming values, and lag, was horrible, and screamed about the nomination -- but not to worry, it didn't win anyway.
What *did* win was the San Jose Tech Museum (just as problematic as NASA in my book, but that's for another day). But one of the runner-ups was NASA Colab in Second Life, which was described by the Lindens on their website in just that way -- a NASA-branded project in our virtual world (this project had put on a simulation of Apollo on the anniversary and various other educational exhibits).
I responded to this bit of news by saying the following:
2) The Library and Archives at NASA CoLab in Second Life
Submitted by: Archivist Llewellyn from NASA's CoLab
I'm sorry, but, it's not like NASA -- NASA ?! -- is lacking for resources here. It's disgraceful that they even put in a application to a community resource like this. They are a large, government, tax-payer-supported entity with enormous resources.
So I don't think they belong here. It would likely be impossible for the Lindens to say they'd disqualify government-sponsored projects. For one, it would be hard to control. So many nonprofits take government money, especially in EU and other countries (it is really only the U.S. that has that tradition of private philanthropy and non-profits). And it would be hard to say, as Eric Rice once inimitably put it, that some people in virtual worlds have to drink at separate drinking fountains (he said it about the corporations invading in 2007).
The reality is, this is the Lindens' Better World sort of prize. People who made real life better using SL. And by saying that hugely wealthy (by SL standards especially) entities get to compete on the same playing field as little nonprofits for the disabled, or a student's bright idea for a social networking and commerce-boosting tool, is just wack.
I'm sure those steeped in the government projects of SL, of which there are no shortage given the handsome government grants that go with those projects, will strenuously object. Let them. I think this contest should be for non-governmental groups, not giant government science agencies. They had their chance to make a better world in real life; they blew it. Now it's the turn of these virtual entities -- and in aquiring the patina of virtuality, I think they aren't any more lipsticked than the chicken -- and the chicken should win this beauty contest.
You can see the blog comments for the slew of protests that resulted, but here's the essence from the first one from the usual anonymous frightened grammar-challenged drive-by slammer:
Archivist Llewellyn and her Library are on NASA land, however her and her staff are not government employees and they work as unpaid volunteers.
While the virtual land may be owned by NASA, the content and the work are developed not using direct government resources.
Your assumption of their work and sponsorship is incorrect.
I then had to endure a number of claims I wasn't checking facts, I hadn't called anyone like a good journalist, blah blah blah -- merely because I *disagreed with their self-characterization*.
To defense my perspective, I started with the Lindens' own characterization of them, *based on their own application* which had NASA all over it.
I proceeded to point out that having the NASA logo and brand; volunteering for NASA; putting a project on land (server space) that NASA paid for *made you a NASA project*.
You couldn't take all those things -- NASA brand, land, prestige, attention, connection -- and then suddenly whine that people who didn't realize you were "independent volunteers" with your "own IP" should be "fired from their jobs if they are journalists".
This is where very deep and very vast confusion exists in the minds of the little people of Second Life that go and work for free on NASA projects. I say little, because they don't give us their real names and we'll have to assume they are modest and/or fearful.
Archivist Llewellyn is a librarian in real life, I have no idea who she is but she's one angry beaver now, because yesterday, in a talk about a completely different subject, in room chat during a voice presentation where backchat is encouraged, out of the blue, she suddenly remembered her grievances about this contest (which she lost) and told me to shove my blog up my ass in vulgar barely-disguised terms. It was very odd, but a testimony to the deepness and vastness of *emotion* that these "scientific types" come to acquire about their open source voluntary projects with big government science agencies that they want to see as having some kind of spiritual, mystical kinship with ...start-ups. Or...small businesses. Or...nonprofits.
There was this really daffy Twilight moment during [email protected] -- and you can hear it on the Ustream tapes if you go through all of them -- where a State Department official, giddy with the idea of "free agents" that Beth Kanter was espousing, i.e. people not tied down to institutions, described herself as being a free agent who could serve the cause of open government. I try to unravel the geek life experiences and Internet-based education that went into that sort of curious thinking that would make someone in the civil or foreign service unable to tell where the citizenry left off and they as an official representative of the state began -- but it was too tangled. Too tangled.
And that tangle is what tangles up Archivist Llewellyn. She wants to dine out on the NASA connection, she wants to make use of a free NASA land base for her project, she wants to be in a contest openly described as an institutionally-backed NASA undertaking, yet scream that she is free, independent, unattached and completely undeserving of Prokofy Neva's sharp critique, claiming that she is disgraceful trying to suck down a modest grant in a virtual world when she has those kinds of resources. She doesn't think so -- in her mind, in the concocted narrative of her long-suffering life, she is working for free (and at some level resentful, hence the agida); she is underappreciated, as anonymous avatars always eventually get; she is put-upon by being mentioned by the evil Prokofy, etc.
But NASA is not civil society. CoLab may be a lovely thing, but it's not the independent sector. It may reach out to the "commuuuuuunity" which usually just mean the likeminded connected ones, not the general public -- but that's not civic, that's state reaching to civic. And it enabled Archivist to get a gig. Great. Let's not confuse that with betterworldness. It's not. (You may disagree; that's fine, but then don't confuse civil society and state).
Why? Because enabling government agencies to assume the fictional guise that they are community-based-organizations (this is a post-Soviet territories problem for example) only makes government more sprawling and more unaccountable, not more.
It's good for government to have programs about "open government" and even "open source" -- it should be one of two choices of software, of course, and it should be openly debated (and isn't) but that isn't the problem here.
The problem is the defensiveness, insularity, and sheer mama-grizzly ferocity when faced with legitimate criticism about the very status of the project. It's the preposterous refusal to understand that while they have a right to submit their application to a community project, they don't have a right to bully and silence criticism about it, and claim it's something it's not. They don't have a right to claim that people who make this legitimate criticism about a misleading status of a project (that it is independent and not resourced even when it has a government office paying for the server) are somehow printing falsehoods, eligible for firing from a putative journalist job, or deserving of having to shove their blog up their ass.
Government has to know its place, regarding people. It doesn't know its place, when it enables creepy anonymous and cranky geeks like this to run a project and become belligerent about criticism about the very nature of government and society themselves.
I continue to look for answers to these questions:
o Why does someone who has the government paying for their server lease where their project is based ($1000 set-up fee and $295 a month) think they aren't sustained by the government and related to the government?
o Why does someone who volunteers to help a government office imagine they are some poor tiny start-up?
o Why does someone using a government brand name like NASA think they are unrelated to NASA?
o Why does the government -- and their volunteer tiny start-up -- together think they should suck down a community resource?
Throughout this saga, I never saw any actual NASA official become available to opine on all this, but I'll now try to write them, now that I am going to follow "[email protected]".
I think these are important issues. It's not about the chickens of Second Life. It's not about some thin-skinned geek librarian. It's not about a gadfly blogger. It's about whether or not you draw a line between people and government. When you can't do that, you have intrusive government that takes away your rights.
Claiming this story is about innovation and the FUD of people who can't see a groovy new Gov 2.0 enables the liars of Gov 2.0 to hijack the government to be unaccountable.
They don't have to care about cranky volunteers harassing bloggers. Worse, they don't have to answer for whatever wacky thing some "free agent" might undertake in their name. Their name, after all, isn't theirs; it's the People of the United States.
As the father of Dr. Zhivago put it so plaintively, "I'm a member of the people, too."
What I hope is that some bright, scientific NASA guy could eventually look at this and say one of two things:
o Yes, when people who are independent volunteers who happened to put a project on our land, they should describe themselves on their blogs, etc. and apply for contests under the name of their project, not claiming they are a NASA project. They can mentioning our role and relationship to CoLab, but if they are not paid staff or consultants, and are volunteers in essentially an informal and (perhaps non-contracted?) relationship, they should make that clear -- and they -- and we didn't do that this time. We'll try to do better. Meanwhile, we will print disclaimers about any liability for these sorts of informal voluntary uses of our open source software and our SL island.
o No, it's ok for us to have put our brand on this project, to put the independent volunteers who work on our land under our tent, to claim the relationship is about our NASA project. Furthermore, it's ok for us to apply for this community project because we are making a better world. Everything is fine, except rather than whining that she was unrelated to us, Archivist Llewellyn should have admitted she was part of the Borg -- and happily.
What I hope the adults at some [email protected] desk can grasp is that what's *not* acceptable, is a third answer:
o NASA gets to spawn projects which use its name but have the street cred of civil society. NASA gets to allow its volunteer to whom it has given free land, Archivist Llewellyn, to bark at an inquiring blogger that she is independent, owns her own IP and is free and independent from this NASA-supported project. NASA has no comment when our volunteers tell bloggers to stuff their blogs up their asses, because bloggers should never question NASA CoLab's efforts to appear cool.
Yet, I'm about 67 percent sure that the third answer is exactly that Archivist's overlords at NASA actually think and while they may not say it, actually believe they have a right to think. That's the scary part.
Of course, the most scary piece of all this is Archivist's edging away from the problem of NASA's outright and documented and celebrated support of the awful Sinulgarity University by saying "that's Ames, that's not us" -- as if CoLab of NASA is somehow not NASA, and as if one branch of NASA that does one bad thing isn't something another branch of NASA needs to be concerned about [I was repeatedly told I was a "jerk" and an "idiot" for making this valid point. Given that Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, is an avowed fan of the Singularity and Kurweil (Kurzweil's son worked at Linden Lab, and Kurzweil was a keynote speaker at the annual community conference once year), it's not a trivial matter that NASA supports the Singularity University and NASA has SL sims. Not at all.
These discussions are not pleasant. *I'm* not pleasant when I raise them and hammer on them again and again. But it does matter if NASA thinks that it is the same as civil society, and if it cannot grasp these issues.
Recent Comments