NASA has had a presence in Second Life for almost two years now with Explorer Island and CoLab Island. Explorer Island has been the subject of two i-reports so far, Rocket Flasheart wrote about attending the Mars landing event that took place in Second Life on Explorer Island ( http://secondlife.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/27/explorer-island/) and Janey Bracken wrote a follow-up story when a group of i-reporters subsequently visited Explorer Island ( www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-27510). Explorer Island is a place where much information can be found - information on NASA missions and projects, the results of these activities and much, much more. Models of Mars rovers can be found there, as well as a planetarium, an asteroid floating around the sim and lots of other things that look like the sort of thing you imagine when you think of NASA.
And then there is CoLab Island, a more mysterious entity at first glance. You can find some objects there that are space related, but meeting places and an amphitheater take up a good portion of the sim, whereas much of the space on Explorer Island is devoted to interactive displays. The name of the island itself comes from "collaboration". "CoLab - Leading by COLABeration" signs can be found throughout the headquarters building. NASA has decided to open itself up to the world by creating an interactive environment in Second Life. With Explorer Island people can discover, manipulate, learn about and even participate in NASA activities, such as the Mars landing described in Rocket Flasheart's i-report. CoLab is the place to meet, discuss and generate ideas.
I spoke with sim manager Drew Frobozz about CoLab Island. Frobozz has been working as a contractor with NASA since 2006 and helped to create NASA CoLab Island in SL in the Fall of 2006. CoLab Island is part of a broader project , NASA CoLab, in RL. In Frobrozz's words "CoLab (the whole project) is an effort to get NASA to collaborate more directly with the public through social media, co-working, open-source software, etc. , taking the tools and culture that generate a lot of innovation and energy in the start-up entrepreneurial world of Silicon Valley and bringing it into government. So we built collaborative co-working communities for NASA as part of that work and we help internal NASA groups that want to have their mission/project/team collaborate with the public do so. The intended result is that people outside NASA get to contribute to the space program and people inside NASA get hands on help; and each learn from one another." CoLab, as an internal NASA only collaborative working group, started at Ames Research Center. The decision was then taken to expand CoLab into Second Life because, according to Frobozz , "SL was a solution to a problem we had. We wanted to initiate co-working between NASA and non-NASA folks in the technology startup hotbed of San Francisco but found that it was legally and financially difficult to open a new government facility or place government employees in a non-government facility so we were limited in our ability to explore collaborative co-working in the context of NASA, unless we wanted to keep it entirely internal to NASA... we started coworking internally at NASA Ames but for the non-side+NASA goal, we needed a different way to do it and SL gave us the opportunity to do it virtually."
NASA has already had a couple of interesting results from the whole CoLab experiment. A new, virtual CoLab community, made up of NASA people from different centers and also non-NASA people, has developed in Second Life, an SL CoLab group or community, just as there is an Ames CoLab. In Frobrozz's words, "(SL is) unlike the inside of a bureaucratic government agency, (in that) there are no trappings of rank, age, etc. ... so it's conducive to a different kind of internal collaboration than we tend to have in RL. Most of the other NASA people doing work here (many of them contributing to CoLab, and many of them doing their own work on the other NASA island, Explorer Island, and in other parts of the Scilands) are not doing it in the context of a CoLab at their Center" . Now CoLabs are starting to take shape in other NASA centers because people have recognized and experienced the benefits of working in this kind of collaborative environment and want to expand it to their own work sites. At least some of this is due to the SL experience which has allowed NASA people from all over to actually participate in a CoLab environment.
We all know of NASA for the exploration of space but now NASA has become an innovator in managing organizational change as well. Some of this can be seen in NASA's willingness to explore the metaverse and "set up shop" there. Thinking outside of the box must have been necessary throughout NASA's history (and it is 50 years old this year) in order to get rockets off the ground, into space and to wherever they are supposed to go; now this kind of thinking has been applied to the organization itself.
NASA CoLab (244, 111, 22)
1. Inside NASA CoLab headquarters
2. Overview of CoLab Island