In addition to my reinventing government and science policy panels at Netroots Nation on Friday the 18th, I’ll be moderating the only space-related panel at Netroots Nation, entitled “Progressive NASA and Space Policy Under a New Administration.”  We have a great panel lineup– Chris Bowers of OpenLeft.com, George Whitesides of the National Space Society and Virgin Galactic, Lori Garver of Avascent (and formerly NASA), and Patti Grace Smith most recently of the FAA.

Then, about an hour after the panel we’ll be hosting a Space Meetup / Obama Space Policy Platform Meeting in downtown Austin, Texas.

It is my fervent hope that after next Friday we’ll have a much clearer sense of what a progressive space policy that all Americans can get behind in 2009 looks like, and also have the Netroots more informed about and actively engaged in space policy advocacy.

I’m not really sure what to think of this, but I’m quoted on pg. 33 of this month’s US Airways Magazine in an article about using wikis for social change.

I’m very pleased to announce that for the first time, The Netroots Nation (Yearly Kos) Convention will feature a panel on space policy, July 18th or 19th in Austin, Texas. The panel, entitled, “Progressive NASA & Space Policy Under a New Administration,” is an opportunity to bring critical space policy issues to light within a potent progressive political constituency– the Netroots– that hasn’t historically paid much attention to space. It is also an opportunity for the Netroots to weigh in on what a new progressive space policy agenda could be under a progressive Administration in 2009.

I will be moderating a panel comprised of prominent progressive bloggers, leading space advocates, and space policy advisors to national Democratic campaigns, including Chris Bowers, Managing Editor of OpenLeft.com, Lori Garver, space policy advisor to the Presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, Patti Smith, recently retired as the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation for the FAA, and George Whitesides, Executive Director of the non-profit National Space Society. The discussion will address space policy from the following perspective:

“NASA is in crisis–overburdened, under-funded, and inefficient. Yet the progressive legacy of space, which dates back to JFK, is being quietly reborn: NASA can reinvent itself as a critical resource in climate change mitigation; the UN and some in the U.S. military are collaborating to prevent space weapons from becoming an arms race with China; progressive “NewSpace” entrepreneurs are creating new domestic high-tech jobs. Before 2009, a new progressive space policy needs to be devised and advocated beyond the traditional space constituencies, to upgrade Bush’s failing space exploration vision. Who better to initiate this work than the Netroots?

While traditionally a niche constituency on the national political radar, space policy takes on particular importance during the General Election, as 100,000s of aerospace jobs are at stake in the key swing States of Florida and Ohio. This year, NASA’s policy of returning humans to the Moon has come under fire from the Left since it is generally thought of as one of George W. Bush’s signature policy goals– his “Vision for Space Exploration.” Progressives in the space community are working hard to dissociate this policy agenda from the failed Bush Presidency so that it may be considered on its own merits. They are also formulating new space policy goals more central to the Progressive agenda, such as expanding NASA’s role in understanding Earth systems to mitigate climate change, as a bulwark against declining science and technology education in the US, and as a diplomatic tool for peaceful international collaboration with Europe, Russia, and even China. The panel will provide their perspective on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the candidates in the realm of space policy in the General Election, and will weigh in on their vision(s) of a progressive space policy under a new Administration in 2009.

Please join us at an organizing meeting for supporters of Barack Obama in the aerospace community on Saturday May 31st during the International Space Development Conference. Event details:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/meeting/4v9q

Organizing meeting for Barack Obama supporters attending the International Space Development Conference in Washington, DC, building on the earlier meeting on Thursday, with input from some new people who can’t make the Thursday meeting.

We’ll make plans both for conducting outreach to the aerospace community on behalf of Barack Obama this summer around events such as the Netroots Nation convention in Austin in July.

We’ll also discuss Obama’s space policy platform and how we can best contribute our perspectives to it.

Time: Saturday, May 31 at 6:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Host: Andrew Hoppin
Location: Lobby of the Capitol Hilton Hotel (Washington, DC)
1001 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036

This video is of the first 5 minutes of my presentation to the PSFK New York Conference on March 27th… There is a joke herein “[Second Life] is the best thing EVER!” that references a comment I made before the beginning of this video clip… Trust me- it’s funny if you see the whole thing. Really…

As part of the first ever US Congressional hearing simulcast with a virtual world (it wasn’t QUITE mixed-reality), the House Telecommunications & the Internet Subcommittee held a hearing last week entitled “Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium.”

During the hearing, Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, played a machinima video that featured NASA CoLab in Second Life… sort of! While it was great to be featured alongside NOAA as a pioneering example of Federal government use of virtual worlds, most of the video footage displayed was actually of NASA CoLab’s neighbor island, the International Spaceflight Museum.

ISM, an independent non-profit 501c3 organization, was the premier space-related destination in Second Life long before we at NASA came along, and without their generous advice and countless hours of hands-on support, it’s doubtful that NASA CoLab would have become a thriving open public+government community in Second Life. ISM still has the most extensive and beautiful space-related environment in Second Life in my opinion, and apparently Linden Labs’ machinima makers agree. I do hope that Linden Lab sets the record straight next time they’re in Congress, if not before!

UPDATE: Well, Linden Lab not only corrected the credit to ISM, they actually removed the footage of NASA CoLab island and removed all mention of NASA, which was unnecessary… Ah well!

When I saw the charge for Oyster Bar in Feb. 07 on my credit card statement while working on my 2007 taxes, my brain needed a minute of concentration to recall that it was for lunch with Jay Ackroyd, with whom I co-created the 2007 Virtual YearlyKos Convention.  I hadn’t thought about Jay in months.

The memory of that lunch with Jay was data in a compressed file format in my brain that became extractable into an uncompressed readable format only when paired with a corollary data set– the charge for the Oyster Bar on my credit card statement.  Now that that compressed file is extracted, I remember a lot of details of that lunch with Jay, and will for some time, until it auto-archives after a certain amount of time without being accessed.  Wow.

From my writeup about my panel at the upcoming PSFK Conference in New York:

“Collaborative co-working is putting more people on the creative “edges” of workgroups by fostering informal but vocationally relevant peer to peer interaction across boundaries of bureaucracy, organization, and in the case of NASA with Second Life, physical geography. Cultural cross-pollination results, making organizations more contextually aware, nimble, and responsive. It’s Biz Stone’s (Twitter founder) “crushed ice theory” at work– with more surface area, the crushed ice melts faster. Co-working exposes more surface area within an organization, melting bureaucracy away and generating creative juice from the meltwater.”

Posting the PDF here so that anyone can access it… Thanks again to the entire NASA and non-NASA Second Life team that made this mixed-reality event happen– and to the paper writing team that pulled together a record of the event and lessons learned in very short order. See also my original post about the event.

(please post comments over at the new SpaceDemocrats.org thread instead of posting them here) Many space constituents are publicly critical of the Obama campaign for campaign rhetoric that is less overtly supportive of the status quo of the US space program than that of the Clinton or McCain campaigns. However, to this constituent of space, Obama’s ambivalence makes him THE MOST ATTRACTIVE Presidential candidate in this campaign.Why?Because I believe that the WORST CASE scenario for the US space program under a new Administration is the status quo, and that we’re quite unlikely– even under an Obama administration– to experience major cutbacks in public space spending, due to the political capital that the status quo of space policy enjoys in key large States.Thus, I believe the real issue of concern for space constituents in this Presidential campaign is how much IMPROVEMENT there can be on current space policy under a new Administration. In that context, I believe that an Administration LESS beholden to the status quo– an Obama Administration– is MORE likely to conduct a thorough and objective analysis of opportunities for improvement. Thus, while paying less lip service to the current space program at this juncture of the campaign, I believe that Obama is more likely than any other candidate to institute the sorts of reforms that many of us progressives who work in the space community wish to see, such as:-Appointing dynamic and technically competent leaders to the top posts at NASA who have the charisma and gravitas required to reform the culture of the Agency and turn it into the vibrant “startup” organization that it was decades ago as NACA, thus enabling it to better:-Pursue an aggressive human exploration program beyond LEO that pushes the envelope of technological innovation without significant budget increases, and presents inspiring opportunities for multi-national collaboration in the peaceful uses of outer space, and-Accelerate of the handover of LEO activities to ‘NewSpace’ private commercial enterprises, with the US and other governments as a customer, and with an emphasis on competition, entrepreneurship and innovation rather than large guaranteed “cost plus” contracts, and-Fully leverage NASA’s potential as an ‘Earth Systems Engineering’ Agency as a key component of a comprehensive Federal climate change mitigation program.I believe that an Obama Administration is far more likely to call for and to have the courage to see through these sorts of policy reforms than that of any other candidate that is today more overtly laudatory of the status quo of the US space program.Does anyone really want the status quo of the US space program to endure? (please post comments over at the new SpaceDemocrats.org instead of posting them here)