International Spaceflight Museum

Thanks to ISM visitor KikoHunniton, a new video of the ISM has been posted to CNN’s iReport site. Click on that link to read the article, and enjoy the video here:

One of our active members, Mike Goerisch, has just posted a truly excellent article in his blog with a spot-on, entertaining description of the ISM. Do have a look.

Of course, but in particular the US Internal Revenue Service have sent us a letter asking for more information regarding our application for tax-exempt status. This is excellent news, since it means we are getting close to approval of that long-awaited state. While the ISM Corporation has been a non-profit corporation in the eyes of the State of Kansas, where we are incorporated, since 2006, that is not the same as having recognition from the IRS.

So, please help us keep the doors open as we clear this final hurdle! The bills are due again next week, and we are far from being able to pay our monthly debt to Linden Lab. You can follow our progress in that effort on our online balance sheet here, and you can help by visiting our Donation page here.

We’re almost there!

Kimberly Rufer-Bach’s new book, The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement, includes prominent mention of the International Spaceflight Museum, according to Dave Taylor (Davee Commerce in Second Life).

Kim knows what she’s talking about. This is her second book about Second Life®, and she has been a member of the ISM Planning Group for several years. Kim’s in-world development consulting group, The Magicians, has done some of the most original and effective builds in the virtual world.

Our congratulations and best wishes to MICA-VW (Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics – Virtual Worlds), the first professional scientific society formed entirely within virtual worlds. This week they were featured in Wired and Tish Shute’s blog.

When MICA’s founder, Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, first came to Second Life in late 2006, the ISM provided meeting space and an introduction to the culture and mechanics of our world to Piet and some of his astrophysicist friends. MICA met in the ISM Clubhouse and ISM Workshop for about a year until they acquired their own island, StellaNova, and joined the SciLands group in SL.

We at the ISM are very proud to be associated with this illustrious and innovative group, and are glad we were able to help them get started.

The ISM Balance Sheet has been replaced by a new Google spreadsheet because of a technical glitch with Google Docs. There is a shortened URL available, xrl.us/ismmoney1.

If you look at the bottom of the new spreadsheet, you’ll see we received a huge donation (L$30,000) from an avatar in the past day, which effectively saves Spaceport Alpha for this month! Many thanks!! (I am not revealing the avatar’s name at this time, since we don’t have permission to do so. If consent to let us acknowledge this generousity is given, we will publish it here.)

Now we just have to raise at least US$152 by the end of next week, and Spaceport Bravo will also be with us for at least one more month.

Thanks again for all your support since we started this museum, in 2005!

Do you Twitter? Even if you don’t, you can see what people are “tweeting” about the ISM by going to http://hashtags.org/tag/sl-ism. If you do have a Twitter account and want to discuss the musuem there, please use “#SL-ISM” somewhere in your message so it will get indexed.

Some examples of tweets using this tag:

This image is from a Twitter client called iTweet.

To find out more about hashtags, see the Twitter Fan Wiki entry. For more ideas on using Twitter and other online social network tools for nonprofits and education, visit Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog.

Thanks to Earth Primbee and Paradox Olbers (one of the ISM Corporation directors), we have a promotional video about the ISM on YouTube now.

Once you see this, be sure to come back here and make a donation, so we can keep this marvelous place going! For more info about our finances, see our balancesheet.

We have closed the online ISM giftshop at CafePress.com due to problems with their interface and lack of sales. But watch for our new shop at Zazzle.com, coming soon!

The application for federal tax-exempt status — non-profit, or 501(c)(3) — has been filed with the US Internal Revenue Service on behalf of the ISM Corporation. This corporation is the Real Life organization that manages the financial affairs of the International Spaceflight Museum. Now we wait to hear from them.

Assuming the application is approved, we can then petition Linden Lab to lower our “land use fees” (server costs) to the level charged other non-profit organizations, which would cut our costs drastically. Since buying our first island we have paid full retail for our space-space, with current costs running nearly US$400 per month. But in the meanwhile, again assuming the application is approved, anyone who has made a financial donation to the museum and who pays US income taxes can include those donations in their itemized charitable deductions back to the corporation’s founding in October 2006. This is possible because we submitted the application (just barely) within twenty-seven months of incorporating.

In the meantime, thank you for your past support, and please don’t stop! We need your contributions to keep the museum running, so visit our donation page, or just click this button to send a gift to the ISM now.