International Spaceflight Museum

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 past few weeks have seen quite a bit of activity in the background, and soon some of it will become obvious on this site as well.

Paradox Olbers (SL name) has taken on the day-to-day operational leadership of the ISM planning group in Second Life, and was elected to the ISM Corporation’s board of directors.

This website will have a new look soon, as well as a new “landing page”, so you won’t be immediately on this blog page in future, but will need to either navigate here or use a longer URL. If you’d like a preview or want to watch the work in progress, go here. You can leave comments about the new page design on this post if you like.

The new exhibit info wiki is acquiring translations into a number of languages, thanks to friends of Becka, who has been contributing articles to this blog as well. We will be adding more research results to that wiki as time goes on, too.

There is more in the works, but we’ll wait till the other things are closer to reality before mentioning them here. Congratulations (and thanks) to Paradox, and to all the planning group members who are working hard to help make the best museum in Second Life become even better!

Longtime ISM member Opal Lei has started a new wiki for the museum, which we plan to use to document our exhibits. Instead of using notecards, which are somewhat limited and inconvenient (filling up visitors’ inventories), we will create weblinks to the appropriate wiki page, to be opened in the visitors’ web browser.

As well as avoiding notecard spam, the web-based wiki enables us to conveniently offer the information in more languages than before. Some of our notecards have been translated into Spanish and French, but we have hopes that in future we can have versions in Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Hindi and Arabic. All we need are translators, and in fact have been told there are some people willing and able to help with some of these languages now. There is a lot of work to do, basic research as well as translations, so we’d be happy to hear from anyone interested in volunteering their time and abilities in this area. The wiki will not only be the repository for such research/translations, it can help us keep track of which exhibits need documentation. So, thanks again, Opal, for another great contribution to the ISM!