What started as an April Fool joke by Google for 2008 called Project Virgle is now a real and genuine effort by an increasing number of people to create ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology. This project is a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate on simulations of space settlements. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.

OpenVirgle will support a playful learning community of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
Artwork derived from NASA artwork by Rick Guidice on Space Colonization blended with a modified version of the Land-use plan artwork by Richard Iriga from the Development Art collection using The GIMP under Debian GNU/Linux

OpenVirgle's mission is, first and foremost, the consolidation of information. There are many pro-space-settlement groups out there, each with great ideas. The problem is, they are all competitive for funding, and they can't seem to agree on space settlement tactics and technologies. OpenVirgle will attempt to bring together all of these ideas and all of this information, and put it all up for discussion. Hopefully, future groups, or future iterations of OpenVirgle ourselves, will be able to use this collected knowledge to "put our eggs into a few more baskets" than just Earth.

Artwork courtesy of Alexis Flamand; plants made using the PlantStudio software.

You can read a paper related to this topic in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which is made available on the web: here.
The slides for the presentation are here.