Just ran across the IBM developer space for Jazz, which recently opened up a lot of its source code and which is the platform upon which Project Bluegrass runs. The developer space “is focal point for all things Jazz, including Jazz-based commercial products like Rational Team Concert Express. Jazz is IBM Rational’s next-generation technology platform for collaborative software delivery.”

It includes this cross-link to the IBM Research Center’s project page on Bluegrass where some of the stated goals of the project are outlined:

First, we do not want to move people’s collaborative applications into the virtual world. Instead, we want to take artifacts from these applications, such as bug reports or work activities, and represent them in the virtual world. Second, we want to avoid walls so that people have much more visibility into the presence and work of people on the distributed team. Finally, we want to support brainstorming with simple creation of objects in the world without requiring heavy, 3D modeling. These objects should also be used to create artifacts in the host collaborative application, enabling people who are not in the Bluegrass world to use them.

I still think their choice of avatars is a bit unfortunate, but then hey, sometimes I prefer to be a Neko so what do I know?

I posted about Bluegrass previously, including some snaps of the prototype: