League of Worlds

Hello,

This is Chico Bertone making a test post to check that I have sufficient permissions. Let’s see if I do.

Whether I do or don’t the process I just went through to get this far is not very intuitive or user-friendly, so I will ask my good friend Mister Kelly to do something about this as soon as he can. Which had better be in about five minutes.

Update

This has been done. If you log into the site and look at the sidebar on the right, you will see a new option. You can go directly to Site Admin, as before, but you can now also go directly to the New Post page.

About two weeks ago, Linden Labs announced that the educational discount for universities and non-profit organisations renting space in Second Life would be abolished from the beginning of 2011. Later they amended this, but not in any way that changes what follows.

The initial reaction on the Second Life mailing list was horror and outrage. Interestingly this was not solely (or even mainly) about the financial implications, even those these were calamitous for many groups. The horror was more like a feeling of betrayal. There was also a sudden and extraordinary outburst of collective optimism.

One of the results of this was a sudden community-wide interest in OpenSim, the SL-compatible open source virtual worlds server that aims to be “the Apache of the 3D web”. And the realisation that if we explored OpenSim as a group, this would open up many new opportunities.

That is why we looked at our plans again, threw them out, and decided to hold League of Worlds BYOG1 in Second Life to look at these issues.

We intend to establish a league of virtual spaces whose creators are willing to link their spaces, and keen to debate the cultural and pedagogical issues behind these worlds, by experimenting within them. Theory through practice. In the first phase of this new adventure the emphasis will be on Second Life and OpenSim. In later phases the emphasis will be widened.

Everyone who is interested in bringing virtual worlds and spaces together; interested in learning by doing; and interested in developing theoretical frameworks to analyse what has been done, is very welcome to join us.

League of Worlds BYOG1 will be an intense onee hour in-world symposium held at Decka Mah’s venue, Spotter Square in Terra Incognita, at 18:30GMT on Wednesday October 27. Its goal will be to launch an initial configuration of an OpenSim League of like-minded simsters.

Our hope is that League of Worlds 6 will then be a real world gathering of members of the OpenSim League and those interested in hearing about it, and debating the issues raised by it.

The slurl for Spotter Square is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/157/108/33

The League of Worlds url is :www.leagueofworlds.com

[Update: this post was updated to reflect the changes in our thinking as we got nearer to holding the event. Initially we planned to organise something more like a conference. Later we realised that this would close rather than open up opportunities, and Lindy came up with the idea that you should Bring Your Own Grid.]

The League of Worlds began in 2004.

It started because a number of people at an Ed-Media conference in 2003 met in the bar and asked why the educational use of virtual worlds was not on the conference agenda.

We decided to hold our own conference, and we did: the next autumn in Helsinki. Since then we have held five conferences in different parts of the world, each one attracting forty or fifty people.

Now, however, the situation has changed. Virtual reality, virtual worlds, Second Life, are on almost every conference agenda, and there are a growing number of books being written and compiled on these topics. So why would we want to host our own conferences anymore, when we can go to other, larger, better organised conferences?

The answer is: we wouldn’t. At least not in the way we have done before. When we started, virtual worlds were a novelty; now they are all over the place. When we started most of the discussion was necessarily theoretical. Now there is no reason why it cannot be based in practical experience.

This autumn we plan on holding a very short and very intensive online symposium (probably in Second Life, with live streaming into Eve Online and The Sims). Our aim is to plan ways in which we can collaborate practically as well as theoretically. There are plenty of places where we can read papers. What we need now is a forum where we can share ideas that arise from our day-to-day practices, as they arise.

We are therefore going to spend a month or two tearing the site down and building it up again. Some of what you see here for the next few weeks may have gaps. We will fill the gaps later.

And probably sooner.