Thinkers' booth at the Second Life Community Convention (Oct 1-9 in-world)

Dear fellow Thinkers,

The Second Life Community Convention will be held in less than one month - if you haven't heard of it yet, this will be the 1st convention of SL ever. True to the spirit of innovation, it will be held both physically - in New York City, at the NY Law School, during the same weekend as the State of Play conference there - and in-world, with videoconferencing set up both ways. Yes, this will mean that people in NY will be able to see the in-world exhibition centre, and from in-world, we'll be able to see streaming video from NYC, and even participate with questions to the speakers.

It will certainly be unique - at the very least, it will be the first one - and the theme is "community". Now, Thinkers' have been one of the oldest discussion groups in SL (almost one-and-a-half years now!), still meeting regularly, and having over 200 members, and still growing (albeit slowly). We're definitely part of the community of SL, and I felt very strongly that we should participate at the SLCC.

The best way we can participate, of course, is doing what we do best: host a series of discussions during the in-world part of the convention, and have a booth there to explain people what the Thinkers are and how we meet and what we discuss. The in-world convention will start on Oct 1st (booth building time!) and finish on Oct 9th. Thus, on the 8th and 9th people will mostly be there to watch the video streaming, but before that, many will visit the exhibition centre - if, of course, we can attract them to events

After a small brainstorming session last Thursday (don't worry if you didn't attend; we'll be discussing it again next Tuesday, I promise!) we not only came up with some very good ideas for discussions vaguely around the theme "community", but we even managed to get a very generous sponsor who already paid for the booth (he'll remain anonymous for now until I ask him for permission to publicly thank for his generousity ).

The first idea we had (a suggestion by Kitten Lulu) was to sponsor a contest for the Thinkers' booth. The guidelines are few and as follows:

- 512 m2, 117 prims
- strictly PG
- designed to mostly give information on what the Thinkers' do, how to contact us, what we discuss, how our "rules" work, how you can apply to host your own meetings, etc.
- eventually have a small "meeting place" for the discussions themselves (we may be able to use the central area of the exhibition centre)
- eventually, have some souvenirs there for sale (Wittgenstein, Kirkegaard and Heidegger busts were suggested )

I think I can raise at least L$ 2,000 for the contest prize, but we can talk about that again next Tuesday. We'll give people, say, one or two weeks to submit ideas, and at a subsequent meeting, we'll pick the best choice by a simple majority vote of those present If nobody applies, well, we still have Plan B

Now, as for ideas for discussions during those 9 days, here go some proposed topics:

1. Power and the Lindens
   
2. Mediation in SL
   
3. Thinkers' on Thinkers' ("The Meta-Thinkers Discussion" - ie. self-promotion, lol (I'd love to have Jinny Fonzarelli run that one!)
   
4. SL's Counter-Culture (if we can get the W-Hat to host that one, that would be amazing)
   
5. Love in SL and how it translates/overflows in RL or not
   
6. Communication Issues in SL
   
7. Diversity in SL
   
8. Urbanism in SL: bringing design and planning past your land
   
9. SL Economy
   
10. The Open Source Community in SL
    
11. International Communities in SL (or the lack thereof)
    

Please note that we don't have speakers for all those topics yet, although I think we're able to do at least one per day, hopefully two.

Of course, we'll also be providing "running commentary" during the videostreaming sessions on Oct 8 and 9, and eventually squeeze one or or two in-world meetings during the lunch breaks.

All this is food for thought for the upcoming meeting on Tuesday. So bring you thinking caps and lot of fresh ideas on how we can make this work

Hello all,

Well, after two brainstorming sessions, we seem to have managed to come to a few conclusions.

1. The discussions

First, a list of potential discussions (now reduced from the above ones to a more manageable number):

1. "Urban planning in SL" by Traxx Hathor
   
   
2. "Are we all perverts?" by Eloise Pasteur
   
   What is Second Life? What makes some of us stay, and spend huge amounts of time and form communities and relationships, even work here, whilst most of those that join SL leave it sooner or later (~190,000 residents ever and 51,000 active residents, and a much smaller number active each week)?
   
   What is it that makes us SLers? Some of it is a high end computer, broadband internet access of course, but there are more than 190,000 households in the UK with broadband internet, so I suspect it is something unusual in us, as individuals.
   
   Come along and share your thoughts about our quirks and that little spark of perversity that makes this place special to us all.
   
   
3. "Mediation in SL" by Neal Nomad
   
   
4. "Website Democracy" by Prokofy Neva
   
   Date & Time: probably early on the week
   
   
5. "The Open Source Community in SL" by Kitten Lulu
   
   
6. "Self-governance in SL - from the community to the government", by Gwyneth Llewelyn
   
   Focusing on the "Neualtenburg experiment" as a solution for long-term planning in a private sim, "elected government" as opposed to a "SL company" managed by a small group of people is one of the many possible ways to deal with the "succession" problem: how to deal with a long-term project when the project founders leave it?
   
   Date & Time: probably on Tuesday, Oct 4, 2 PM (game time)
   

We're still open to more suggestions, of course.

What we need now is a paragraph from each person and a definite date & time. I urge you to do that - if at all possible - until next Tuesday, so that we can submit the "definite" agenda to the SLCC organisation.

Beyond that, we will have some "running commentary" during Oct 9. Probably impromptu

2. The booth

We'll have a booth of 512 m2 with 117 prims. All we know is that it'll be somewhat squarish in size and reasonably flat. The idea is to announce on Friday an open, public contest for the booth, subject to the following guidelines:

1. some notecards on the Thinkers
   
2. it should have a place where people can sit
   
3. space for a slideshow presenter
   
4. eventually a small exhibition space
   

Contestants will have one week to present their proposals in a "show & tell" event to be held on Friday, Sep 30th, at Aliasi's place (probably between 2 and 6 PM, depending on the number of entries). Then they'll have to argue why the audience should pick their proposal instead of the others This should be fun to watch, and is a quite different kind of contest - probably the better arguer will win, and not necessarily the better builder, heh heh. The prize will be L$ 3,000, unless we can get a few more donations

I think this sums up our meeting pretty nicely. But for the sake of completion, the next posts will feature the transcript (hopefully I got it all!).

Cheers to all who volunteered to help!

If you're reading this, I needed to push the time from 2 PM to 5 PM PST on the contest announcement (Friday, Sep 23rd), due to an overlapping appointment iRL.

My sincere apologies to you all, and I still hope you'll be able to make it and be around.

I've posted the actual contest for Friday, the 30th, 4 PM grid-time.

My place in Neualtenburg, the Field of Can'-ka no Rey, if you've not been. It's the big rosefield with tower outside the city.

Hello all,

Just a short update. Right now, events can only be announced for the SLCC booth by the SLCC group officers. This means that you should IM Baccara Rhodes & Fey Brightwillow to ask them to set up the event for you. Feel free to set them up in advance.

Sadly, Prokofy Neva is formally boycotting the in-world events because of some statements publicly made by one of the organizers of the SL part of the SLCC, so we have one less event. On the other hand, Ulrika Zugzwang and Spengler Roo are considering to host their own events as well, so it should balance out nicely

- Gwyn