Meet Your NPC Neighbor (Niama Meyersohn)
Rock The Path is a non-profit holistic retreat and educational center located in Camden, Maine. The “Path” is the journey that each of us travels during our lifetime and to “Rock The Path” is a direct invitation to take part in the unabashed exploration and expression of your greatest potential.
Rock The Path offers a range of informative and experiential programs that provide effective and easy-to-use tools to enhance and improve health and wellness. Programs include but are not limited to, stress reduction, relaxation, meditation, pain reduction, concentration, sleep, creativity and the exploration of consciousness. In SL they will be duplicating some of their their programs…..and combining them with other distance learning technologies. Rock The Path is holding its Excursion Weekend Workshop in Maine on 2/20-2/22 and we want to offer 1 NPC. www.RockThePath.org member a Free spot ($350 value), if anyone is interested. Check them out at www.RockThePath.org
NPC tenant update (Penguin, Kali Izdiak)
We have had a few offices vacate and have some new orgs that are coming in. We’re accommodating almost everyone on the waiting list at this point. Penguin Kuhn: Priceless and MagazineKidd are two of our new folks. Welcome aboard! Youth Venture is leaving so Penguin will need a volunteer to help Ricken with the wiki since Sally will no longer be w/ us. The beautiful Eco Commons has lots of space for enviro orgs. We’d like to get more tenants in there, so please spread the word to any environmental orgs that you know that may be interested. Questions from DonPaul Cale: If we have a current office space, can we look at the ones that are being vacated and choose to move? Penguin says connect with Kali about this. Ricken Flow will be putting in an app today for avatar action center. Page Putzo know several orgs and will pass the word around. Penguin reminds tenants tenants that we periodically have a look at offices/tenants and make sure that the residents are staying actively involved per our agreement. The office agreement is that you spend 3 hours a week in this sim or whatever NPC sim you inhabit. Glitteractica reminds that you don’t need to have an actual office to join this community. Penguin notes we have loads of great volunteers that don’t have a space. Penguin Kuhn says we need a wiki gardener! Wiki gardener helps organize the wiki in a way that is clear and logical for people finding info. about us. Smash Lane may be interested.
NPC session at NYLC (Bradford Rainmaker)
Brad Lewis (Bradford Rainmaker) is a Program Officer at Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), in Washington, DC. We support AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve and Senior Corps programs around the US and mobilize over 2m Americans every year in volunteer roles meeting unmet needs here in the States. (www.nationalservice.gov) “I just wanted to let you all know that we’re going to have some opportunities to share our life with those first lifers who are involved in service-learning (community service tied to curriculum). My federal agency (CNCS) is participating
in the National Service-Learning Conference in Nashville, TN from 3/18- 3/21. (More on the conference at: https://programs.regweb.com/metro/NYLC2009/registration/). We have the opportunity to introduce SecondLife and the NPC to conference attendees, and Global Kids will be streaming portions of the conference live into SL and Teen SL, as well as doing some workshops on their programs at the conference.” Time slots are available for NPC nonprofits (in 30 minute increments.) There will be 2300 attendees and 1/3 of them are youth, every year. The “live” booth at the conference will be staffed by our National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, www.servicelearning.org. If you want to present, this is a great opportunity to share yr work with a governmental agencies, state agencies, nonprofits, tribal groups and youth groups of all stripes and others … this is an audience who doesn’t know us that well yet. Visit the website for information on funding for service-learning programs (approx. $350,000 – $450,000 per year for three years for community- based programs) by visiting: http://www.learnandserve.gov/for_organizations/funding/index.asp. Muse Carmona offered to present for Gimp Girl.
Virtual world design project (JudyArx Scribe)
“I been teaching Architecture for 12 years at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. I am here because I am hooked by SL and what
it can do. SL is hopeless as a document or production management tool- and that is why I love it. …in SL we will be able to talk before, during and after the project. All sorts of ideas can be played with – the wildest ideas -the nature of the absurd –and also the realistic. But the treasure is that at each step of the way the students will have to be convincing… you …and me. What I hope you will be good enough to help us with is a process of surveying – and we promise to make it fun and as painless as possible- to work out what is great about NPC – what is familiar and friendly –what is troubling –what more NPC could be. Should it be one community with a similar look everywhere? Or should everyone be absolutely different. Should we be aiming for NPC to be the busiest Sim of SL -Do you want or need to achieve 1000 notecards delivered to 1001 different avatars daily? Or is it a quiet place? My guess is yes to it all. From that rich soup students will start to make proposals- to plan events – to document – to build –to prototype. And you will be pleased to hear we will do that without harming one hair on the head of the current sims. Auckland University has it’s own sim for this work and is purchasing another to support this project . But we would like to be part of NPC so we can build a relationship of creative practice and we can engage in Research by Design.
The nuts and bolts are that we will be a team of about 20 and we will set up an office in Bali Natural. At this stage I imagine that in early March we will start asking people to interact with different ways of collecting information. In a further weeks or so they will have presented ideas, had feedback, represented to critics. This will include Keystone Bouchard, Scope Cleaver, Tab Scott, most importantly Yourselves and as many others as I can convince….After that will be six weeks where we can implement something -it may be one idea or bits of many ideas or it may be none. These students will be third years students. They will be expected to put at least 30 hrs a week into the project. At Auckland University there will also be 115 first year students being introduced to Digital ideas and I would imagine they will want to visit. We are engaged with Virtual Africa- putting a possible project together… And have some Master’s students looking for advanced work in SL. We are hoping to have a final exhibition of interesting projects from the School at Dakota Skies Gallery. Can we come and play? and do something useful for you?
Open mic
Zinnia Zauber: I invite you all to Common Ground which is our weekly networking event every Thursday night at 7 pm here on Plush. On Thursday, Feb 19 – Avatar Action Center is sponsoring Common Ground. Our color for the night is Gossamer Green. I encourage you to attend to get to know your fellow nonprofits in Second Life and share what you do while dancing. Common Ground is a weekly event to network on Plush for all to enjoy. We brainstorm, share, and boogie! Common Ground is every Thursday at 7. Remember that Coughran has his Wharf Ratz Tuesday Night Extraordinary Dance Extravaganza at 8 every week on
Aloft! If you are interested in sponsoring a Common Ground, please contact Ethelred Weathermax or myself to set a date and
get details!
Muse Carmona: Just a quick reminder that I’m doing a community study of NPC for a class in online community design. You can find more info here http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/teaching/6470/spring09/rese…. Also if anyone is willing to be interviewed in voice for about an hour about your nonprofit, please contact me.
Ricken Flow: NPC/Tech soup will announce in-world office hours soon
Penguin Kuhn: Yes, very quickly, we have some dates for the health panel event this will be on May 26th or 27th. We’re going to see which one is best, but it will definitely be one of the two so stay tuned for more details. More here: http://npsl.wikispaces.com/healthpanelevent. Glitteractica Cookie: google group for this community is at http://groups.google.com/group/TechSoup-Second-Life and we are looking for volunteers to help with event.
Glitteractica Cookie: also, for those of u who do not know, we have a blog at nonprofitcommons.org, a wiki at http://npsl.wikispaces.com
The raw transcript for this meeting can be found at the NPC Wiki.
Written by: SereneJewell