A community-led project, providing space to meet and network, all to create a cooperative learning environment and foster outreach, education, fundraising, all in a virtual environment.
As part of the Nonprofit Commons 4th Anniversary Celebration, we had our members create booths to give information about their organizations for our visitors. Several of you responded with some very creative booths.
We asked DJ Earnshaw and Parhelion Palou to judge the best of the best, and these were their selections:
1st Place: Giving Circles Network
2nd Place: Floaters
3rd Place: Bridges for Women
Congratulations to our winners and thanks for everyone who participated!
Written by: rikomatic
This Friday, October 7, we are pleased to welcome Mr. Daniel Moshel, director of the new virtual world documentary “Login 2 Life.” Daniel will be appearing along with Gentle Heron, one of the main subjects of the film and longtime member of the Nonprofit Commons, and Draxtor Despres, award-winning machinimatographer and musician who helped make the film.
This will be at our regular Nonprofit Commons meeting that starts at 8:30am PDT. As always we will have introductions, tips from our Mentors and other announcements prior to talking about “Login 2 Life”. To participate teleport over the Plush Nonprofit Commons amphitheater at this teleport link.
We look forward to seeing you there!
[For my own review of the documentary, see Betterverse.org.]
Written by: rikomatic
Last Friday, September 30, 2011, we got introduced to the Avatar Charitable Trust, a new initiative to fund various arts, humanitarian, educational and general welfare causes in Second Life and the real world. Ms. Lillie Radek , operations director at the Trust, was kind of enough to drop by and tell us about their work.
Read on for more information about the Trust….
ABOUT THE AVATAR CHARITABLE TRUST
A Foundation in Second Life for the purpose of:
(1) raise funds to be used to financially promote charitible endeavors for the arts, humanitarianism, education, and the general welfare of avatars in Second Life and people in real life,
(2) promote goodwill, personal fulfillment, and enjoyment among those in the Second Life community,
(3) promote non political, non sectarian, non discriminatory, and non violent causes for the good of us all, and
(4) improve the standard of our lives in the virtual world of Second Life.
If you would like to make a donation to the Trust, you may do so by (1) paying our Treasurer, Banks Copperfield, directly, or (2) giving directly to any of the Avatar Charitable Trust kiosks placed throughout Second Life. Kiosks are also located in our art gallery located in the Eclipse Arts Complex .
If you have questions about the Trust, or would like to apply for a grant from the Trust, contact our Executive Director, Chuk Edman, or our Operations Director, Lillie Radek Edman. Any of our board members would also be happy to help – Leslie Ekstein – Chairperson, Penny Althouse, and Frey Bravin.
To partner with us in the work we do, we invite you to become a member of our group. Please contact Chuk Edman or Lillie Radek Edman, or search for “Avatar Charitable Trust” in Groups.
See the AVENUE Magazine article about them in the June 2011 issue at this link http://avenuemagazine.blogspot.com/search/label/Chuk%20Edman
Written by: rikomatic
On September 23, at the Nonprofit Commons in Second Life, Douglas Maxwell of the U.S. Army Simulation & Training Technology Center spoke about the “MOSES” virtual world being used by the US Army for prototyping and training purposes. Read about how the US Army is using virtual worlds to train soldiers in how to handle difficult cross-cultural negotiations in real time, among other applications.
Read on for Doug Maxwell’s remarks, edited for clarity…
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Doug Maxwell of the U.S. Army Simulation & Training Technology Center on the MOSES Virtual World Platform
Edited Comments by Mr. Maxwell at the Nonprofit Commons meeting in Second Life
September 23, 2011
Good Morning everyone, its a pleasure to be here today. Also, thank you very much for your interest in our work.
I am Douglas Maxwell and I began working in modeling and simulation in the mid 90s. My MS is in Mechanical Engineering, but I have a heavy focus on software engineering. I recognized back then that it was important to take a look at Modeling and Simulation (M&S) from a multidisciplinary approach. I was recruited by the Naval Research Lab out of college to work in their Virtual Reality Lab in Washington DC. I am a civilian civil servant, GS14.
My interests in virtual environments began when I noticed people were becoming immersed in the simulations we created. it isn’t logical to duck when a virtual object is flying at you, but they did. It told me they had made the mental leap from reality into the virtual environment we created. So I started looking at gaming technologies. A wonderful thing happened in the late 90’s. Nvidia releasted the first commercially available and cost effective PC based 3D graphics accelerators. We no longer needed a $750k SGI computer to do 3D tasks. I published a journal article showing how a cheap PC cluster could replace it (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6294). This was 2002 (I got some hate mail for that one).
Fast forward to today, almost a decade later. We have ubiquitous 3D app in almost everything: PC, browser, mobile. Now we need to concentrate on interfaces. Intuitive interactions will be the next “killer” app. Keyboard and mouse are klunky. Voice is coming along, but not there yet. Touch screens too. I tried to write a research paper on a tablet recently and got sore. it was an exercise to see if it could be done. Today I’m working on my PhD at the University of Central Florida. My focus is on scalable and flexible virtual worlds.
We have done a number of experiments with large numbers of people in a virtual world. Last week, our team was at Ft. Benning, GA. We had nine soldiers logged into our EDGE system (Enhanced Dynamic Geosocial Environment). At Fr. Irwin, CA, we also had three native language speakers logged in. They spoke Pashto and Dari. They performed roles as interpreters and afghan village natives. At Ft. Leavenworth, KS, we had another native language speaker logged in acting as an afghan village elder. At Ft. Monroe VA, we had observers logged in. At Ft. Hood, TX, we had observers logged in. Back in Orlando, we had a technical staff monitoring the servers and logged in as well. As you can see, we had a widely distributed training event. However, that does not include the dozens of NPCs and autonomous entities. It was a medium scale exercise.
What is attractive to me about virtual worlds is they are non deterministic. We set the goals not the makers of the virtual world. Every participant in the exercise has been in Afghanistan and returned home. Every participant had been in the area of Afghanistan that we modeled. The observer / trainer inworld gave the platoon leader a mission. In this case, it was a key leader engagement. The platoon leader used his knowledge to organize the fire teams (2 in this case) and lead them to the village, conduct an investigation, find the elder, and use their cultural knowledge to properly elicit information from him. The experiments were run nine times, mixing up the people and roles a bit. We had stunning success. I made a quick movie from captures of the event.
Today I was asked to speak about project MOSES. The Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy was created out of necessity. Back in 2008, we (the military) began looking at the Second Life platform and were amazed at how flexible it was. It is a computationally steerable persistent simulation. The capabilities in here are tremendous: in situ scripting, terrain deformation in real time, every object is composable, not static. We got the idea that if we could increase the fidelity of the physics in here, it could actually be very useful.
There are draw backs, but the advantages and potential make this platform work taking a look at. The biggest issue we had at the time with SL was the network access. We wanted to use it for serious work, but the data we had was not for public consumption. We cannot ever expose sensitive (classified, for example) data to the open Internet. Back in 2008, we experimented with Open simulator, but found it very fragile. I reached out to Linden Lab and they proposed the Second Life Enterprise as a solution.
In 2009 and 2010 we worked with Linden Lab to harden the SLE so it would work on a military network. Unfortunately, in May of 2010 we were informed by LL that they were no longer supporting the SLE. That left us in a bind. We had a HUGE investment in the SLE. I have found that creating content is much more expensive that the platform itself.
I took another look at Open Simulator. It had matured significantly since 2008: it was more stable, feature rich, even allowed for *gasp* backups! In March of 2011, I decided to stand up MOSES and debut it at Gametech 2011 as a hands on “this is open simulator” demo.
I know of many users in the Military, Industry and Academia who where in the same dilema as myself. How do we preserve the content? We were able to migrate all of our content from our SLE to the MOSES before the license expired. The objective of the project is to evaluate open sim for suitability as a replacement to the “behind the firewall” capability we need. Its goals are to provide a persistent and stable virtual world, VOIP, base content, mesh, media on a prim, and monitoring tools.
I have MOSES on a commercial network at http://fvwc.army.mil/moses. It is open to anyone wishing to contribute to the project. It is composed of 117 sims. We have all branches of the military in it. We have a number of academic institutions. We have a few industry contributors as. well.
When you register an account, I personally email you to find out why you want to be in MOSES and how you would like to contribute. There are no casual users. The academics really like this, as it provides a safe environment for their students. I encourage you to sign up and take a look. We have done things like import actual afghanistan terrain and replicate actual areas.
I hold office hours every Friday at 3PM eastern.The weekly office hours are a great way to meet open simulator developers and our team. We usually have 20-ish in attendance. A good way to follow is by my twitter account @vrdeity. My email is douglas.b.maxwell@us.army.mil.
Thank you very much for having me.
Written by: rikomatic
Written by: rikomatic
On September 16, 2011, the Nonprofit Commons, the longest running and largest community of nonprofits in the virtual world, celebrated its fourth anniversary with a series of events. We received nearly 300 visitors to the archipelago, who enjoyed musical performances, a fashion show, exhibit booths created by our members, and socializing with our members and friends.
A highlight of the festivities was the kick-off gathering from 8:30am to 10am PDT at the Plush Nonprofit Commons archipelago. Here are some highlights of the presentations during that time.
Glitteractica Cookie, founder of the Nonprofit Commons and Director of Online Community and Social Media at TechSoup Global, began the meeting with her thanks to the community:
I would like to just say that I am so very grateful to all of you who have shown up dutifully, every week for all these years. This is an entirely volunteer-run community , and most of the space was donated. I am also very grateful to TechSoup for being innovative enough to believe in this platform to support a global community of nonprofit innovators.
Please remember that this is not our only way of connecting, and be sure to make this one spoke in the wheel. We are all connected via our various communities, and also, we hope you come to us with feedback if you have it. Thanks again for the many years of volunteer service, and I look forward to seeing you all at future TechSoup online events. The way you can help us keep this community sustainable is to tell your nonprofit friends about TechSoup. Also, participate in our various online events.
After Glitteractica, we welcomed Viale Linden, head of marketing at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life:
I wanted to congratulate your team on four years in Second Life. It is great to see non-profits are continuing to see value in using SL to support their missions. Nonprofits are a great part of the diversity of SL.
SL users have a stronger interest in altruism and affecting real world social good than some outside SL may realize, and groups like this offer the community a way to have an impact, while helping RL organizations further their missions.
Just one correction Rik. I am not a VIP. The community is. Mayo clinic, Virtual Ability. I don’t even come close.
My team leads community efforts at the lab and many of you heard at SLCC we have a change in philosophy. It’s not about LL and kiss a linden events. Its all about the community being brought forward. You can see this with our Destination Guide efforts. The white space in SL is unlimited self expression and shared creativity – the community does this like no other community. The non profits are big part of this.
And it is always an eye opener for the RL folks that have never heard of SL. Rik, Susan – you have obviously made this happen here by looking at the diversity. if your communities need our help bringing the value forward – please contact us at community@lindenlab.com. Thanks all.
One of our veteran members and leaders in the community, Mr. Coughran Mayo of Preferred Family Healthcare, offered his greetings:
I can say with certainty that finding NPC when I first got to Second Life was one of the true factors that made it “sticky” for me. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I remember when we dedicated Plush, and I was able to say a few words then about the future of SL for nonprofits. Cerainly this has proven to be an important factor in the advancement of Preferred Family Healthcare over the past few years. We have received a lot of good publicity about our smart use of new technology, from many outside sources. And a not insignificant amount of grant money to pilot projects.
The best part is the many friends I have made in the nonprofit community around the world. People I would neve have met but for the SL/NPC experience.
HB Eternal of Love Foundation talked about how Second Life has expanded the reach of his organization:
The Love Foundation came to SL in April 2010 to host our first ever virtual version event for Global Love Day on May 1st where over 200 people participated inworld. Three weeks later we came to NPC in Plush and since then have had over 600 visitors to our office, making many new RL friends….
This May 1st we held our Global Love Day virtual event for the second time on a beachfront gifted to us by volunteers and had over 1,000 visitors during the day, again offering TLF info and teleports to our NPC office. Since we are connected to people in over 140 countries in RL, SL has been a great opportunity to meet and get to know some of our international contacts inworld. We have had 5 CNN iReports written about TLF both for Global Love Day and our presence in NPC.
It has been an amazing and fruitful collaboration among so many wonderful people here in NPC and SL and we are grateful to everyone for their friendship and support!
Chayenn of Protect Yourself 1 talked about her work on HIV/AIDS:
Our organization Protect Yourself 1 was set up by sarvana haalan beginning of this year. The Protect Yourself 1, Inc.’s mission is to increase Awareness, Education and Prevention of HIV and related diseases by using art, entertainment, nature, animals and events to foster a sense of individual responsibility that encourages positive behavioral change among the general public. Protect Yourself 1, Inc.’s Goals: to decrease the taboos, myths and stigma associated with the HIV virus, to lower the number of new infections and reduce HIV transmission.
Thank you to you TechSoup we can network and collaborate here in NPC. We have social marketing media campaigns one called safe2live, HIV prevention for youth using mobile puppet theater and PSA, and one for adult Protect Yourself.
Calliope Lexington of the Italian nonprofit Espica talked about her work:
I represent an Italian group, Esplica-non profit – Laboratory for the Cultural and Scientific dissemination in the digital age is an Italian RL and SL group. It started in 2010, but the groups that joined had been engaged in scientific-cultural dissemination in Second Life since 2008. The initiatives of Esplica are addressed to the general public, the young, the school and learning, and are the natural cross-bridge from the cultural experiences in the virtual environment, to Real Life.
We think SL is also important to knock down physical and psycho-cultural barriers, differently abled. Esplica promotes: cultural and formative activities for the general public, the school, the professions, the social activities, voluntary work and leisure; Our activities remark the correlations between their artistic, literary, musical, historical, pictorial aspects, with the scientific or technological ones;
We organizes cross-universe events ( RL-SL). For example “Let’s read in Second Life” last fall, an exhibition of digital publishing inworld,connected with the eBookFest in RL in Italy.
We discovered NPC Googling for”non profit” and “Second Life”, the programmes, the meetings inworld. And hope to start a collaboration with the other groups that are so far as I’ve know so far really engaged and advanced on the way of using the virtual environment for RL purposes.
Finally Buffy Beale, one of the organizers of the celebration and a “mentor” at the Nonprofit Commons, closed out the meeting:
SL has been a path leading me to the most beautiful kind-hearted loving and caring people I could ever dream to meet, friends who are near and dear to my heart despite the fact they look like a pink cat, a silly furry, a towering fairy, a penguin, a Transformer, a cabbage, a robot, running around with funny headphones on, or wearing funny hats, or clad in daring attire ready to rock makes me almost want to change to human form, to name a few.
It’s been meeting the heart and mind behind the avatars who, like me are striving to make a difference however small for the good in life for all; people who are here for the educational side who work hard to make SL work as a classroom; or people who laugh and dance and sing and create astonishing things to be marveled at. These people negate any and all of the seedy and ugly side of SL for me, they make both of my worlds a better place.
So it’s people like all of you here today who have joined us from around the world to help us celebrate the fact we have not just survived, but have expanded and we’ll continue to grow I just know it.
Thank you TechSoup, you are my hope that one day all non-profits will be connected to work smarter together while keeping current with technology. I know the SL Nonprofit Commons is a very very small part of what you do but to me it is the cherry on top.
A special wave to the organizers of today’s event, MacZ Urbanowicz, Parhelion Palou, Brena Benoir and Zinnia Zauber and to those who came and put up a display, this is no small task to put on, so thank you for all your effort to mark this wonderful day.
And finally, thank you so much everyone for coming here today to join in our celebration of our 4th year at the Nonprofit Commons, feel the magic and warmth as you walk around, I just know my gushing will rub off on you 🙂
And a special special thank you to Glitter for having the vision to see this come true four years ago, I heard how you had to plead for this Glitter.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, Buffy! Thanks to everyone who came and made this fourth anniversary celebration so special.
See pics from the event in our Flickr set. More info about the Nonprofit Commons at http://nonprofitcommons.org.
Written by: rikomatic
Thanks to everyone who came to the Nonprofit Commons fourth anniversary celebration on Friday, September 16. It was a wonderful day-long party with lots of different activities taking place on our islands.
One of the highlights was the awesome booths created by our member organizations to exhibit their work. If you didn’t get a chance to check them out, head to this teleport link on Aloft today. We’ll try and keep them up for a few days so others can enjoy them.
Special thanks again to our volunteer organizers MacZ Urbanowicz, Buffy Beale, and the rest for making this happen.
Written by: rikomatic
Your participation is requested at the upcoming Fourth Anniversary Celebration of the Nonprofit Commons this Friday , September 16. Can you believe it was four year’s ago that TechSoup launched the Nonprofit Commons, the largest community of nonprofits and social benefit organizations in the metaverse?
We will have have events throughout the day, with a formal opening from 8:30-10am PDT. Here is the schedule of events:
Nonprofit Commons 4th Anniversary Schedule of Events
8:30-10:00 PDT Nonprofit Commons Main Meeting
Location: Plush Nonprofit Commons amphitheater at this teleport link.
10:30am-12:00pm Music by eclectic musician Avantgarde Frequency
12:00-1:00pm Meet & Greet
5:30-7:00pm Mini Presentations and Fashion show by Journey McLaglen/ Scottish Criss
9:00-10:30pm Music and Meet & Greet with DJ DyVerse Resident spinning, house, 80’s, neo-soul
Join us to see how you can get involved! Find out what other nonprofits and groups like yours are doing in SL. Network, exchange ideas, find volunteer opportunities, pick up freebies! Chance to win 4000L worth of door prizes (kindness of The Love Foundation, Etopia Island, and Happy Hippo Education).
If you are interested, you can also do a mini-presentation. If you would like to schedule a presentation, please contact MacZ Urbanowicz.
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Tenants of the Nonprofit Commons are strongly encouraged to attend and participation. Each NPC tenant can have a booth to present the work of their organization. The location of these booths is at CommonGrounds on Plush at this location . A L$1000 prize will be offered for the best booth based on creativity and message!
For more information on creating your booth, contact MacZ Urbanowicz, Buffy Beale, or Brena Benoir. Please have your booth set up by September 14.
If you have questions about the Fourth Anniversary celebration on September 16, please contact MacZ Urbanowicz or Buffy Beale in Second Life.
Written by: rikomatic
On September 12, there will be a press conference on the upcoming documentary film “Login 2 Life” directed by Daniel Moshel. Here’s the description:
Login 2 Life portrays people who have found an alternate home in an online world. This is the starting point of a journey into fascinating virtual realities, meeting diverse human beings in different parts of the world who have one thing in common – they are savvy in using virtual worlds as an extension of their real lives.
It looks like the film is going to feature, among other folks, the indomitable Gentle Heron, founder of the nonprofit Virtual Ability. Gentle is one of the more active and supportive members of the Nonprofit Commons community. Gentle has a very interesting story to tell, so we are happy it is getting the film treatment.
If you would like to participate in the press conference head to Virtual Ability in Second Life at this teleport link on Monday September 12 at 9am PDT.
“Login 2 Life” will be shown on October 17 on ZDF in Germany and in Austria soon afterwards. No word yet on US or other international screening dates. Perhaps a virtual film opening in Second Life?
Written by: rikomatic
While not directly virtual world related, I thought the Nonprofit Commons community might find useful my review of the new book Twitter for Good, by Claire Diaz-Ortiz, since many of you are Twitter users. And the lessons from the book are in my view applicable to other social media tools, even Second Life.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Retailing for about $16, today only (September 6) you can get a free e-version of Twitter for Good for your Kindle or Nook compatible device here.
Read on for my review. All of these views stated are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of TechSoup….
Twitter for Good by Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a concise primer on how to effectively use the Twitter micro-blogging platform to support your nonprofit or charitable cause. I received a reviewer’s copy last week and found it to be a quick and informative read for the nonprofit professional.
Subtitled “Change the World One Tweet at a Time”, Twitter for Good is probably most helpful for an organizational leader wondering how to leverage this particular social media tool to support your group’s mission. Diaz-Ortiz describes a helpful and memorable framework to help you to plan for your use of Twitter by your organization, a structure she calls “T.W.E.E.T.” which stands for:
While this framework was written to focus on Twitter, I think it could easily be applied to helping your group think about any other kind of social media tool, whether it is YouTube, Second Life or FaceBook.
The most useful parts of the book for me were the specific case studies (real and imagined) about how groups can use Twitter for different applications — fundraising, activism, brand awareness, etc. I’m a Twitter “veteran” of several years, but there were a few applications that I had not heard of that were impressive and memorable. For example, I have not thoroughly explored all that you can do with Twitter “lists” or how to court social media “influencers” to re-tweet your posts.
The book has a breezy, encouraging, positive tone that make it easy to read. One proviso is that the author is an employee of Twitter, so her perspective is as a paid promoter for the platform. So her anecdotes are all unqualified success stories, for obvious reasons.
I would have liked for the author to have stated at some point that an organization’s Twitter strategy should be nested within a larger communications / outreach strategy, employing a number of traditional and social media channels. That seems like a fairly obvious and non-controversial point that wouldn’t detract from her main thesis. She skirts around this at various points, but it probably deserves to be higlighted.
Overall, Twitter for Good makes a strong case for why Twitter is such a user-friendly, low-barrier-to-entry communications tool that can help an organization achieve greater impact on the world. A newcomer to the professional applications of Twitter will certainly get a good start, and even veteran social media experts might find some fresh insights from the book.
[Full Disclosure: I received a full digital copy of this book for review from the publisher.]
Written by: rikomatic