Chilbo Community Blog

What is Chilbo?

In the beginning, we came to Second Life (SL) out of curiosity, but we stayed for the promise of an open, collaborative, convivial space where we can grow our personal projects and form new relationships, friendships, partnerships, and organizations. Chilbo is just the place to fulfill that early promise with a minimum of distraction and a maximum of interaction and fun. Your ‘project’ might be anything from personal to professional, but if you want to pursue it ‘in public’ with the casual involvement of friends and neighbors, then you will want to settle into a place like Chilbo.

Chilbo is the name of the sim where our project began, and the “cultural center” of our community, but encompasses the surrounding sims and all of the people who collaborate on our projects, whether they “live” in Chilbo or not.

Chilbo is newbie friendly, part of our mission is helping new residents find their way in Second Life since we all remember those confusing early days.

Chilbo supports artists, musicians, writers, teachers, students, creative thinkers, entrepreneurs, and those who are interested in contributing to the public good.

Chilbo is our home in Second Life. We may work or play in places all over the grid, but Chilbo is where we practice, experiment, relax, and enjoy the company of good friends and neighbors.

Community Organizations

The Chilbo Community Building Project (CCBP) is the organization that holds community land, defines community standards, makes agreements with tenants, and supports community projects.

The CCBP is a Second Life group that holds land in Chilbo and surrounding sims, currently Mangyeong, Mujigae, Mindulle, Kuwol, and Madhupak.

All community members are welcome to join the group. Membership allows you to create objects on community land, to become a tenant on a sliding scale, and to be notified of community events.

Members are encouraged to contribute tier to support monthly land costs.

The CCBP is owned by Fleep Tuque and Cosimo Urbanowicz. This means that they have put in the original capital to buy the land. Privileges currently held exclusively by the owners are: terraforming, land permissions; sales, purchases, and leases; banning; revisions of community standards.

There are practical limitations to group controls in SL that have lead to the ‘benevolent dictatorship’ form of government that Chilbo currently has. We are quite open to increased democratization, and anticipate that as the community grows, and as other residents develop a deeper stake in Chilbo, that the inclusive decision-making process we currently employ can grow into a fuller democratic process. In the meantime, we have taken the approach that we are all moving forward as a community in a very low-overhead, consensus sort of way.

The Chilbo Arts Foundation manages several arts and culture facilities in Chilbo, and supports arts and culture projects. The CAF is intended as a fully immersionist organization, or at least one that quite simply is from a place called Chilbo.

There are also various Neighborhood Associations. These are typical of SL, and are not a formal part of the project. If anything, we are just another (oversized) association member.

Land Use Intent for Community Lands

Second Life can be very asynchronous, since not everyone is around at the same time; this is just a reality of the medium. We have made a distinction between public and private uses with the intent of clustering the more active uses in the center Chilbo sim to enliven the community. More passive uses, visited by only a few people, are an important support, but we’ve located them at the edges to leave prims and traffic resources to the public uses.

The Chilbo sim will eventually be prioritized for public uses and some private uses that are open to the public and enhance the public experience. With the exception of some fascinating hold-outs and grandfathered uses, this means that walking around in Chilbo proper will mean walking past things that are intended for the public — that you might expect to be interested in, and certainly things you are invited to participate in. The intent is to keep Chilbo active with overlapping events and opportunities to interact spontaneously. We aren’t a centralized monoculture though — each build in Chilbo will be created and maintained by a fairly independent group of active people, with their own tastes and enthusiasms. You won’t see very many residences or other typical private uses. The experience so far has been that private homes either fall into disuse, or grow in size and prims to the point where they aren’t a good fit. We have tended to move residences away from the center of Chilbo, but if a resident had an active ’salon’ culture going in their front room, we might want to move them the other way — toward the center of things.

Outside of Chilbo — NIC (Not In Chilbo)

This is where private and low-intensity uses go. Projects and residents that are new generally are located in NIC until they come up to speed and can better show what they contribute to the community. And people who want a workshop or an office, or a home, locate here to take advantage of Chilbo’s cleaner environment without being right in the bustling heart of things. Other benefits to the surrounding sims are that you can make more of a mess here — work on your stuff out in the yard without any worries about image.

Community Standards

The Community Standards are kept at Town Hall. Please forward comments and suggestions for future revisions to Fleep or Cosimo.

Membership

Chilbo is open. If you are interested in joining, you should hang around and talk to residents, and then find Fleep or Cosimo. We can give you a few months’ use of a mini house at no cost. As you settle in and sort out what you really want, we can usually find a more permanent location for you.

We expect long-term residents to help with tier, but we also have a few tier vouchers available on a rolling basis. Community service is encouraged, this includes keeping an eye out for litter, parcels for sale near our holdings, or other new developments that the community might want to know about.

Those with special talents in building, graphic design, scripting, or other content creation skills are invited to help develop Chilbo resources and facilities.

Community Facilities

These areas are maintained by Fleep and Cosimo for member or public use:

Chilbo Town Hall
Sand Box
La Bella Dam Jazz Club
Chilbo Market
Chilbo Museum Center
Main Street Newbie Stores
Public Parks

Community Projects

These projects are the works of Chilbo residents but receive support in the form of tier, land use, or extra prims by the Chilbo community:

GUILD at Chilbo
Chilbo Road Press
Second Life Best Practices in Education HQ
Reform Seminary
SL HIV Prevention Center
SkyeRanger Kiosk

Community Shopping & Entertainment

Businesses and shops owned by our residents:

Berlin Bar (entertainment)
Chilbo Flower Shop (garden and landscaping)
CoaPec Furnishings (furniture)
Lunicima (clothing)
SunQueen Creations (furniture)
Tara’s Retreat (park and gazebo)
The Loft @ Chilbo (art gallery)
Varsity Theatre (movies)