The Chilbo Road Press

Today, Chilbo will be host to the Storytellers Event to Benefit Relay For Life. This is a live event that combines original songwriters and storytellers. Beginning at 2pm to 8pm slt, 11 the authors, poets and musicians will be taking the stage. Each musician will play about 40-45 minutes, all original songs they have written and each one prefaced with a story of the song. The last 15-20 minutes of each hour will be for folks to share spoken word stories.

The scheduled line-up:

2:00pm    Opening with Kristine Kristan
2:15pm    Hazideon Zarco
3:00pm    Escape Unplugged
3:15pm    Beth Odets
4:00pm    Matthew Perreault
4:45pm    Crap Mariner
5:00pm    Starflower Orbit
5:45pm    Chibi Lexenstar
6:00pm    strum Diesel
6:45pm    Mary Wickentower
7:00pm    LANCE Rembrandt
7:45pm    Winston Dufaux

Storytellers Stage Location: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Chilbo/78/42/103

The Chilbo Summer Faire, a week-long celebration of communities and partnerships in Second Life, will kick off July 4 and run through July 11 — and everyone’s invited!

The Faire will feature daily events and special week-long exhibits to be held in Chilbo, a vibrant, diverse community of individuals engaged in activities and communities all over the grid.

“The notion of a fair began a couple of years ago when we were brainstorming ideas for something fun and summery to do,” says Chilbo founder Fleep Tuque. “What better way to celebrate and showcase all the great things in the community than to have a big community fair?”

All Second Life residents are invited to participate in the festivities, which will include rides and games, workshops, storytellers, live music, tours, builds and exhibits — even a parade.

Communities are encouraged to host an event during the week to showcase their Second Life sims or groups.

“Everyone enjoys some solitude to build or work on projects or be creative,” Tuque says, “but the best thing about Second Life is sharing the things you care about or the things you’ve made with others — and that’s really what the Summer Faire is all about. It’s an opportunity for us to invite our friends and neighbors to come see what we’ve made and to invite them to bring their own creations and show off their great stuff, too.”

The Faire will culminate in the first annual Main Street Parade & Best Float Contest, scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. SLT on Sunday, July 11. The parade floats will be judged by the parade’s Grand Marshall and members of the Chilbo Executive Committee.

Communities are invited to participate in the Best Float Contest with a “wearable” float that best represents their community or organizational focus. Each float must contain a notecard that provides parade-goers with information about the organization and/or sim represented.

Following the parade, awards will be presented in a number of categories, including:

• Best Community Representation
• Most Creative Float
• Viewer’s Choice

Winning floats will be on display for the remainder of the day.

“Our theme for the fair this year is Community Partnerships,” Tuque notes, “because we all recognize that Chilbo wouldn’t be what it is without the networks of friends and communities we interact with and learn from every day.”

And how will this year’s fair differ from its predecessor — the first Chilbo fair held in 2008?

“We’ve had a terrific growth spurt since then,” Tuque says, “so we have much more to see and do than ever before. We’ve also improved much of the infrastructure in the community, so it should be easier to get around and find things.”

Communities interested in hosting an event during the Summer Faire should contact Calissa Leclerc.

All other questions should be directed to the Faire’s director, Chibi Lexenstar.

On March 31, 2010, the Chilbo Community became an official Event Partner with Metanomics, the weekly webcast show about policy, business, and education in the metaverse.   Though Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats have long hosted the live Metanomics stream unofficially in the Malburns MetaHub in the Chilbo sim, this marked our entry as an official partner.  Host of the show Robert Bloomfield (SL: Beyers Sellers) announced our partnership live on the air, and we welcomed a number of Chilbo residents and other visitors to our Chilbo location in Second Life.

Chilbo residents Tara Yeats, Malburns Writer, Fleep Tuque, Cosimo Urbanowicz,
and others view the Metanomics show live at the Malburns MetaHub, Chilbo sim, in Second Life.

In addition to this exciting development, on the very same day Chilbo also became the first event partner to broadcast the Metanomics show live from Reaction Grid!  For those who may be unfamiliar, Reaction Grid is an OpenSim grid that has become a hub of activity for artists, business users, educators, scientists, and those interested in exploring virtual worlds for serious use.   OpenSim is an open source virtual world platform that has a similar “look and feel” to Second Life, but unlike Second Life, both the server and the client code are open source.

Chilbo Community members and folks from Reaction Grid watch an interview
with Tom Hale (SL: T Linden) live on Metanomics. The live stream was
hosted simultaneously in the Malburns Metahub, Chilbo sim,
in both Second Life and Reaction Grid.

Despite a few technical glitches in the beginning, the live Metanomics stream was broadcast simultaneously to the Chilbo sims in both grids, and connected to the larger Metanomics community through chatbridge technology.  This allows participants in all the event partner locations across both grids to chat with one another during the show -which was very exciting!  Linden Lab Chief Product Officer Tom Hale (SL: T Linden) was the guest that day, where he discussed Linden Lab’s new Viewer 2.0, new New User Experience, new newbie avatars, new Terms of Service, new new new!  See the official summary announcement at Linden Lab’s blog, and then watch the show!

Please join us in Chilbo (SL and RG) next week for the next Metanomics show, which airs on Wednesdays at 12PM SLT.

The Chilbo Community wishes to thank our new partners at Metanomics, the support staff at Reaction Grid, and all the folks on both grids who made this exciting event possible!  (And special thanks to Chilbo residents Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats for getting this initiative off the ground!)

Images from the Virtual Praxis conference organized by
Chilbo Connect! member Ellie Brewster.

File in the “better late than never” category:

Friend, colleague and fellow Chilbo Connect! community member Sharon Collingwood (SL: Ellie Brewster) wrote an article in the Winter 2009 edition of  On the Issues: The Progressive Woman’s Magazine discussing the Virtual Praxis conference she founded in 2008.

The article discusses how the platform has become an empowering tool for women, and how the concept of community plays out virtually.

Community was at the heart of the presentations given at the Virtual Praxis conference (archived here). For the most part, speakers either explained how their own community has grown within Second Life, or they studied communities that interested them.

The article goes on to describe some of the presentations given at the conference, including Fleep Tuque’s presentation about The Women of Chilbo.

Linda Rogers (known in Second Life as Kate Miranda) and Chris Collins (Second Life: Fleep Tuque) are founding members of two prominent Second Life communities, Cedar / Sea Turtle Island, and Chilbo,respectively. As Executive Director of the Toronto Philharmonia, Rogers was able to rely on her real-world organization for contacts in developing a series of live music events in Second Life. Collins, an IT analyst at the University of Cincinnati, relied on her own community, a loose association of online friends who moved from posted chat to virtual interaction and established Chilbo as an important cultural center for artists, architects, musicians, educators and others to gather.

The conference was a great examination of how virtual worlds like Second Life can provide additional tools to feminists and activists for many issues:

There are many possibilities for feminist organizing in this new virtual world, but there are also difficulties. The technology is developing very quickly, but there can still be frustrating systemic problems. Although use ofSecond Life is free, it does require a recent computer and a fast Internet connection. Some problems of accessibility and disability exist. However, organization at a grassroots level is growing and these small communities are now reaching out to each other to negotiate a larger social framework.

As in the early days of the women’s movement, this negotiation is taking place outside institutional control, and it is based on trust and cooperation. It is too early to make predictions on where this social framework will lead the citizens of Second Life, but the inherently egalitarian nature of this new technology could provide fertile ground for feminist activism.

Be sure to check out the full article and congrats to Ellie!

Historical perspective.. think how much has changed since this presentation was given – though the Women of Chilbo are still a driving force in our community, that hasn’t changed at all!

Chilbo residents at the Hanja Welcome Area

On October 24th, Chilbo residents met to discuss the Linden Lab Community Partnership and our intention to submit a proposal. Fleep presented a first draft document that incorporated nearly all of the initial suggestions and brainstorm results from the previous meetings. It should be noted that this document was merely a first draft and that it did not/does not reflect the views or consensus of the Chilbo Community.  Indeed, there were  strenuous objections to some sections of the document.   Nevertheless, in an effort to be transparent about our process, we post the original unedited first draft for archival purposes.

Current Status: Based on our discussion at the meeting on the 24th, a second draft version of the document is in the process of being created.  The second draft is available for revision, commenting, and editing by members of the Chilbo Community.  Members of the public and other Second Life residents are also invited to watch our progress there and submit comments or feedback as a reply to this post.

Fleep intends to set up a special kiosk in the Chilbo Town Hall with transcripts of our previous meetings and the relevant web links later today, and will send out a group notice in world when it’s set up and ready.  (Apologies for the delay, I’m in the process of helping my mom move today!)