Fleep Tuque delivers the annual “State of the Community” address
at the February 2010 Chilbo Town Hall Meeting
In Attendance: Fleep Tuque, Kristine Kristan, Corcosman Voom, Malburns Writer, Tara Yeats, Tomkin Euler, Rachel Corleone, Maddog Easterling, SunHi Mistwalker, Maggie Larimore, Rah Rehula, Chavez Lefevre, SkyeRanger Pinion, Gem Blue, Polenth Yue, Josain Zsun, Robyn Eddenbaum
First-time Attendees (please friend!): Robyn Eddenbaum, Rah Rehula
Fleep Tuque Gives “State of the Community” Address
Following introductions of new members and first time attendees, Fleep Tuque gave the State of the Community address in voice chat. For those who couldn’t attend, the following is what Fleep intended to say, hopefully she actually said most of it:
Welcome to all who are here and to those who are attending a Town Hall meeting for the first time. We don’t usually get so formal at Town Hall meetings, with speeches and so forth, but from time to time a little formality doesn’t hurt and it’s good to reflect on the year that has passed and to think about the year ahead.
For those who may be new, the Chilbo Community was founded in 2006, so we’re going into our fourth year of existence – which is a long time in Second Life terms! Our group has 230 some members, but only about 25% of the group are super active in the community, so considering that, we’ve managed to accomplish quite a lot in those few short years, through the hard work of a relatively small group of dedicated people.
This past year in particular has been one of really rapid growth, in 2009 we added much more group and privately owned land to the community map, attracted more people, more businesses, planned and held more activities, and the group itself has become much more interconnected with more people in Chilbo knowing their neighbors and fellow community members.
All of this would not be possible without the contribution of each and every person who works to promote the ideals of the Chilbo Community, so I want to thank each of you sitting here today – you are the ones who make Chilbo happen, the people who come to the Town Hall meetings, and help with events and collaborate on projects – without you Chilbo wouldn’t exist.
And while all of our active members deserve great thanks, I’d like to also make a special recognition of three people who go well above and beyond the call of duty in service of the Chilbo Community: Rachel Corleone, Kristine Kristan, and Corcosman Voom deserve a round of applause. You probably aren’t even aware of the countless hours they spend day in and day out working in the community, providing advice and counsel to me and to other residents. Rachel walks the sims and cleans up litter and junk every week and keeps an eye on our prim counts, in addition to making and updating all of our maps. Kristine has helped countless new members get settled into the community and she’s been up with me all hours of the day and night doing things like tallying parcels for the Land Census. And Corcosman not only organizes and schedules all of the art exhibits in the Museum, he’s done tons of work on the wiki and the Community Partnership proposal and is a great sounding board whenever I need advice. Please thank them for all of the tremendous work they do to help Chilbo achieve it’s fullest potential.
Finally, we should also recognize and thank all of the volunteers for the committees and the chairs of the committees for all of their hard work too. The Chilbo Community is an example of “more than the sum of its parts” – it takes a lot of effort and dedication to make something like this happen, and as much as I personally do for Chilbo, it doesn’t begin to compare to what we all accomplish together, so thank you for being here and being a part of our community.
When I look back on the last year, I am amazed at how many things we did accomplish together. As I mentioned, 2009 was a year of tremendous growth, and not just in terms of numbers like land and people and such, but also in terms of what we actually did. Implementing the Hippo Rental System has brought many new faces to Chilbo and made it possible for many more people to feel a part of our community at a very low cost and low barriers to entry for newbies. We also implemented the Resident and Locations directory on the web, linked from our main website, and the traffic on those sites has been surprisingly high! You probably don’t realize how often people google for your Second Life name, and by putting these directory websites together, we’ve brought Chilbo out to the web so people can find more information about our people and our community. I hope we’ll continue to work to bring more of Chilbo out onto the web and more of the web into Chilbo as we move forward.
In addition to these new services, our residents also had a number of exciting accomplishments in the past year. Tara Yeats and Malburns Writer‘s “Metaverse Week in Review” weekly webcast continues to be a great weekly summary of everything happening in virtual worlds, and it brings together residents from all over the Second Life grid for great conversation in text chat during the show. If you haven’t seen the show, I highly recommend that you do, I try to make it whenever I can. Chilbo now boasts a great live music scene through MS Hawkers‘ coffee Haus, and she and Kristine Kristan have done a great job attracting talented musicians in partnership with Mad Wax Records and the Musician Mentorship Program. And Chilbo residents also made great contributions to real world charities this year. Alleara Snoodle‘s team for the Relay for Life event raised over $9000 USD for the American Cancer Society, and Chibi Lexenstar and MS organized a charity benefit for Haiti that raised over L$130,000. This shows that the work we do isn’t just benefiting Second Life, but also making a difference in the real world as well.
And finally, we worked very hard at the end of 2009 to put together a proposal to join the Linden Lab Community Partnership Program, and though we received a letter from Blondin Linden that sounds like we might not be a good fit for the program (more to discuss later in the meeting), putting the proposal together was a good experience, I think. It was a good for us to refine some of our communication processes as we worked on the draft document, it was good for us to document how and why we do some of the things we do, and it was definitely good to update some of our infrastructure and locations in-world as we prepared for a possible site visit. During the course of writing the proposal, we updated our community maps, our teleport maps, the Chilbo Town Hall, and many other locations around the community.
Considering all we accomplished in 2009, what should we focus on in the year ahead?
For starters, we’ve got the data from the 2009 Land and Resident Census finally, and we can use that information to help us think about what our priorities should be in terms of land and prims moving forward. We’ll take a look at that data in a moment and perhaps discuss it in more depth at the next Town Hall meeting.
But if the theme of 2009 was “Growth in Land and People”, I think we should make the theme for 2010 about “Partnerships Across the Grid”. Partnerships with more communities in Second Life, partnerships with people in the neighboring sims through the Community Liaisons and Annexes program, and more partnerships and collaborations with each other. Partnerships help us learn from others and share what we know, too, and we’ve had several conversations lately about potential partnerships with other communities in Second Life.
Corcosman and others have mentioned partnering with NCI, which is a great organization that helps new residents learn about Second Life, and there are other communities doing great things too like Insight Virtual College, Caledon, and we’ve had some good conversations with the folks who started the East River Community, another Mainland community. We should look at ways to collaborate with these groups and maybe others that are doing good work on the grid that we would like to support.
I’m also hoping that the Community Liaisons and Annex program will help us get to know more of the people who live in the sims around Greater Chilbo, and where it makes sense, learn more about their work and see if more partnerships are possible with folks in our own back yard. We hope to have a volunteer Community Liaison for each sim in the Greater Chilbo area who can do some of this outreach, and the Chilbo Annex buildings will serve as a place for folks in those sims to learn more about our community, too.
And finally, I hope to see more partnerships and collaborations _within_ Chilbo. I encourage you to get involved, work with each other, learn from each other. If you’ve never taught a class before, maybe talk to someone who has and offer a workshop, or schedule a discussion with someone else in the community. Or maybe you’ve read a good book lately, make a contribution to the Chilbo Public Library, or do a movie review! Certainly I hope we can reprise the Chilbo Summer Faire in 2010 and partner with each other to make that a great event for others on the grid to come and celebrate with us.
So that’s pretty much all I had to say, I didn’t want to take up too much of our time here together, but I think the last year has been a really good one. I’m sure most of you know, for me personally it was a really hard year when my grandpa passed away and it wasn’t until I came back to Chilbo after that loss that I really could appreciate just what a great, caring community we really have. I’m continually amazed by the people here and I hope we continue to grow and do great things together in the years ahead.
Thank you and now I’ll sit down!
Brief Review of the 2009 Annual Resident & Land Census Data
Following the speech, we briefly looked at the charts and graphs of data from the 2009 Annual Resident and Land Census. There was way too much info to digest all at once, so the PPT slides are located in the Town Hall and posted to the Chilbo Road Press so we can look at the data at a more leisurely pace. We’ll have a more in-depth conversation about the census results at the March Town Hall meeting, and figure out what changes we might want to make in terms of land and prim priorities, and other suggested changes from the feedback given in the surveys. Be sure to check out the data before the next Town Hall!
Community Liaisons and Chilbo Annex Buildings
Chilbo residents discuss the Chilbo Annex building model created
by Kristine Kristan and Chibi Lexenstar.
We are now accepting applications from community members to serve as Community Liaisons. To apply, fill out the Chilbo Volunteer Form and let us know which sim you would like to be responsible for – if you want to volunteer for more than one sim, please make a separate application for each sim. One person will be selected from the applicants to be the Community Liaison for each sim, and that person will serve a 6 month term, like the Committee Chairs.
The responsibilities for a Community Liaison include:
- Active outreach to landowners and residents in the area to invite them to join our community, connect with sidewalks, etc.
- Point of contact for questions about Chilbo Community (ambassador role)
- Experienced in land management issues to assist residents in the sim with issues, questions, or problems
- Responsible for maintaining and updating the Chilbo Annex buildingin that sim
- Provide updates about happenings in the region at Town Hall meetings
In addition, we also discussed the Chilbo Annex building model that Kristine Kristan and Chibi Lexenstar built in the Madhupak Sandbox. (We visited that location after the Town Hall meeting.) Anyone with ideas about the building itself or what should go inside it should put their contributions in/on the platform above the sandbox. At the next Town Hall we will finalize the design choices and begin to select the locations for placement in the sims. Each sim in Greater Chilbo will have its own Annex, on group land, and we want to stay around 100 prims or less for the building and all the content. We’ll include a “Door to Town Hall” in each Annex so it’s easy to get the main Town Hall for visitors.
Community members have until the March 2010 Town Hall to provide feedback on the building and any content they would like to see included (max of ~ 100 prims). Just give your feedback to Kristine or Chibi or place items in the model.
Linden Lab Community Partnership Update
A historic day in Chilbo, the last plot with n-entry barriers becomes
community land on February 12, 2010 thanks to Blondin Linden’s assistance.
We received a letter from Blondin Linden about our proposal. Blondin had some concerns that Chilbo might not be a good fit for the program, particularly regarding the “theme” of our community and he seemed to come away with the impression that we’re focused on land rentals. Many were confused/disappointed/upset by this result, but we have written a draft letter in response to his concerns, and the community is invited to add edits, comments, or discuss the response on the discussion tab of the wiki page.
On the upside, even if we don’t get into the partnership program, Blondin took the time to visit the community and seems interested in helping us deal with some land issues. Thanks to his efforts, the very last no-entry barriers in the Chilbo sim were removed on February 12, 2010 – a historic day for our community! Many residents flew in and out and around Chilbo all day, excited to be able to fly through the WHOLE sim without bumping into a single barrier. Hooray!
Center for Virtual Collaboration to Locate in Chilbo
Fleep Tuque announced that the Center for Virtual Collaboration, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, will be locating its Second Life headquarters in the Chilbo Community! Chilbo resident Wainbrave Bernal at the University of Oregon is on the project team, and the former Nature Preserve parcel in the Madhupak sim is being re-purposed for this project. We are still in the discussion phase with the Center to work out the details, but so far, we know that the Center wants to pay for their land use (woohoo!) and that they will be working with a real life architect to design their space in Chilbo.
More info about the Center for Virtual Collaboration project:
The Center for Virtual Collaboration project is funded by the National Science Foundation, and they are currently studying Sun Microsystems and IBM, the OpenSim variants, and other places where geo-distributed groups belonging to (primarily) formal organizations are conducting serious work. The Center is using Evolutionary Economics, SocioMateriality, and Human Computer Interface (design / behavior) to investigate the ways that virtual work identity and work routines co-evolve. The Center for Virtual Collaboration in Chilbo would act as a showcase of Collaboration Routines that they are developing into a typology, examples of how virtual teams collaborate effectively, act as a demo for exemplary collaboration practice, and act as a place for people to demo collaboration strategies, etc.
We are very excited that the Center wants to locate in Chilbo and we hope that they will benefit from being co-located in a living collaborative project, even while we hope to learn from them too! Stay tuned for more info as it becomes available.
Chilbo to Become an Official Metanomics Event Partner in SL and Reaction Grid
Fleep Tuque began conversations with Jennette Forager from the Metanomics team to discuss a partnership between the Metanomics show and the Chilbo Community. Tara Yeats and Malburns Writer have long hosted weekly webcasts of the Metanomics show at the MetaHub in Chilbo, but it’s been a sort of unofficial site up to this point. In keeping with the theme of “Partnerships Across the Grid”, Chilbo will become an official event partner of the show in Second Life at the Shrubbery Amphitheatre and Park, and in Reaction Grid at a location to be announced. Stay tuned for more info!
Other Updates
Corcosman Voom attended Blondin Linden‘s office hours last week, nothing much new to report at this time. No progress on paving Route 9 yet, but the moles are pretty busy with the new Linden Homes which roll out February 17th.
Meeting adjourned.
Following the Town Hall, a bunch of us went down to the Madhupak Sandbox to check out the proposed Chilbo Annex build created by Kristine and Chibi.
Next Town Hall meeting scheduled for: March 13, 2010 @ 11AM SLT
Meeting summary and complete transcripts are available at the Chilbo Town Hall.
