Mitch Kapor… who?
After reading the post in the Official Linden Blogrelated to the program for SL5B i’m full of curiosity.
Some time ago Lindens said there will be an important announcement at the closing of SL5B, and the one closing SL5B will be Mitch Kapor, but… who is Mitch Kapor?
Image by Isfullofcrap published under a Creative Commons license.
In the image above you can see him (at left) in Second Life, during Life 2.0 conference. Well, Mr. Kapor is head of the Open Source Applications Foundation, Chair of the Board of Directors of Linden Lab, has been chair of the Mozilla Foundation, founder of Lotus (the software company, not related to the genitalia makers in Second Life :-P ) and is an active member of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation (source: Wikipedia).
Mr. Kapor published also some articles about Civil Liberties in Cyberspace, co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation with fellow digital rights activists John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore.
So, knowing the biography of Mr. Kapor i wonder what will be the “special announcement”.
I have my personal guesses about this, one more technical and the other more social: Open Source of the Simulator Side Software and/or some kind of regulation about the use and contents in the simulators (a clearer one), maybe a new Mature-PG structure, specially if they want to merge Teen Grid with Main Grid.
Of course, all that is just ideas… we will have to wait until July 7 to know the answer.
Open Letter: Resident's festival
Shoshana Epsilon posted in her blog an Open Letter to Linden Lab.
She and some other residents will push the organization of a resident organized event for the next Second Life birthdays. It will be intended to be resident (and corporate) supported, absolutely off Linden Lab. The festival is meant to be a complement to “official” celebrations, not to be against it.
Here is the full text of that Open Letter:
To whom it may concern at Linden Lab,
In the interest of transparency and good will, I would like to inform you of a new Resident-run initiative. A Second Life fringe festival.
For several years, Linden Lab has graciously provided space for the Residents of Second Life to showcase their talents. For their part, the Residents receive recognition from their peers. (Due to my participation in SL3B, I was interviewed for Le Monde on-line magazine and asked to participate in the University of Texas at Dallas’ first display of Resident art. Later, I was asked to be the art director for SL4B and SL5B. My continued presence has given me additional exposure to be asked to be curator and board member for several galleries.)
I understand the need to provide a squeaky-clean image to the “outside” world. Honestly, I want Second Life to continue and succeed as much as you do. However, many artists and exhibitors find the “squeaky clean” image that you wish to portray as being too restrictive. In truth, there are MANY aspects of Second Life, and the G rated version is only part of it.
In the image of the International Arts Festival at Edinburgh with its associated Fringe Festival, several of us from within the community wish to have our own fringe festival. The intent is that Linden Lab’s Birthday event is to the Resident event as the Edinburgh International Arts Festival is to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: the official, major event, and the supplementary smaller event. We would welcome your cooperation in coordinating these two separate events so that they can support each other and create a stronger whole.
We have yet to actually name our event, but I am rather fond of calling it the ‘fringe festival’ following a concept commonly used in Great Britain. (There are actually concurrent fringe festivals in many cities throughout northern England and Scotland.) The festival organizers will be meeting in the upcoming weeks and months to iron out these details, and we welcome input from all sources on how we can construct a truly wonderful festival to celebrate all the things we love about Second Life.
For 2009, we will be asking individuals and corporations, rather than Linden Lab, to donate the use of their sims to host a festival concurrent with Second Life’s 6th birthday. In subsequent years, if this is successful, we may include other non-birthday events, especially if we can arrange long term donor support.
The intention of this event is not to take attention away from your primary event(s). It is to allow additional participation by people who love this place and see it as “home”.
In thanks for your continued support,
Pyrii Akula
Shoshana Epsilon
SignpostMarv Martin
Will Webb
In my opinion this is a nice iniciative, the start of all the issues about SL5B was the “coup d’etat” (just a way of speaking) of Linden Lab over the SL5B organization that was originally composed by residents.
Wish from here the best luck to Shoshana and the rest in this new project.
Family is censored now in SL5B
Image copyrighted by Sue Stonebender, published with permission.
Now all this is going too far. All the credit Linden Lab had fighting against the so called “Ageplay” (simulated paedophile) now is lost in that stupid (yes, stupid, i can’t use other word) censorship for virtual familiar behaviours in images.
Thanks to Sue Stonebender and her post in Flickr (touch the image to see more) we all knew Linden Lab turned down Stephen Venkman‘s application to exhibit at the SL5B celebrations this year, Stephen’s theme was “Family”. Some of the images were just “virtual family” shots, Stephen and Kimmy (his SLwife)with his SLdaughters, you will fins links to some of the images at Sue’s post in Flickr.
I know Stephen Venkman, is someone i have the luck to may call a friend. He is honest, caring, respectful. Stephen and his SLwife, Kimberly, decided to have an SLfamily. Is the kind of life (or Role Play, as you prefer)they wanted to have with their SLdaughters.
Sue is explaining all together better than me:
“… Because the pressure of the law (and moreover the lack of clarity on exactly where the boundaries of legislation lie in a constantly morphing global community), the once “wild frontier” nature of the Second Life online community was gifted with some boundaries regarding the representation of children in the form of avatars, and the kinds of interactions that were not acceptable, that would lead to the suspension of accounts, and in some cases prosecution. It was both responsible and appropriate for Linden Lab to do this.
Having said that, we are left with an abundance of gray areas, and sadly a “witch hunt” mentality with many residents taking up zealous campaigns to brand a lot of very healthy, loving and even healing expressions of human interaction as something shameful and subject to persecution.
Because of the ongoing nature of this controversy, Linden Lab turned down Stephen Venkman’s application to exhibit at the SL5B celebrations this year. Stephen’s theme was “family”, and if you know Venk and Kimmy at all then you know they treat this matter with a very loving, healthy and honest touch, and not a trace of the kind of interaction that sends people running to the street with pitchforks and torches.
Stephen’s request to allow these pictures to remain intact as a part of the exhibit is currently under review by Linden Lab. This is why I am reaching out to you today.
I believe if we simply give up the right to normal, healthy and even healing parts of our expression as real people behind the pixels that we suffer an even greater loss: human rights, and our voice.
I realize that by sharing this here it opens up that monumental can of worms that has been tossed about like a hand grenade with the pin pulled for years on SL, but I do this because we are still living in a time of witch hunts and paranoia, and one where a continued intelligent discourse and debate is sorely needed in order to cultivate our lives responsibly, meaningfully and creatively within a virtual community. …”
As you know I decided to be outside SL5B some time ago (and i think is one of the best decisions i made lately), but, now i know for sure i won’t even visit SL5B. Sincerely, I hope all exhibitors, artist, creators and volunteers in SL5B resign. I’d like to see what Linden Lab does with 16 empty sims. Of course is up to that persons and i’ll respect their decisions, i’m just saying what i’d like to see.
UPDATE (Jun 12nd): I wrote a notecard with my opinion about that issue to give to Sue as support to Stephen:
I, Raul Crimson, support Stephen Venkman’s art project at SL5B.
I know him and his artwork. He is light years away of that few people that damage the reputation of SL childs with acts outside legality.
In my case i’m not agaist Linden Lab about this issue, i understand they are between us (the residents) and some narrow minded politics and tabloids. Anyway there has been some lack of communication between Linden Lab and the residents (sadly, is a common mistake) and it may seem Linden Lab is the same opinion of that politics and tabloids.
I think also the best Linden Lab can do is to show what is Second Life, the diversity, the world of fantasy, business or alternative reality the residents are building, texturing, scripting and living each and every day. This is, in my opinion, the best way to make that politics and tabloids know what is Second Life.
Raul Crimson
off-SL5B
I won’t be in the SL5B official celebrations this year, and i won’t be there for more than one reason.
I was there last year, in SL4B, with a pavilion, quite simple, trying to speak about the diversity of Second Life (it sounds ironic under the actual circumstances, eh?). Was really interesting, met there wonderful people, some of them very good friends still right now. There were some problems, specially about performance (the SL4B sims were laggy as hell) but all together was a nice experience.
This year, well, is better to start in the beginning… When the organization started looking for people to participate in SL5B some friends and me planned a common space. Instead of individual pavilions we wanted to make a common space where we could express our vision about a theme colectively. After talking with SL5B Art Direction we saw our project was not matching their project, so we decided all together to be off SL5B and do our own exhibition. In this moment all the team is working on this project, but i don’t want to give more information for the moment, will talk about this soon…
Then, the “Gorean child into BDSM” issue…. As you all know and you can read in the previous two posts there was some problems about the participation of child avatars, Goreans and BDSM people. Finally all SL5B sims will be PG rated and Linden Lab took control over a celebration that was originally “resident-organized”.
So this are my reasons to be off SL5B, one we can call “artistic” and other we can call “ethical”.
UPDATE (Jun, 06th 2008): I’d like to clarify something. I know that Child Avatars are now allowed to participate in SL5B. About the “artistic” reason, as i said when we made our group porposal to SL5B the Art Direction said our project was not feeting their plans for the art area, we wanted to make our own pavilion to show our images in an enviroment, and they said this year “No pavilions this year, we will have enviroments were you can hang your art, but not building, just like a gallery”. We wanted to have our images in an enviroment, that was the reason to say no. Now it seems they permit to build enviroments in SL5B.
In both cases the organization (Linden or Resident organizations) said first NO (no to childs, no to enviroments), now organization says YES (yes to childs but all sims PG and yes to enviroments). Sorry, i can understand sometimes the needs or the ideas of an organization may change, for the preasure of residents in the case of Linden Lab and the childs-Gor-BDSM issues, or because they just saw is better to do it in other way, in the case of SL5B Art direction, but now i made my own plans outside their organization and i don’t need to change them.
That doesn’t mean i’m having any kind of bad feeling with SL5B Art direction, the Art team of SL5B are people i really apreciate and i can call them friends. About Linden Lab… well, that’s another story.
*Image published by Esther Dayson licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-Non commercial 2.0 Generic.
So… are you invited or not?
Finally Linden Lab wrote a post in its Official Linden Blog with the answer to this issue.
They now say everyone can apply, as long as it’s accordance with PG standarts.
Not sure if a what we can call a fix on the issue, but is the nearest to a correction we will have.
Of course in the comments people is still complaining, and Katt Linden is trying to do her work as good as she can. But we are upset, really upset. Someway she seems surprised people in comments is speaking as if they won’t be trusting Linden Lab, and maybe the point is that, we are not trusting them.
As i said in my comment, the damage is made, the trust we had in Linden Lab as residents was low for some different reasons (performance, problems with assets or central database servers alternatively depending the week, and many more) but now we felt me threatened as community.
Let’s see how all this goes. But although that post i won’t be in SL5B, first, for something you can call pride (yeah, i know is a sin and stuff… but i can help it) and second, the “resident organized” SL5B porposals were, for me, more interesting than that “new” and official SL5B.
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