Category: Netroots

So during the week of Novemeber 8 to 14 I blogged my head off about RootsCamp in Second Life. By the end of running the whole thing I was a bit exhausted and have been remiss in writing about what a great success it was, and how the community we developed is not going away!

We had a dozen different sessions and activities attended by easily over 100 people (avatars) at various times over the week. It was very fun and educational. And more importantly, it strengthened the nascent activist culture in SL and built a community that will continue to seek out and develop opportunities for progressive advocacy in-world. And on that note…

I am pleased to announce that the SL Netroots group (which is the RootsCamp community) will be having weekly meetups in Second Life. They are every Wednesday at 4pm eastern time (1pm Linden time) including today. I will be leading today’s meeting so please stop in. You have to join our “SL Netroots” group to get the announcements about meeting locations as we do not yet have a permanent home, but I think today’s meeting will be at the Tech Soup office on Info Island.

The RootsCampSL wiki is the place to go for tons of information and on-going updates. I was especially pleased with how we integrated several collaborative tools to collect and share information on the wiki. For example:

• photos from our Flickr group
• RSS feed of blog posts tagged as rootscampsl in Technorati
• RSS feed of links tagged rootscampsl in del.icio.us

These are free tools that can be used with any event or campaign, so I hope we also did a good job of demonstrating how easy it is to involve a community by opening channels of communication and amplifying each other’s voices. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Today at RootsCampSL was really great and just as interesting as I had expected. I’m really tired and trying to conserve energy so I won’t write much. We had nearly every seat filled for Rik Riel and In Kenzo‘s session about political activism in Second life, and it generated lots of great discussion and ideas about how to support each other in this kind of work.

Tomorrow’s finale is a conversation about how to use Second Life as a campaign tool in 2008, and it will be followed by a party! Someone said they’d bring drinks and someone else is getting a DJ. Should be fun.

This is your last chance to be a part of this groundbreaking online organizing event. Sessions start at 4pm EST. Hope to see you there tomorrow!

This weekend featured a couple of excellent sessions. Saturday we had a presentation from the founder of the CODE PINK group in Second Life (below left) and Sunday two expert machinima makers (below right) talked about how that emerging art is being used for social justice (links at the end of this post).

In next two days we will be working up to a fever pitch with at least three sessions each day, including our closing party. Any suggestions for how to make the party festive and social? See the schedule here.
 
Some machinima links from yesterday’s session:

• a simple tutorial: http://altzoom.buhbuhcuh.com/classroom
• great example: http://movies.lionhead.com/studio/koulamata
• how to use the alt-zoom camera: http://moomoney.wordpress.com/2006/09/14/how-to-alt-zoom-camera
• In Kenzo’s videoblog, including Camp Darfur mashup and Manor Meta shorts: http://inkenzo.blip.tv
• Hiro/Paul’s blog: http://blog.machinima.org
• moo’s blog: http://moomoney.wordpress.com

I can’t wait to check these out!

RootsCampSL Day Three update, and weekend preview…

Yesterday I led a session on basic building in Second Life which also included a great discussion about what kinds of activities and “builds” in SL are effective politically. One my favorite RootsCamp moments so far happened, when I told everyone how to manipulate objects and invited them to try to move the stools we were sitting on. Suddenly seemingly fixed objects started flying around with no respect for the laws of physics.

We also had an interesting presentation from Aldon Hynes, Technology Director of the Ned Lamont for Senate campaign. It was interesting to learn about the internal needs of a campaign and what worked well for them. I was surprised to hear that they considered whether to even have a campaign blog or just reply on the supportive community of progressive bloggers in Connecticut.

This weekend we have some very fun sessions: today at 4pm EST I will do an open thread/open house, which will be about anything we want. I may continue the SL building lessons if folks are interested. Then at 5pm the founder of the CODE PINK community in SL will lead a discussion on “Pink Jesters, Lingerie & Cyber Disobedience.” Tomorrow at 6pm there will be a session on “Using Machinima for Social Change / Political Action” with Paul Marino, Moo Money, and Beth Kanter. That should be pretty awesome.

The rest of the schedule is already packed with goodness (see below), but you can still propose sessions any time until Tuesday afternoon.

Continue reading “Fun stuff at RootsCampSL this weekend” →

Day two of RootsCampSL was very interesting. We discussed some specific cliffhanger races like the Virginia Senate battle and some very competitive congressional seats in North Carolina (even touching on the Durham DA race which was the political fallout of the Duke rape case prosecution). We also talked about whether the Democratic Party is or should be a “big tent” encompassing a wide range of issues and positions. Today’s RootsCampers came from CA, MN, WA, IN, NC, NY, CT, AZ, CO, VA, and Trinidad & Tobago!

We now have our own Flickr group for RootsCampSL, I am also collecting related links in del.icio.us, and there’s always Technorati.

Tomorrow’s topics will be a general Q & A for those new to Second Life, and then a review of Ned Lamont’s campaign in Connecticut from Ned’s tech coordinator and maye other campaigns staff. If you’ve never tried Second Life, tomorrow afternoon’s session for newbies at 4pm EST is a great time to start. I hope to see you there.

The picture above of me and my avatar was inspired by these images of Susan Tenby and her Second life avatar.

The first day of RootsCampSL was awesome! We had about 15 people (with very little notice, this is a lot) including prominent SL blogger Rik Riel, prominent nonprofit blogger Beth Kanter, and Aldon Hynes who worked on the Howard Dean and Ned Lamont Campaigns. (I can’t decide if I should share their Second Life names or real life.) We also had people from Georgia, California, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina (not including me!), Massachusetts, and New York, as well as Canada, Italy, and Spain!

The schedule wiki is shaping up nicely with a lot of good idea from today’s participants.

On tap for tomorrow’s meeting: 2006 Debrief & Discuss. We started to do this today but didn’t have time, so tomorrow we’ll take an hour or two and hear from eachother about the elections in our own states and any other races that we were paying special attention to. This will be an opportunity to share our personal experiences and any lessons learned. Its starts tomorrow (Thursday) at 4pm EST on Better World Island.

Continue reading “RootsCampSL – off to a great start” →

See my last post for more information about RootsCampSL. I’ve posted some graphics on Flickr, please post one on your blogs and link back to our wiki: http://rootscamp.org/RootsCampSL

Continue reading “RootsCampSL starts in 48 hours!” →