Category: Tech

community application of technology for public benefit

Fun and powerful new tool

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Also posted at Netcentric Campaigns.

This looks like fun.  IBM has launched an experimental site called Many Eyes, which allows users to upload data sets and create lovely visualizations of their own or other people's data.

For example, select from existing data "Average Gas Price by Median State Income for 1- and 2-earners" and then choose a "US state" visualization, and viola!  They even have a handy "blog this" function to make it easy to insert the resulting graphic into a blog.  Like so: 

Available visualization types include U.S. and world geographic maps, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, bubble charts, a variety of graphs, and my favorite the network diagram.  This is the kind of site that can absorb a whole weekend, I need to be careful… 🙂

Thanks to Bruce Hoppe for the link.

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RL media covers SL politics

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Thanks to Sara Donnelly (a.k.a. Sara Susa in Second Life) of the Portland (ME) Phoenix for her coverage of the Avatars Against the War protest. Sara attended many of our meetings as well as the protest and I appreciate her taking the time to learn about what we were/are doing.

(Speaking of what we are doing, we are still holding meetups weekly on Thursdays at 3pm EST. However, I won’t be there this week as I am going to see Cory Doctorow speak at UNC. My co-organizer Andrew Hoppin/Drew Frobozz will be facilitating today’s meeting.)

“We had envisioned doing something small and symbolic until . . . we realized that we had clearly touched a nerve in the Second Life community,” said Ruby Sinreich, a/k/a “Ruby Glitter,” a real-world activist who helped organize the virtual-world rally. “Although we can’t vote in Second Life, we can raise awareness and connect people and show our strength.”
– The Phoenix – Out-of-body politic, 2/7/07

However I have two corrections to Sarah’s article:

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Crazy for the future

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Brian Fitzgerald reflects on his personal evolution and a career spent saving the planet upon his 25th anniversary at Greenpeace. He started out as a part-time canvasser in Boston and is now the web guru at Greenpeace International.

I’ve spent 25 years trying to keep in balance the daily doses of despair and the general sense of hope that by making a choice to do something for the planet, people can actually achieve something for the planet. And there are days I believe that mightily, with all my being, and days I cluck with ancient pity at how naive a 49-year-old man can be.

… In short, you gotta be crazy to try. But if nobody tries, game over.

– Eco-Geekery: 25 years with Greenpeace

Keep up the great work, Brian. Let’s hear it for being crazy!

BBC interview & SLNN story

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With the gracious permission of Chris Vallance of the BBC’s Pods and Blogs radio show, here is the audio of the BBC Radio interview (4:46 2.9MB MP3) mentioned below.

You can read the show notes and hear the whole program on the BBC website. (Thanks to the awesome Audio Hijack software by Rogue Amoeba for making it really easy for me to make the above MP3.)

Also, Second Life News Network published a nice (and long!) article by Scarlett Qi. Unfortunately many viewers (at Wonkette, too) didn’t recognize the iconic “pink slip” of Code Pink. My favorite line in the SLNN article: “Amazingly, it was not chaotic.” Quite true. 🙂

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I’m! In! Wonkette!!!

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Wonkette posted Rik’s machinima of the protest – without attribution 🙁 – and generally made fun of us, called us hippies, etc. As Rik pointed out: “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” And as I replied: “there’s also no such thing as a kind word from Wonkette.” In other words, I’m honored to be on the receiving end of their snark.

Give it up for liberals: they managed to find the one way left to make traditional protests even more ineffectual and embarrassing. Have ‘em on the internet!
– ‘Second Life’ War Protest Ensures Continued Occupation of Iraq For Next 1,000 Years – Wonkette

Unfortunately, this post wasn’t nearly as funny as most Wonkette entries, but it’s a start. I see we’ve caused them to create a new category for politics in Second Life, so we’re clearly having some kind of impact, 😉

Here’s Rik’s machinima video with music by Sweet Honey in the Rock. I understand a longer video may be in the works.

Post-protest processing

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First, you can now hear my interview with the pods & blogs show on the BBC HERE! I’m not sure how long this audio will be available, so listen now…

A lot of reporters have been asking me for statements about the march so to save us all time, here it is. Use at will (with attribution):

I was thrilled with the event. The owners of Capitol Hill reported that we had 126 people attending, which is a lot in a world where it is technically difficult for more than about 40 avatars to gather in one space at one time. Our group SL Netroots had envisioned doing something small and symbolic until last week when we realized that we had clearly touched a nerve in the Second Life community. The turnout was amazing, especially considering we did very little to promote the event, and everyone there was engaged and having a great time.

The fact that a normally apolitical population like SL residents responded so enthusiastically shows how widespread the opposition to the Iraq War is. People who heard about it told their friends or blogged about it, and spread the word themselves. We simply facilitated that by linking to our wiki and making it easy for people to share the information. Most of the participants were from all across the country, and a few came from other countries – including Iraq! I think this reinforces the idea that most Americans agree with world opinion in opposition to the war.

SL is a very creative medium, and events like this help to develop it as a outlet for activism and political expression, as well as a place where people can find and participate in a community of like-minded advocates. This person-to-person connection is as “real” as any other. This is movement-building. Although we can’t vote in Second Life, we can raise awareness and connect people and show our strength. We will continue to do so!

Rik Riel and In Kenzo put together Video of “Avatars against the War” Peace Demo in Second Life. It doesn’t exactly show the narrative of the whole event, but it has some great looking avatars breaking it down as we danced for peace. (I have some more video that I will share with them.)

There are now a bunch of pictures on flickr, and they’re not all by me! Although this one is:

Capitol steps

I have been been contacted by many members of the (surprisingly-large) SL media corps, but I haven’t seen any of those stories come out yet. I’ll post links when I get them….

A smashing success

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We had over 80 126 avatars in attendance which is pretty much exceeds the limit of what Second Life can tolerate (SL Capitol Hill is TWO islands mashed together). We had people from all around the country and a few from around the world, I think we broke Second Life, and I was interviewed by BBC radio!!!!

Lots more links and pics to come. Now back to my first life…

071029_029

Thanks to Errcheck Hicks, Effulgent Brown, Rik Riel, Kiwini Oe, TROI Timtam, Drew Frobozz, and everyone who participated in any way!!!

Update: After I left, an Iraqi refugee who is living in Jordan came by and shared his experiences. Several people reported that it was a touching and apt closure to the event, really bringing the problems back home to a personal scale. I got the transcript of that and will try to post it later.

I posted some more pictures from today and made an album on flickr. More cool pictures and an interesting blog entry were posted by the only furry at the march.

Because of SL crashing, I lost much of the chat log which includes people saying where they were from and making up slogans and stuff. 🙁 Hopefully someone else who was there will send me a copy.

Someone from Capitol Hill also sent me some pictures of the event, but I don’t know how to get the images out of Second Life!

I’ll keep watching to see what turns up…

Monday we march

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Tomorrow this space will be full of avatars: Alone on the steps

You know, some of us just thought this peace protest in Second Life would be a fun thing to do, but we really hit a nerve in the community. I think we’re going to make a big splash at 5pm EST today (Monday)!

In the past few days I have met tons of anti-war residents of Second Life, as well as several in-world reporters and machinimatographers who want to cover the march. The creators of SL Capitol Hill will be on hand to support us as well.

Keep checking our wiki for the latest on the Avatars Against The War events. I’ll see you in-world!

More blogging about the march:
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/01/28/march-for-peace-in-sl-on-monday

Avatars Against The War


http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/01/avatars_against.html

And a good time was had at our Peace Party earlier today:
http://djdoubledown.blogspot.com/2007/01/oyster-bay-house-events-for-peace-jan.html

Avatars Against the War

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RootsCamp & peace poster gallery Our weekend of peace in Second Life is already going great! The latest plans and SLurls are at the RootsCampSL wiki.

First of all, errcheck Hick’s workshop today was great and was attended by at about a dozen avatars. We now have a groovy sign you can carry that changes textures with a click, and that includes sign waving/pumping fist animation.

Tomorrow, errcheck will lead a talk on “Deconstructing Fascism” including his experiences with the recent protests against French white supremacists who have set up shop in SL. This and a Peace Party with a live DJ will be at Conscious Lounge.

me with sign On Monday at 2pm we will have a march on SL Capitol Hill! The creators of SLCH are very supportive of what we’re doing and will be on hand to make sure everything runs smoothly. Protesters should meet at RootsCamp first, where we will have a teleporter that will send people to the right spot. Then we will march around a circular path and wind up on the steps of the capitol building. At this point, we will probably pass a megaphone around so folks can say whatever is on their mind, and/or watch a streaming video of today’s march in DC. (Suggestions?)

We have already had some great blog entries about the protest:
http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2007/01/reminder_virtua.html

Peace in the Metaverse, Goodwill Toward Avs


http://muveforward.blogspot.com/2007/01/political-science-civil-protests-in-sl_27.html

I have been amazed at the amount of excitement there is about the demonstration on Monday. People have been dropping in to RootsCamp all day asking about it. The March will be filmed by some machinima makers, so it’s especially important to get people there.

On a less happy note, errcheck pointed out to me that the SL Netroots group has been joined by one of the right wingers that have active with the Le Pen camp. Nothing bad has hapenned yet, and I don’t think he has visited RootsCamp, but we need to be cautious, especially since most of the stuff at RootsCamp has relatively open permissions.

See you in-world!