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!
Oy vey. Second Life is having another one of those days… First they announce (with no warning) they’re taking everything down for three hours, then 3 hours turns into 4, then I was finally prompted to download the update (indicating the end of downtime), BUT the grid is still not up.
So, the meeting will begin as soon as SL is back online. We may need to push it back an hour.
The downside of a consensus reality run from a centralized server.
youTube went offline lastnight and it was interesting to see all the “holes” spattering the ‘net – everything from crooksandliars.com to milkandcookies.com.
Relying on the good graces of these providers to support online activism gives one pause….
An excellent point, Will. Which is why I’m increasingly interested in http://www.libsecondlife.org, an “open source software project to allow the creation of third-party Second Life applications.”
This is a great reminder of the strength of distributed activism as well as distributed computing.