 Hello everyone and welcome to the 2.30 p.m. session in the content and community track as Reminder to our in-world and web audience you can view the full conference schedule at conference That open simulator org and tweet your questions or comments to at open sim cc with the hashtag OS cc 14 This hour. We are happy to introduce a terrific session called new association for grid owners My name is Maria Koroloff and I'm the editor of hyper good business and also run the hyper Erika site and the hyperport I will be the moderator today First I would like to introduce you to Terry Ford the founder of third rock grid He's also known as in world as butch Arnold Third rock grid is one of the oldest grids running in open sim and is one of the 10 most popular grids as well Terry's the one who originally came up with the idea for an association of open sim grid owners Terry, can you please tell us a little bit of bit about yourself and why you decided to start this association? Sure. Hello everyone. Thanks, man I'm very pleased to be here with all of you today So I look around I see many people here I've already met and talked to over the years and others. I've not yet had the pleasure of me Many of you know me but those of you who don't my name is butch Arnold. I'm the founder of third rock grid. I Live in Ohio, which is in the United States. If you don't know that I Hold a degree in computer programming. I've been a avid 3d world's fan since joining second life back in 2005 and I first became interested in the open sim platform in December 2007 and Shortly thereafter I placed the third rock grid online for the first time in February 2008 And like many of you, I'm very interested in learning all I can about current upcoming open sim developments As well as other similar technologies and this conference seems to be the right place to do it There sure are some exciting projects going on and our beloved open sim platform continues to get better with each passing day It truly seems to be a great time to be involved in 3d platforms. They continue to grow in popularity and function. I Sometimes visit other grids and I talk to the owners and the admins. I See grid owners as partners in a sense As we're all trying to offer users a great experience built on top of the open sim platform Some of them have different views may cater to a different user base, etc We all share in the responsibility to present our users the best that open sim can offer Oftentimes I believe grid owners see each other's as competitors and to some extent I believe this to be true But the virtual world space is a very big place and the potential user base is huge Much larger than any of us has seen thus far as the the number of open sim users and worlds continue to grow. I Believe our responsibilities as grid owners also increases. I believe one of these Responsibilities is to make sure that none of our worlds give open sim a bad name. I Like to submit to you that each instance of open sim should be seen as a link in the chain of virtual worlds And that this chain is only as strong as its weakest link Sharing some of our knowledge back to the community can and will help to strengthen our and our entire community As our platform continues to evolve with new features better stability and more content I think it will become increasingly attractive to new users and the community will continue to grow creating new and unforeseen possibilities for all of us Also, believe there's much room for grid owners to collaborate on events and projects which help to bring our community together An example of this might be the annual Rob stock event that we hold on the third rock grid each April This event was created by Jim St. Clair, which many of you might know is lazuli paraca in our grid The purpose of that event is simply to act as a fundraiser for the doctors without borders charity The events simple we bring entertainers into the grids they play music they sing etc And all the tips they receive during the event get converted to real dollars and then we give it back to the charity For the past few years this become a multiple grid event Spanning third rock red second life and others last year. We were happy that metropolis joined us and Each year the amount of money that we raised continues to be a substantial amount Anyway, the point is is that there's many opportunities for grids to collaborate if provided the means to do it I think that's the important thing to take away from all of it For several years there's been much talk at third rock grid that we as a community Should try to form some sort of grid owners association to provide a means for grid owners to share ideas Knowledge and to provide a forum. We can all interact on a level of friendship instead of always as competitors My visits to the other grids and talks with the owners have solidified the desire of the other grids to have something like this as well Few weeks back. I proposed the idea of a grid owners association of sorts and Maria at hyper grid Decided to write a story about it My original idea was to test the waters to see what kind of interest there might be About forming an organization like this The response was pretty good. We've got 18 grids indicating they were interested in supporting such an organization and Justin from the developers indicated he would he would try to support it as well But interestingly enough though, it seems that the entire community wants to be a part of an organization like this So it seems the original idea somewhat morphed into a more general open sim community organization now Based on the responses Myself Mark Wiseman Maria and Alan Tupper have started putting together the initial startup phase of an organization We are so so far calling this organization open sim united and We've created a website that you can visit and join and that's at open sim united calm And our hopes are that this organization will provide tools to grid owners Open sim developers viewer developers general users and vendors of the open sim community We believe that the community is now large enough that we can successfully run crowdfunding campaigns To help raise money to fix bugs develop new features or extend existing features The idea is that we pick the top things if you will bug fixes features etc That seem to be the most wanted and we start talking to the developers about whether or not they think the project It's a good fit If they determine it's good fit and the project's doable then we'll start collecting pledge promises from the community The pledge amount then would become the bounty if you will placed on this most wanted item Any developer current or future could then submit code for review If it's deemed acceptable then the code to get rolled back into the core code And we've all then benefit from the efforts and we could do this over and over and over again multiple times for any any feature any bug any extension The organization could also provide tools to the community Maybe we could have a central repository for all the content that's been given to the community Maybe we could have a directory of worlds a community Vince calendar the list could go on and on and on really the possibilities are endless Our hopes are though that this organization will be completely open and Transparent it'll be made up of all segments of the community and would remain completely unbiased and run by the community Just to be clear the proposal here is for an organization to be formed by the community for the community It should be one that's never biased towards any individual or group And it should always work for the good of the community as a whole Any projects or work developed by this organization should be considered the property of the community I'll step back now and hand things back over to Maria and we can hear from the others. Thank you all for your time It's great being here Thank you. Thank you Terry for that introduction Next I would like to to introduce you to Alan Tupper another member of the new associations kickoff team Alan is a transmedia content creator Focusing on animation and independent game development He writes about the metaverse from both a developer and and user perspective on the blog meta pundit In his free time Alan is spearheading an effort to explore the potential of cryptocurrencies within the hyper grid Alan how will this association benefit regular users of open sim? Thank you for the question Maria. So We're a pretty passionate community and We're in the software almost every day and we all know we all have our list We all have our list of things. Gee, I really wish we could do X. Gee. I really wish you know this feature was more like that and This isn't something that's limited to just grid owners This isn't just limited to you know content creators This is everyone and everyone has their features and what this Association has the power to do is to bring us all together as a community and say yes That is worth pursuing. Let's get together. Let's chip in Whatever we can chip in and get this thing done We got a lot of Responses was pretty succinct and it was get things done So I think that in a a nutshell is What? We should be aiming for and what what I think it can what it can offer regular users Some users have expressed a few concerns about this organization that This would be a short circuit the normal development process or or you know push open sim maybe in a in a different direction How do you respond to these concerns? I mean, yeah, those those are definitely some common concerns You know, there's you know some concerns that you know, it'll be just sort of a way for You know close grids to essentially strong on the developers and to say hey, you know We have this pet feature and you know kind of do a smash and grab and then go back to their closed grids And leave everyone else kind of in the dark And we won't give everyday community users a voice Our answer to that is Like like Terry was saying earlier We truly believe that everything that the that the association will do and what will produce will be the property of the community and we Really really want to invite the community in to every step along this process Whether that's the initial discussion phase what that we're in right now during the kickoff phase of how this organization should be structured all the way to the the day-to-day Decisions and deliberations on should this be a feature that we pursue or should we You know fund this It's we want to keep this as absolutely open and transparent as possible And we don't want to be shutting people out You this is supposed to be a community organization Some of the things that you're talking about are gonna cost money Can you talk a little bit about your fundraising plans? Absolutely, so yeah, we have two main Methods that we're considering for fundraising and we're considering a combination of both First and foremost we are considering for raising money for projects doing it in a crowdfunding method Platforms like Kickstarter Indiegogo and even patreon have shown that it's More than feasible to when you have a concrete project a group of people who are passionate about seeing that project through It is more than possible to have a group of people come together and Raise funds for that now that works great for individual projects for projects where Or not not even projects, but for the day-to-day operations of the organization We are considering the possibility of introducing a paid membership model and now that Will not really provide any We aren't considering it offering too much in the way of special access we again We're very early in this discussion and we want community input on that but The idea is that that that the funds from a paid membership would go to run the day-to-day Costs of the organization whether that's you know having some people working part-time or even full-time if this gets Large enough to actually do the administrative work And to keep the lights running as it were Um Finally, I'd like to introduce Mark Wiseman who is also helping this organization get off the ground Mark is the CEO of digital worlds group which provides services for private and commercial grids He has a strong passion for 3d historical recreations and for using open simulator for niche applications like real estate previews and Language and subject specific grids He currently lives and works in the Netherlands And he offers online marketing consulting services to companies aiming to incorporate the 3d web into existing and new marketing channels Mark, could you tell us about some of the practical realities of getting an organization like this off the ground? Hi, Maria. Thank you. Yes Well the way we get an organization like this off the ground in our community, which is open source based and Wants to be open and transparent in its nature It's to set up the organization together with the entire community and The way we do this is we define a kickoff team Which is this four people here because in the audience is Nick Swart and educated from the Netherlands who has also joined the team and We have a number of a number of other people who have Pledge their support as we go forward during this phase And where you want to be at the end of this phase is to have a non-profit organization most probably Which has gone Through the motions of together with the community defining. So what are our finding founding principles? Next step what what is it we want as a community on large? so as well for the software development as For the community ends of it and Alan has been Guiding do the questionnaire online. I think we had 46 48 responses Alan I think 42 right now, but I think it's growing and it's think it's still open. So we're we're still taking input Right. We're taking input on that until the end of November at least And what we're seeing in that already is that there are demands from the community for different types of activities which a non-profit organization could do one of these activities is the crowd crowdfunding But we won't know that yet until we've done our inventory which we'll do with the entire community I'll have to look at my slide for a moment So what once once the community has come back and said right we like these activity plans Please go and sort them out. We're going to have to figure out the legal aspects of this organization Get it properly registered I think the next step after that is and we've looked at Apache how Apache does this and Mozilla does this and other open source organizations They tend to have a board which is elected by the community which consists of A number of people who are strong on the field and have have a long-standing experience They're a non-executive and they appoints a management team for a period of a year And that management team is the team which goes back to the founding principles and the activity plans Which have been decided on and actually act executes them at that point this kickoff phase obviously ends and it becomes an operational organization And in that what one of the things that could be doing so when I say activity plans very often so far we've spoken about the Crowdfunding end of things So here's a small example of how that how that plan would work and it would be a separate If you want department within the organization, which runs this activity and it goes through month or three monthly cycles Could be six months in which you go to the community Infantry all the requests which are out there and what that will tell you is What are the demands in the market for? The end users what is it the end users want which items have the highest market value when you add them to the products So you do that for a couple of weeks And you end up with this top ten list of things which end users once we take that to the core developers to the additional developers and really we take it to any developer who Could develop for open sim and we say all right come up with the folks from design for this Come up with your price for it. And then if these plans check out and this is why we need some developers To be in this management team really You take it to the crowdfunding stage and we're talking about items, which could cost 200 bucks that the $200 to fix or up to two thousand The community that has asked for these items is now in the position to actually crowdfund these items You get your crowdfunding in the organization takes care of the financials of it The developer goes or the development team goes and develops their Proposal delivers it to the repository and rinse and repeat So that that's in a nutshell the way you get from your kickoff phase all the way to operational And then how you could consistently repeat repeat these activity plans So you you're gonna need some support from the core open some developers for this so far What's been the feedback that you've heard I'm gonna hand that one off to Terry because Terry's been in contact with the developers so far Hi, yeah, thanks Mark. Basically, we've we've received not much response from the developers Justin has been the only one to Any up for any information and he simply indicated that he would try his best to support our efforts but as everyone knows his his Schedule is rather busy at times and therefore his participation might be limited. So so we're open to any of the developers that might want to Get in touch with us or become a part of this because we know moving forward. They're going to be a big big Part of this without them really it's going to be really tough for us to to do anything and move forward So again, like I said not much interest yet But we welcome anybody that might want to step up to the plate and and help us out in that area Okay, and this might be a little repetitive, but I've seen it asked quite a few times Can anyone join this organization or is it just for the big grid owners? Ah Well, here's a philosophical question. What is a grid owner? We tend to think of the grid owners as the people who commercially run the top 20 30 grids out there But an educator who runs a grid on their own Network in a school is is a grid owner essentially So it becomes very hard to make a distinction between grid owners and grid owners. So anyone out there using the platform is Should be a member of this organization because you need your Your end users to give you the input what what is requested from market? And they all they need these specialized fields where people are grid owners. So in education Sorry business applications education Language learning is an interesting one there. So You need to get all these all these inputs. So everybody is a member. It's not just commercial grid owners and what about grids that are running on different versions of open sim or that have their own Own technology that they're using I can take that one. Yeah So in the survey we have definitely seen some interest for that I think we still need to reach out to the platforms To to find out if they're truly interested personally, I would love to see it But I think we should still see I think we lost you there for a second. Okay. I'm sorry But it sounded like your answer was yes Yes, I Just came from moderating a panel on content protection and open sim. So this is actually top of my mind Um, will this organization do anything to help protect or help improve the state of content protection in open sim? Well, the real answer to that question is does the community want that because if you go through your cycles And you keep asking your community. What do you want and this floats to the top then? Then that is the thing you want to work on what I would imagine is Content protection is not just about the technology why it's protecting the content but also about how do you handle people who? kind of break your laws and Do the thieving as a fourth? So within the organization you could have an activity a group which focuses on on these particular issues But it stands to the it stands to the community whether or not they want that activity inside the organization Which is what you discover during your kickoff phase One of the problems I think that some of the grids have is that they're competing Amongst each other for a small number of users. Well, this organization do Be doing any big joint efforts to promote open sim beyond this existing user base to the more general public I think so. Yes, I think that that's going to be It's something that the community has definitely shown interest in and I think it's something that we should definitely push forward on that being said, I believe that a great way to do that is to Really support some strong technological developments to make the platform intrinsically exciting and Intrinsically capable of spreading itself. We're still, you know, right now relatively still in the second life model So saying it's like second life, but you know free Hasn't quite been the the selling argument yet. So I think yes, we can we can help with that I had something something to that as well. I think that It would also be a good thing or a potential Reward that the grids could all join in to maybe an advertising co-op of sorts It's just an idea and we could then develop on maybe some of the pricier places to advertise and Share that more like maybe we could do a Series of banners that might be third rock grid for one. Maybe it's a metropolis grid for another maybe it's heavy worlds for another etc, but basically let everybody chip in a banner and maybe Somehow come up with a way to give the each banner owner and equally share the advertising on a platform That may be too pricey for an individual grid to advertise on their own That's just one of the ideas that we could do as well One of the things that I hear From my readers is that it's hard to learn how to get started to run a grid Will your organization? Help people get started provide mentoring or other support or would you rather not have the competition? No, I think absolutely we should do what we can to improve the new user experience and If that boils down to helping other groups get started, you know heading in the same direction I think the more the merrier Personally I Agree with that. I think for the to go forwards. We want more and more adoption of open sim And will the organization organization help people get started with new grids? Well, I think what we should be doing is Making the start of experience easier And not per se help out people by hand, but where are tools where are Simple wikis which explain it where our technological tools which make it simple to set us up within three clicks I Think this organization should be focusing on that because I think it should also be focusing on the market placement of the platform as a whole and Adoptability of it is key there and finally before we Before we start going through the audience questions I'd like to know if the three of you can talk to us about What are your most wanted features for open sim development that you're hoping to see accomplished through the through this organization Well, I'm I'm with 99% of the population which is I want a web viewer, please That's that's my main thing I As a grid owner would second that that opinion but also border crossings would be a second or possibly even the primary concern for myself As someone who has not really been really affiliated with anyone grid and who is really excited by the hyper grid I would love to see more development on that. I would love to see more documentation on both the protocols and Working on really making the hyper grid not only just the technical aspects But also the social and economic aspects really solid so this can be the only the foundation of where we can grow to Alright, so we have a question from the audience Your organization plans is considering having a paid membership model Does that mean that you will be creating an official nonprofit or organization to manage that? Yes, it does indeed. We will have to this this organization has to be incredibly transparent on what it does and Why would you want to pay membership model? Well, first off, you want to have an officially registered Organization which takes cash to actually do that So there's there's going to be costs with running the organization that sort of depends on how heavy you make what the organization has to do And then there's the cost within these individual activities which show up So so yes, it will be an official organization What country will you be based in? That's a good question. There's a good question Oh We're talking about that. We're talking about that. Sorry to pop that on you It's a good one. It's a good one And what you'll see is if you while we're in the kick kickoff phase on the slide I actually we are here is we're actually before we've actually done anything So it's country will based in The first thing the kickoff team will do is Create a process plan for going through the kickoff phase and in that these questions will have to be answered But um, no, I and I don't know I'm not quite sure if I have a particular preference either It's global. I myself don't have a particular preference it and really I guess we should explore The advantages and disadvantages that each country Would would offer the the organization And go from there The good thing is this has been done before by By other software groups So there are models out there we can look out There already is a non-profit organization for open sim the overt foundation Why not just use their infrastructure? That's that's a good question from my understanding of the overt foundation it Primarily exists to be a a holder of the the IP of Open sim to keep that as as a legal vehicle to make sure that all those contributions stay Stay open source and perpetuity Trying to kind of latch on to them and try to expand them Maybe too much to ask of them and I I think at least on from my perspective starting up Open sim United and then if it turns out down the line that you know, we want to merge with overt then So be it but I think right now we shouldn't try to bog down overt with our with our idea this bold experiment of trying to create a community driven organization One of the members of the audience suggests that that being inside the European Union could provide a lot of European funding which also reminded me that there is funding on the table for Possibly for the possibility of a web viewer through the real extent project, right? Is that something you guys would consider? Yes, most definitely I already work in the E I work in the EU and we have cross-country initiatives The central EU is quite happy to hand out money for that So yes, if you have the organization set up in Europe There is a bigger chance of getting hold of that but though there are there are funds around the planet which are worth looking into Another audience member was just that the viewer development panel and one of the things they mentioned was the need for standards a sort of W3C for open sim grids this particular organization you guys sound like an ideal place to create that would you agree and Also, I would strongly suggest inviting the viewer makers to join your organization Yeah Go ahead. No, it's gonna say yes. They're all welcome. Come to the website and register Yeah, we absolutely we absolutely want viewer developers. I think Have just just the example of of Diva and the onlook viewer That's an example of what can be accomplished with When you have a full knowledge of what's going on on the simulator side and the viewer side So the more that we can get there to be Subsynchronicity between the viewer developers and the simulator developers get them on the same page with standards and by having them in Involved in the same conversations together so we can work together to solve these problems the better so absolutely they're invited The previous question by the way was from Raymond Raymond Ben The next question is from Douglas Maxwell of the Moses grid, which is the military grid and he says I have offered funding to the Overt Foundation for Fixing bugs and so on and was turned down Would you guys have a problem with accepting money from the US military? I would say definitely not but just be aware that the organization We're wanting to make sure that any projects that we work on that that code gets Contributed back into the core of open sim so as long as they're okay with it being Open-sourced and available to the rest of the community. Most definitely As we said earlier any anyone who uses open sim is a user and is therefore welcome to contributing which way they do Fantastic that sounds really really optimistic so If anybody has any follow-up questions, this is your chance to ask them Meanwhile, um, do do the three of you have any closing remarks? Yes, well, I go ahead Alan. No My only closure Marcus Please come and register on the website and be part of this process Because without the community out there this doesn't fly That's pretty much what I was going to say and this is something that we're trying to form for the community by the community and We absolutely want your your input. We want your participation. We want your ideas and You know, you are the future of open sim. So we want you to be a part of this organization Well, thank you Terry Alan and mark for terrific presentation This concludes the first day of the second annual open simulated community conference 2014 Though the conference programming has ended for the day Littlefield grid is hosting a special event this evening at 8 p.m. Pacific at the Speak Easy Dance Club and We encourage our attendees in world and on the web to visit Littlefield for fun and post conference discussions You can hyper grid teleport to the event with your conference avatar or for more information See the conference program at conference dot open simulator dot org We'd like to thank our audience in world and on the web and our speakers staff and volunteers for a terrific first day of the conference We will begin tomorrow at 7 a.m. Pacific Standard Time in the keynote regions with an exciting keynote address from Steve Laval from Oculus Rift who will talk about the race to bring virtual reality to a mainstream audience We hope to see you there