 In World folks, are you guys able to hear the stream? Okay, great. Well, good morning everyone. Good morning and welcome to the first annual open simulator community conference. I'm sure as you are, we are all extremely excited that the day has finally arrived. We hope that everyone's getting into their proper locations and finding their way around, okay. We have a few sort of housekeeping notes that we wanted to cover at the start of the conference. So to start, you know, this conference is really, has been a really tremendous community effort. I think the open simulator community itself has been somewhat maybe fragmented. There are some folks who participate in the listservs and some folks running their own grids and have community events going on. But in some ways, this is sort of the first time I think that many of us have all gotten together to meet each other. And I hope it has been a great experience for all of you who are speakers, volunteers, and staff members getting to meet lots of folks. And for all of our attendees who are here for the first time today, we wish you a very warm welcome. And we hope you enjoy exploring the grid and all of the terrific things that our team has put together. So just to sort of go over how the conference program is gonna work before we dive into the first keynote panel, hopefully everyone has seen the online schedule. If you go to conference.opensimulator.org and click the schedule link at the top, it is web-based, so you can take a look and see all of the day's presentations. And if you click on any of those scheduled links, you can see where the venue is, who the speaker is, and who the moderator is. So that's a good place to start. I also wanted to briefly explain, if you profile yourself in world, you should be assigned to one of four groups. It'll be OSCC zone one, two, three, or four. And we did that to sort of break things up so no one region got overwhelmed. So if you're in zone two, for example, you should be able to teleport to keynote zone two, but you won't be able to get into any of the others. And that's sort of to prevent sort of cascading failure, which we hope doesn't happen today. So keep your fingers crossed and knock on wood for us. The other thing I wanted to mention too, for your friends who weren't able to get an in world ticket, the expo regions are open to the public. So anyone with a hyper grid enabled account can visit the expo regions and see all of the terrific things that our sponsors have put together. And I should absolutely, without a doubt, thank our sponsors. This conference would not be possible without the support of all the people who sponsored. And it's really a tremendous thing. Obviously we had some really generous, large sponsors, but really the community members who chipped in is what made this happen. So thank you, thank you, thank you to all of our sponsors. We're tremendously grateful for your support as well. In terms of other sort of housekeeping note things, in any of the presentation spaces, there are six breakout regions, breakout zones one through six that correspond to a conference track. In all of those spaces and in the keynote regions, if you could make a special effort to please sit down as soon as you arrive, that will be really helpful because we know that the grid performs much better when the avatars are sitting. So in the places where there are presentations, we just ask you if you could sit as soon as you teleport in, that will really help keep the performance of the grid going well today. In the landing zones and expo regions, feel free to wander around and do some shopping. If you're in a newbie avatar and you wanna customize your avatar, the landing zones have clothing stations for you to change. And there are also hyper-good portals. So you can visit all of our sponsors grids and do a little shopping. As long as you don't just, don't miss any of the conference programs. So just make sure you're back in time for the conference. I think that's really it in terms of the general housekeeping notes. We hope you really enjoyed the conference. I did also want to just, people have asked, so who's putting on this conference? Who is Avakon? Who is over it? And I think that it would be good maybe to just mention a little bit. So Avakon, Joyce Rianan, Chetnoir here in world, and I are on the board of Avakon and we're one of the co-producers of the conference. And you may have known some of our previous work. We also produced the Second Life Community Convention a few years ago. But I think in the past year or two, we've begun to see that virtual worlds and the metaverse and generally what we're calling immersive technology is really an exploding space right now. And we hope that this conference is an opportunity for us to get to know each other and talk and network, not just about Open Simulator, but to make connections about all of the different technologies that I think we're all interested in in terms of seeing the metaverse grow and expand and reach the mainstream audience of folks who don't know yet, who can't appreciate yet just how powerful these virtual environments can be. So I hope that that's part of Avakon's goal. We hope to have other events in the future as well. So we hope you'll visit our website at Avakon.org and sign up for our mailing list. And we'll try to keep in touch about all of the future events that are coming down the pike for us. And then I think Justin is gonna maybe talk a little bit about the Overt Foundation, who's the other co-producer of this event. So I will turn the mic over to Justin. Yes, hi, Fleet, can you hear me? Yep, you sound great. Great. Okay, yeah. I just wanted also to welcome everybody here today. Thanks a lot for coming along. This has been a big effort all around. When we started looking to do this, the software wouldn't cope with any, a really high number of avatars at all. So we've done a lot of work. And a lot of work has been done, of course, on organizing the conference as well to kind of bring us to where we are today. But I want to thank all of you for coming because I know for some of you, it's really early. And this is all, you know, it's very technical things to get in and all the rest of it. But it's really interesting to see all the people interested in coming to a conference like this. So as regards Overt, yes, Avacon has partnered with Overt. Now Overt is an organization set up by people involved with, mainly developers, people with developers involved with OpenSim, initially to take care of looking off to some of the copyright issues and some of the other kind of licensing issues to do with OpenSim. But also, and as part of that, it's kind of like an organization which exists, which doesn't control Open Simulator. Open Simulator itself is kind of a project which controls itself technically. It decides that the developers there decide the direction they're going to take. But Overt has been set up to handle some of the other licensing things and potentially the future act is a vehicle to kind of promote and develop the community more widely. So that's where we are today. And those organizations are also separate from grids, for instance, there's a number of different, what they call grid, grids like this one, this conference grid, which run OpenSim software, which are kind of their own entities. So they, so much like a website might use Apache or in the future any other web server, but Apache itself doesn't have any control over those websites, then like us, we kind of provide the software and then the grids use it and maybe use some other software and create their kind of virtual worlds, which are kind of the entities in themselves, including places like OS grid, which does do a lot of OpenSim testing, but is kind of certainly a separate entity from OpenSimulator itself and from Overt. So just again, thanks very much for coming and I'll turn it back over to Chris. Thanks, Justin. So for today, we really, we're really excited to have a panel of all of the developers and planners who have really helped with the conference to talk about the future of OpenSimulator. I'm sure if you are like me, it's really interesting to think about the potential of this software. I think we all know, right? It's got some little quirks and we've certainly discovered some of those in the planning and with all of our load testers, but it'll be great to hear from the folks who are really working on a lot of the core code to tell us where they think the future of OpenSim is going. So at this time, I'd like to introduce the panel maybe a little more formally for those of you who may not know who they are. We have with us today, Mick Bowman, who is the principal engineer at Intel Labs and leads the Virtual World Infrastructure Research Project. We've got Melanie Melland, who is the founder of AvaNation and is an OpenSim core developer. And she's also been a long-term second-life user. So she's been around the virtual block a time or two. Obviously, you just heard from Justin Clark Casey and we're hoping that Diva Kanto will be able to join us soon and she will be talking about some of the hypergrid services. So at this point, we're gonna switch over to panel format. And the first question I suppose goes to Justin. In a broad sense, where do you think OpenSim is going? Where did OpenSim come from? And can you give us maybe just a general overview? And I can switch out of the presenter's seat if you need the slides. No, no, it's okay. Sorry, so is this the opening statements, Chris, or are we? Yep, yep, you can go for it. Okay, well we weren't guiding where OpenSim came from. OpenSim came from way back, probably about five years now, when, now this is kind of ancient history because I wasn't here, I wasn't here. Oh, Krista was just come here, actually. Hey, Krista, I see you're not on the stream yet because I know Krista had actually prepared some slides to speak about this side of things. So actually I'll probably yield to her in that case. Okay, so there will be a short delay while we get Krista on the stream. Hello. Hello, Krista. Hi. So Krista just gone through the introduction and a conference and I also done a little bit about Overt and we just moved on to the opening statements of this panel. So are you, I know that you've only just come on. Are you ready to jump in and kind of start, because I know you wanted to speak about the, the kind of money of the details about the project. I'm ready to go if you want me to. Great. Okay, so if I turn this over to Krista then. Good morning, everybody. It's a little early here in California. Okay. Well, I'm having some technical difficulties here with my presentation. If you just bear with me a little bit. While Krista is preparing her slides, I think it sort of would be interesting from the audience. How long have you guys been involved with Open Simulator? I think in the beginning, for me anyway, it's been a couple of years and I know that I've seen just such a tremendous, tremendous progress in the stability and feature set of the software. So I think it'll be really interesting to see where this is going as we move forward. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I think, sorry, I just grabbed the mic there. Yeah, I see people have been doing it for quite a long time. So a lot of you, yeah, have been with us for a long time now. So you've actually seen a lot of the, a lot of how things have gone over the past four or five years. It's kind of quite interesting because I think these systems are potentially very long lived systems. They're not like, and I'm not moving on to my, I mean, tell me when you're ready, Krista, I'm just. I will, I will keep talking, Justin. I think what's interesting is that to me, these are long lived systems. Unlike, well, unlike games, but then even games are long lived nowadays. I mean, you look at something like Team Fortress 2 or even something like Skyrim, these things are, I kind of, I mean, they're kind of released as games, but then they become worlds and they stay as worlds and people keep modding and developing them. And it's kind of interesting to think, well, is there a natural end to these things or these things which start as a seed and then continue on and different people make use of them over the years and technology moves on, but it's not the case anymore where technology moves on so far that another virtual gets abandoned. So I don't need these questions for me in the chat or just kind of statements. I mean, me personally, I've been involved with OpenSync for what feels like a very long time now. Actually, although, to be honest, it's kind of the same kind of time as many of you folks. So probably around four years, ever since I was at IBM in my nine years. I think I created my first, my first Second Life avatar was in 2003 for the beta. One of my wow guildies sent me a beta invite for this thing called Second Life. So of course that was my first introduction to this kind of platform. So you guys, yeah, if we don't just talk about OpenSync, but kind of Second Life and systems in general, I mean, most of you, I mean, quite a few of you have been around for longer than I have because for me, it was very much, very much when IBM was very involved in Second Life, which was about five years ago now. And they had people, you know, in while doing kind of meetings and all that kind of thing. And then a number of people got involved. And I was one of these people at the time, I was kind of looking for something new to get involved in. And these kind of, what really, one of the things that really fascinates me are large, complicated systems. And to be honest, I think virtual worlds are one of the, one of the really, one of the really complex environments, apart from operating systems, the operating systems are pretty complex, but I think virtual environment systems have the potential to be another hugely complicated system. And maybe I shouldn't phrase it quite like that, it's the kind of thing that really interests me. So I can't go into it. I agree. You know, that's one of the things that I find so interesting. All of you, if you're sitting in the audience in World Today, you are a persistent person. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here, right? That's one of the things about the community of people in Second Life and OpenSync, and I think virtual worlds in general, it's really a testament to our perseverance. I think many of us have that vision of the open metaverse that the 3D web that can be accessible by a mainstream audience. And even though the technology isn't quite there yet, it's the people who are here watching the stream today and sitting on the stage and out in the audience that are gonna make that happen if it's gonna happen. I think what some people are saying are right, we are, I think what David says, we've kind of got issues with the believers, I think, in a sense, because we've gone through that kind of hype cycle of Second Life being so big four years ago, then kind of like shrinking down again, and we're the kind of people who are sticking with it, because I think we can really see that there is something really interesting here. And to me, it's like, because I mean, I think Austin also mentioned the old muds and moos, and I was certainly in there. Funny enough, I didn't really do much programming back in those days, but I'm old enough to actually have gone in those systems. Oh yes, I was a mutter. Yeah, I'm the mood, that was the, I guess that was the most famous one. A long time ago, I was in Medivia. Careful we're dating ourselves here, you know that. That's true, that's true. Yeah, so yeah, being in those walls before, but also being in these, I think to me it's, and maybe I'm speaking a bit forward again, but to me it's like, are the conditions different this time? Because muds and moos were, they did have a big, all relatively speaking, did have quite a lot of popularity back in the day, but then maybe things were taken over by the graphical muds and really the games, the, you know, the lines and of course, the Warcraft eventually. And the kind of the more social side of it kind of, oh, are you ready, Krista? I am ready, but please finish your thought. Oh, I'm just rambling. I think it's interesting that whether the conditions have changed this time, because now we have, I mean, yeah, we can see right here the technology is still clunky. It's really, some of it's really complicated, but now we have really good broadband where we didn't have that back in the moos and muds there as we have much better graphics capabilities, whereas back in the moos and muds it's all text based or only very primitive graphics. So- Don't knock text. No, no, I shouldn't really. But the interesting thing to me is, you know, now that we have broadband and we have these, in other spheres, these social communities and that kind of thing, other conditions change this time that you can have a sustained kind of open source, in this case, virtual environment system. So anyway, we'll shut up now and let Krista give her statement, I think. Krista, are you here with us? Are you ready? I am. Thank you. Sorry for the last minute technical difficulty. I thought that we were going to start at 7.30, but you guys are all early birds, I see. So I thought that would just give a little brief overview about what I think the project is in the community. I'm sure that many people here know what I'm going to say. Others may not know so much, especially if you were just started to use OpenSeam recently. So I thought that'd give some context. So just to give you an idea, OpenSimulator, you can get some statistics from this website, olo.net, OpenSeam is listed there. And if you read some of those statistics, it has had 20,000 commits by 124 contributors. It's about half a million lines of code. It's written in C-sharp. Olo thinks that it's a well-established mature code base, and it's a large development team compared to all the projects that they list. And the last line I think is the most interesting one. It just took it, it takes, they estimate about 107 years of effort according to a software development model. And so 107 years of effort is quite a bit in quite a large endeavor. Of course, we haven't been here for 100 years. The way that they compute this is by computing how many people have contributed. So if 107 years means if there was one person only writing the code, it would have taken 107 years. But of course, there's not just one person, there's many people. So one other statistic that you see in Olo is a project cost calculator, which is the next slide. So this is using that COCO model. If you just put there all the code and have an average salary of sort of a two-year on software engineer of $95,000 a year. And if you have a code base this size, they say they estimate that the project has costed about $10 million, which is quite a lot. Of course, these are all estimates, you have to read all these with a very large grain of salt. But if somebody would like to build OpenSim from scratch, then they estimate that you better have about $10 million to actually build it. So if you compare, if OpenSim was hardware, it would probably be something like an experimental flying car. Like those cool flying cars that are coming up now. Of course, we don't do hardware, but it's comparable the same sort of investment that you might have. Now, one thing that's different from these experimental engineering projects, it's a lot of software engineering projects rather than in open source mode, which is the case of OpenSim. So it's not just one coherent team that's doing it, but it's a lot of people, independent people who don't even know each other, who come together and build this experimental car over the internet, which is an interesting thing. So who are we? In other words, who pays for this effort? Somebody needs to pay, right? Code gets written and somebody needs to take the time to actually write it and test it and develop it. So according to an interesting study that was done by Robin Tiglund at the Swedish School of Engineering, last year, these are the numbers, she studied the OpenSim community. And this is what she found. So it's about 45% entrepreneurs, 30% hobbyists, 30% are companies who have some of our employees contribute to OpenSim as part of their day jobs and 5% are academics like me, who are crazy to just don't go to the publish and perish route and actually like to implement certain things outside of their academic publications. So these numbers are interesting. So there's a very large percentage of entrepreneurs and hobbyists, which obviously is very different from a company environment. These are all people that are very independent and they all come from different backgrounds and they all have different perspectives and different schools by contributing to the project. And that's quite an interesting community, very dynamic, interesting community to be in. And by the way, all these numbers change in quite a bit. It's very common to see people who started being hobbyists and then suddenly they see a business opportunity and they become entrepreneurs or vice versa. They become entrepreneurs and doesn't work out, then continue to contribute to OpenSim on their free time. Same thing with people who are employed in companies. So it's very dynamic. This is one of the numbers last year. I'm sure if somebody will do the numbers this year where they will be slightly different. So but who we are not is equally an important thing to say. We are not a single commercial venture backed up by stable revenue. So unlike, for example, the major player in this field, Lindenlot, that's not who you are. We're not coherent in any way. We don't have stable revenue in any way. We are also not operators of a common grid and I know that this is a very common misunderstanding. Other people when they talk about OpenSim, they, there's also the things that come to their mind. One thing is OS grid. They think of OS grid as being OpenSim, which is not true. Or they think that we are, I don't know, running some grid or something or supporting users doing the things that Lindenlot does and that's not true. We're not operators of a common grid at all. In fact, the only time that we came together to run a grid was now to run this conference grid. That was the very first time that the project sort of came together and decided to do something together in common. We're also not birds of a feather. I don't know if some of you know this expression in English, birds of a feather flock together. So that means that people with like minds end up doing the same things and being together. We're actually not. We are very different. We all have our backgrounds and our different goals and we want different things out of contributing to the project. So it's very important when you're going into an open source project to understand that there is this diversity in the developers and there's not one single homogenous kind of entity going on here. It's very important. We all have our own perspectives on things and it's very important to respect that because contributions in open source are usually done as you saw in the previous slide by individuals who start usually as obvious and if they're not motivated enough, then they will just go away. And so it's very important to respect what each individual contributor wants out of the project. Otherwise the project will just not be able to sustain itself. So it's a very volatile situation if you think about it. In a company, people work on the product because they are being paid. And there's an expectation that the product will continue because there is money coming in. Whereas in an open source project like OpenSim, that's not necessarily the case. There's no money coming in. So the only thing that keeps the project going is people's involvement, people's own interest. And that's quite the currency really. That's the value here. So we all are a diverse community right from the lower level of the developers who developed the code. There's a level above the developers who are the operators of these virtual worlds. And in this middle level, you see the people who run OS Grid, the people who run Metropolis, Avi Nation, France, Franco Grid, German Grid. All the operators are at this middle level. And then on top of the operators, there's the end users. These are the people who actually use these virtual worlds and do creative things with them in education, in medicine, in business, for entertainment, for gaming, all kinds of interesting applications. And so there is diversity all over the stack here down from the developers, the small group of core developers all the way to the people who use this. And that's quite very interesting, I think. I think it's a very interesting environment to be and it's very diverse. So having said that, let me wrap up by putting the pictures here of real-life people who are the developers, the active core developers of OpenSimulator. Here they are. You may know some of them as their avatar's name, like Nebedon. He's a very well-known person in this world. And sometimes I go interchangeably as Krista, which is my real name, and Diva, which is my sort of online identity in OpenSim. There's Melanie, Justin, there's Mick. And the four of us are here. And I think Nebedon is also here, I think, maybe, somewhere. But besides the four of us who are here on this panel, there's those people on the right who are not here on the panel, but they are equally important contributors, core developers of OpenSimulator. There's James Hughes, you may know him by blue wall. Robert Adams and Dan Lake, they work for Intel. There's Dalia Trimble, who prefers to continue to use their pseudonym instead of her real-life picture. And then Dan Olivares, you may know him on the IRC as chair of us. So this is it. There's real people behind the online identities that we project, and these are our pictures over here. I also want to thank the past core developers. These are people who have contributed a lot to OpenSimulator at some point. And for a reason or another, they're not active contributors anymore, and I would like to single out particularly MW and Elbisa, the Michael Wright and Stefan Anderson, who were the two ones who started OpenSim back in 2007. And for some of you who know OSGrid, you may know some regions there called Wright Plaza and Elbisa Plaza. And those are given the names of the two founders of the project. Anyway, so these are some of the past core developers that have contributed a lot. And besides that, I also want to put the slide up of recent contributors. I looked through the commit messages over the past year, and these are people who have contributed code over the past year. And I apologize if I missed somebody, but I just looked at the commit emails if the commit was not done directly by them, then they would have been missed. Thank you very much. I hope many of these people are here. And I think that's it. Justin, did you talk about the Overt Foundation? I think Justin is maybe going to go next if I have that right. I can do. Okay, I did talk about Overt earlier, Krista. Great. Okay. All right. I'll just be a second while I relay these slides. Maybe while we're waiting, we did get a question, Krista, if you're able to take a quick question while Justin's getting sorted. Sure. One of the questions from the audience, Kevin McCabe asks, how sophisticated do you have to be as a programmer to contribute to the OpenSim code? Do you guys, do you have to be an expert or do you accept contributions from folks who may not be an expert? So we don't really look for expertise. We look at the code and if the code does what it's supposed to do, we'll take it. So I think that to be productive in OpenSim is a large, complicated code base. So you kind of have to be a little comfortable about being able to go into a half million lines of code project and get into it and fix some code or add something. So you need to have guts in order to do that. But if you have that courage and if you fix somebody, just put the patch on the mantis and we'll hopefully take it. And just to add in here. Well, Krista, in the past, we've actually mentored people from first contributions that were very little complexity after being core developers. So nobody should be afraid to try. There are many ways to contribute to the project as well beyond just the code. There's documentation and examples and other things like that, helping to test it as well. And I'd also say I'm not a programmer at all. And I guess I try to contribute by helping people on the listservs, trying to document things when I can on the wiki. So I think if you're interested in contributing, you don't have to be a programmer even. I think that there's lots of other ways to contribute to the community and try to support the developers in their work as well. And Justin, how are your slides going? Are you about ready? Sorry, I seem to be having a little trouble here. Hopefully just a few more minutes. Okay, sure. I do have another question from the audience that came in. I think this one is actually from Ustream. They're asking, let me see here, I lost the question. For the panelists, how much time do you guys actually spend doing OpenSim development versus the other things that you do? Is this like something that's a hobby for you or something that you work at every week? That's a very good question. So it completely depends on the person. There's no such a thing as a rule for everybody. On my side, it goes in bursts. So I'm a professor in real life. So there's periods of time that I'm very busy in real life and I just don't have time for OpenSim. And then summer comes and suddenly I have a whole chunk of time to improve the performance of OpenSim by quite a lot or fixing some bugs or to the next version of hypergrid or something like that. So it goes in bursts on my side. And I think that maybe also too for some people, for others, they have a little bit more regularly contribution time, but I let them talk. Well, for me, it's something that goes on at a certain level all the time. Always things to do and always things to fix. And they are done in our system in Avination and then we progressed them up to the core code database once we've tested them and found that they're working. So I may appear a bit spurty, but there's actually not a day where OpenSim's not on my mind. So I can, for myself and Robert and Dan at Intel, we started on this project back in 2008, 2009. And we've been working, OpenSim is not the goal of our research, but it was the means through which we were conducting research. And so we were dealing with it almost on a daily basis through that time. And as we've continued to move on and focus more on applications, it becomes more of a make the platform work so that we can build the applications on top of it. So it's an application focused more now. Right. For my part, I've actually been doing not directly or not always directly OpenSim, but definitely OpenSim and OpenSim related consulting really for about four years, not four years now. So I actually spend quite a lot of my time on it in various ways. So I'm ready to give this statement now if- Okay, yep, go for it, Justin. Okay, great. So I've ended up with more slides with more words than there probably should be, but so I will get through this. I'll just bring up the- Make sure I can see the chat here. Okay, so I'm going to- I am going to talk about what I think are some of the challenges and possibilities for OpenSim in the future. And I'd be very happy to kind of go into those in more details of the questions relating to that later on. So my view of OpenSim, and I think what I want to say to this panel is that as Krista said, we are all diverse individuals and I think what will make this interesting is we do have different points of view on this. My point of view is that by necessity, OpenSim does closely follow what LindenLab does. I don't think we can underestimate- I know people don't like sometimes- I mean, I don't like sometimes what LindenLab does and I see a lot of it myself from what I do, but they do spend a lot of money and time certainly on the viewer code base. And that's kind of time that they're paying for. They're paying developers to vote that. It's not kind of volunteer labor as it is, but you know, partly for us. So I think that the effect of that can't be underestimated because the viewer code base is three times the size of OpenSim even. And that's not a trivial amount of code to understand and work around and actually implement features in. And the features that they do do- Now, I know also this is going to be a point and I can agree that the features they do are not necessarily the features- and in some cases, that wouldn't be the features that we want and we and other people might disagree with them. But there is still some kind of selection going on. The features they pick, our features they think will help their platform. So they've gone through a certain amount of filtering and kind of internal QA. They're not just, you know, they're not just something that somebody thinks might be a good idea. They actually do have some selection there. At least that's my point of view. And of course, the other kind of things that mean that- Sorry, the other kind of reasons we do stick, I think, quite closely to what Second Life does is that by allowing the migration of, I think many people here would have experienced this, even though it's quite difficult to get scripts and not as well, scripts especially, but objects and other content out of Second Life is that if you can do it at least, and as you get that stuff out, you can reuse it in OpenSim and migrate that content across. And I think that is critical because there are other open virtual world platforms out there like Open Wonderland, for instance, and some of the other stuff, which we should find platforms but didn't have that kind of, weren't able to reuse that kind of existing level of content and really a lot of these worlds is about what you can do in them and what the content is. And of course, the other thing that I always think is that by actually implementing what is kind of an existing platform means that the people that develop OpenSim like me and the other people up here can do it in a fairly uncoordinated manner. We don't need to do a lot of communication with each other as to what we should do. We're kind of in some, at least to some extent, it's not university true, but to some extent we are filling in the gaps. If there's a feature in the viewer, then that code is already there and it's relatively easy to re-implement that on the server side. We're kind of filling in the gaps. But there are kind of some aspects of OpenSim which are special. The fact that it's a free and open source platform, anybody can take it and use it behind their firewall or go and set up as many regions as they want. Kind of like, does allow a whole slew of different use cases like people using it in education and being able to, and things like this, this conference where we can have as many regions as we like hardware permitting. The fact that OpenSim does have some scripting language extensions that is kind of an ono SSL functions, and the fact that you can extend these the scripting language through modules if you want for specific uses. The fact that we do have content archiving and distribution which you don't get on the second life platform. I'm, of course, talking about things like ORs and IARs and other kinds of mechanisms like that. The fact that you can do architectural experimentation like Intel's distributed scene graph trying to increase the usability of the platform will rather increase the amount of activity you can host the platform in one particular space and make things more stable in that respect. And, of course, the potential for a truly distributed web-like environment, i.e. what we call right now the hypergrid, in that suddenly it's not one company that just has control over everything. Anybody can go and set up their simulator but also they can go and visit other simulators. You suddenly get this kind of more distributed anarchic environment which is more web-like. So we've already talked, I think, well, not here, but previously, we didn't want to make this into the hypergrid panel which is going to follow later on. But it is this last point which really, I think, above or does interest me a lot because it makes OpenSim, I think, really special. There are a lot of multi-user games out there which have better graphics and better performance than OpenSim, partly because they can optimize what they do a lot better. They can control their use of textures. They know what content is going to be there in advance. They can make all kinds of optimizations for that. And they're also stable and popular, usually generated content or into systems like stuff like Gary's mod, stuff like Minecraft, which has of course been enormously popular. And even earlier than that, I would say mods and moves are kind of UGC systems which existed before something like Second Eye of an OpenSim. But in none of these systems, to my knowledge, is it possible for live content and identity to move seamlessly between independent worlds? By this, of course, I mean, I know some people aren't here. I'm gonna be familiar with the hypergrids. Maybe I'm talking a bit over this, but of course some of us are here from the hypergrid. The fact that we can come from some other grid like, I mean, just to take for instance, there is good and come over here and still have some access at least to our content, our appearance and our identity, I think, is kind of unique out there. There's no other system which can do this at the moment. And I think it's this last point that really makes this, sets this out from, say, a game engine or even kind of a standalone user-generated system in that there's an ongoing sharing of content, culture and ultimately data protocols. And once you get a kind of a network effect of this, where every new grid that joins the hypergrid, for instance, both benefits, all the ones already there and gains an enormous benefit itself, the kind of rolling effect of that means that there's a lot more benefit to joining a distributed system like this. And say, setting up your own stuff from scratch, even though in some cases there are other advantages to that. So I think this kind of thing is actually really interesting because it becomes more like society and more like the web. But I think there are kind of challenges. I think Linda and I are going to continue to push forward but it's not going to be forever. Unless they, the fact that we are dealing with a legacy system which does have all kinds of oddities in that. And the usual life cycle for these as far as I know is that they last for a very long time. I mean, stuff like optimal line is still going for instance but there is a period of growth and then a period of slow decline. They don't come back again. So the real challenge is once Linda and I kind of drops off a little bit more and assume that's going to happen is that can developers like us work together on features and overhaul a system such that we can continue going forward. I mean, Chris has already spoken about a lot of us have different motivations and reasons for doing this. And that's great. And that's very usual for a source projects. But at the same time, we need some kind of agreement as to which way we go forward. We can't have complete chaos. There needs to be some kind of coordination at some level. And I think ultimately for stuff like the Hypergrid to succeed we need well-designed, well-documented and flexible common protocols. We need stuff that can evolve over time. We need to be able to travel between installations seamlessly. I mean, right now we have the Hypergrid but it's early days. There are all kinds of kind of bugs. I mean, partly because we're using we're trying to make a system do what it wasn't designed to do but partly because this is very new software still even though it's a couple of years that's still pretty new. And I think there also must be sustainable business models for people. I do spend a lot of time working on OpenSim. And the only reason I can do that is because I can actually earn money from doing this. It's not easy at all. And I think there's probably a market of about one person at the moment to a large extent. But it is possible. And because of that, I can spend time thinking about the more complicated issues and trying to actually do things that are more... I mean, like this conference, for instance, I should be able to spend time organizing this conference, which would be enormously difficult if I was also doing some completely unrelated job. So I think the other challenges are about the project. I think a lot of done is done by a small number of long-standing developers. People like me, Krista, Melanie. And maybe that's not very unusual. I mean, I do speak to other people on other open source projects. And actually, there does tend to be an effect where there are a fairly small number of people doing a lot of the work. And sending the short-term, that's absolutely fine. You know, that's actually good because it means that the people who are doing it do know the code base. It is a very complex code base. There's fewer mistakes. And we know each other. We know to a certain extent what our positions are and what our interests are. So there's not quite so many arguments as there might otherwise be. But in the long term, we do need to continue to get new developers. We can't stay static. We do need more developers. And whether that's through more people kind of during the core and being able to work on a very large code base, which is subject to, which can have very subtle bugs in it, and that you really understand what you're doing. And even then you make mistakes. Or whether you become more modular, maybe a lot more development is done in kind of third-party distributions, maybe downstream like Krista's distribution or like, well, maybe not similar stick, kind of things downstream, or whether that's more than in modules, or whether really we need to work out a way of actually having a fairly large common core. And I also think that, and I think I've alluded to this in that, my own personal stance is for a community like this to succeed in the long term, it can't just be developer-driven. And that's different from other open source projects because a lot of open source projects, the work is done by the developers and the developers manage the project. And they naturally do stuff which is in their interest, and that's absolutely fine. That's to me, that's human nature. And that's capitalism if you like people, the invisible hand, people do what's in their self-interest and you try to harness that. But at the same time, I think something like this, which is so much centered into me, so much centered in culture and content creation and in almost society, in that I think other people do need, the project does need to be bigger than just developers. I think there needs to be more people who have a stake in it if you like. But I think that's also an enormously difficult thing to do. I mean, I don't actually know how you do that. But I think stuff like this, even this conference today, we've been able to kind of cooperate. I mean, it's not been easy, I would say that. We've had arguments and disagreements along the way. I think in any begun to taking. But we're here now, we've been able to do this. And that's quite an amazing thing with people like Havocon who, as Chris says, they aren't developers. They're a different kind of thing. So I think that shows that I think there is hope for maybe going in that direction. But I don't know what that might look like yet. And that to me is my presentation. Thank you. My opening statement rather. Thanks so much, Justin. And I see the audience is clapping in world, but the streamer folks probably can't hear that. So I think at this point, we're gonna sort of open things up to the panel and take some questions. Since Christa and Justin have kind of given an overview, I wasn't sure, Mick or Melanie, did you have anything you sort of wanted to say before we jump right into questions? I did. Well, I had actually planned to say something and I was waiting patiently to be called. Okay, yeah, Melanie, do you wanna go first? Certainly. I don't really need to take the time to see because I don't have any slides. I don't need slides for what I wanted to say. What I wanted to start out with was saying when I came in to open Sim, it was because I was searching for doing something just like SL. And I found open Sim, which at that time couldn't even store primary rotations. Yes, it was that early, it must have been 2008 or maybe late 2007. And over time, my view of open Simulator developed from doing something just like SL to doing something better than SL and it's now again changing to doing something different from SL. And that's the important point. Hypergrid is one of the steps that have been taken on the way to what I envision as a future of open Simulator and the software, which is a true three-dimensional web that doesn't require accounts and doesn't distinguish grids at all to become like the Apache of virtual worlds and have visitors from far and wide that can visit with ease of visiting a website with no sign up. And I believe that that is the direction things will be going. These virtual worlds that we're seeing now that will remain as a social arena, a meeting ground, but I see this going much, much further. So that's my future vision for open Sim. Thank you, Melanie. That's great. And then I think, Mick, you also wanted to do sort of an opening. Sure. And I have, you know, I had like three slides with a grand total of six words on them. So I think I'll just skip the slides and just chat for a minute. Okay. So my introduction to open Sim was back in 2007. I was working on some kind of next generation internet architecture and the Intel CTO, Justin Ratner came to me and said, you know, there's this really interesting use case down that these Linden Lab people are doing. Why don't you go down there and take a look at them? And went down to this meeting and Dave Levine from IBM was there and Adam Frisbee, I believe Sean was there as well among some others. And we started talking about this open source alternative as a platform for experimenting with everything from kind of open standards and how to go back and forth and how to build the 3D web out. And that was sort of my introduction. We went back to Intel and made a pitch for doing some experimentation with those platforms and been working on it since. In working on open Sim, I guess, you know, and my thoughts are gonna be, sorry, a little bit more kind of farther out, farther future on that. There's really three sort of trends that I think are extremely important for us to track and be aware of as we look at the success and maturation of open Sim. Trend number one is a focus in discussion and effort from a change in focus and discussion and effort from the platform itself to the applications that run on top of the platform. You know, there's a lot of work that we've done over the last few years and maturing open Sim as a platform for building these virtual worlds. But one of the things that's been really interesting and watching just the last couple of weeks as we've started to prepare for the conference here is that the work on the platform when we have an application like this conference to host on top of it, the work on the platform gets much, much more focused. There are very specific requirements that we start working on, performance issues, and gee, how do group permissions work and things like that. That transition in thinking from the platform, the fact that the platform is matured enough that we can actually start thinking about and innovating at the level of applications rather than at the level of platforms, really is a sign of the maturity. And just, and again, just a parallel for that is in 1995 and 1996, we all got excited every time a new version of the HTTP server came out and the new version of Internet Explorer, Mozilla came out. It was all about the platform. And nowadays no one talks about the platform. What they talk about is Amazon and Facebook and Instagram. It's the applications that are sitting on top of it. And that's where we need to be as a community. The second big trend that I was gonna talk about and this will be a focus later for the hypergrid panel is the transition from, as Melanie pointed out, that transition from a focus on grids to a focus on hypergrids. One of the things, even when you pull up one of the Opensim viewers or one of the Opensim-enabled viewers, what you see is a list of the 15 or 20 grids that you can pick as a target and go to. The transition to hypergrids though is gonna make that very interesting because it's no longer a focus on 10 or 15 grids. It's a focus on thousands of grids as each one, as each organization puts up some of their space and hosts their space in order to be able to create the applications that they want and to customize it in the way that they want. This conference is a great example of that. This grid's gonna last for, let's see, it's been around for about three months. It'll last for a few months beyond that. It's here for a very specific purpose and it'll be taken down again. There are a few people here who have accounts related to the grid, but a lot of us are coming into the grid through hypergrid, through other grids that provide us with those access. And it's that transition from thinking about a small number of closed systems where the innovation is still very limited in scope to a very large number of small systems, each one of which is coming up with new ideas for how to do the innovation. In order to make that transition, there's gonna be a huge number of problems we have to deal with. How do we manage content? How do we manage identities? How do we manage trust relationships between the grids and things? But it's those kinds of problems that we're gonna have to deal with there. The third transition or trend that I wanted to point out here, and Justin hit on this a little bit, is again, the focus changing and shifting from the simulator and server side to the viewer side. I'll just assert an opinion here, which is that as long as OpenSim is tied to the Linden Lab viewer, we're gonna have problems. The feature sets that we can implement on the server side and the simulator are constrained by the availability of services and facilities inside the viewer in order to make that work. We're constrained by the models that they have and the graphics that they have. And more than that, we're constrained in how we interact with people. We require them to have this big download of a viewer. It's very hard to transition back and forth between kind of 2D web experiences and 3D web experiences. It's very hard to incorporate in millions of users just because of the weight that we have to deal with in that viewer's side. So on one hand, there's a feature set limitation that we have that we are stuck with the protocols and the interactions that we have. On the other hand, there's a big problem that we have to deal with in how our user base, how the people who are using those applications that we want to build our focus much more on the weight of the viewer download versus just using the application. So I continue to be a proud supporter of OpenSim and look forward to its future. And thank you very much. Thanks so much, Mick. That was really great. And I definitely agree. You've identified some really interesting trends that I think many of us are watching or maybe should be watching more closely. I know it's easy to get down in the weeds of your work but it's good to look up and take that broader view. Well, we do have quite a few questions from the audience. So I'm gonna try to get to all of your questions. Hopefully I will do my best. The first question comes in to ask, are there any plans to implement some of the new features that Linden Lab has implemented like pathfinding, server-side appearance and things like that in OpenSim? Are you going to continue to track the development of second life type features or at some point, do you think that OpenSim will fully diverge? Who's the taker? I'll take that one. There is currently, there is discussion about the new features, but no one's tackled that yet. It appears that server-side appearance is not really useful for stand-alone, since client-side appearance there works just as well. So the same thing goes for hyper-grade stand-alones. I haven't seen anyone take up the task of implementing that. Pathfinding, again, is something that we have been looking at for aviation. Unfortunately, it didn't get very far but it still is on the agenda, so pathfinding will come. And obviously, as has been pointed out before, the lead of Linten Labs in this OpenSim development scene will wane as Linten Labs themselves are experiencing some difficulties at this moment. And I believe that in the end, we will fully diverge. My take on it, on that question is that, so for the first few years of the project, it was pretty clear to all of us that the best strategy was to stay very close to the viewer developed by Linten Lab, to the official viewer. And the main reason or something that Justin said in his note is that the viewer is a big chunk of code and we just don't have the resources to take on another project like a viewer. And even though there are third-party groups that develop viewers. Sorry, Krista, we can barely hear you. Maybe if you can get a little closer to your mic. I'm sorry, I had to put my mic all the way up to my head. Okay. So the reason why we thought it was a good idea to stick to the Linten Lab viewer was because we did not and do not have the resources to take on a second project of similar dimensions. It's just, we couldn't do it. So we were just taking advantage of the fact that there are other groups of people developing the viewer. I must say though that for in the last few months though, and as you can see for this conference, we actually packaged a viewer for the conference on purpose. This is a very nice singularity based viewer. So I am starting to see the light here with collaboration. Sorry, I'm hearing some feedback here on my, oh man. I'm listing some feedback here. I don't know where it comes from. So my point is that we have this new collaboration with singularity developers, which has started already to add some new features to the client and I expect lots of good things coming from this. So now I can actually see a path to divergence and to something that's more tuned to these environments that we want to build. Oh yes, and one of the breakouts actually, you'll hear from Latif, I believe, about these new features of singularity. Yeah, may I say something? Sure, we can jump right in. Yeah, no, I agree with this. I think the first point is I would repeat what Melanie said. I think what happens is that the features that people run in this classic open source manner get implemented. It's interesting that we don't have display names, for instance, even now, even though those have been around for a long time. Nobody, it would appear at least in a position to develop and contribute the code just to actually find it useful to have display names. Maybe that's because it's a little easier for people to change it in OpenSim, I don't know. But that, for instance, is one thing that's not being found useful. And I think what happens is that when somebody finds something really useful for what they need to do, like server-side baking, for instance, then it will get done. Because there's no, as Christopher said, there's no central person saying what happens or what doesn't happen. It's kind of developers doing what they want to do, which sounds chaotic, but it can work. So I think instead in that kind of situation, so I think something like that is when somebody really, really wants it. But I also think, yeah, I think it's interesting in that, I think we are getting, because as Christy just said, the viewer code base is a huge one in itself. And I know Melody does work on it, for instance, but I, for my part, have done very little work and apart from trying to work out where it does certain things for OpenSim bugs. And it's a very large code base in itself. So I think the people, the existing viewer projects are absolutely critical for this. I mean, those are the guys who have been working with that code for a long time. I really know what's going on. And I've formed that kind of, those project constructs, those kinds of social arrangements which we call open source projects. So I think actually getting cooperation with them. And I think, yeah, as Christy says, even for this conference, having your own view, that stands very interesting to see. And whether the code, of course, the thing then is that there's a tension between what Linda and I have ended up doing and then what kind of the viewer projects end up doing to actually make that work. Say, I mean, for instance, with an OpenSimulator. And to me, I would hate to have to keep modifying the code every time to re-incorporate a lot of codes. I didn't know how they do it. Maybe they're not people I maybe were kind of anal perfectionists, but relatively speaking, or massively OCD control people. So I don't know, I would find it frustrating, but maybe that's okay. To me, that seems like one interesting issue is that how you do that and how worthwhile it is and all the rest of it. Anyway, that's just what I think. So I'll just agree for the most part with what's been said that if there's a need for features that are coming out, if there's a demand for features that's coming out, then someone will find a way to add those in and incorporate them. But the more general question is one of, does second life compatibility really matter? And there have been two reasons why we've continued to preserve, well, three reasons. One is because it's actually kind of a useful environment. And the second is because of the dependence on the viewers and that requires us to a certain degree to be able to support the features. Otherwise, our users have a bad experience when they expect something to work and it doesn't work. The third part, which we don't often bring up, but really is also true, is it's the community. It's the expectations of the community. Second life has a very vibrant, dedicated, passionate set of users who have certain expectations for how behavior works and how things should operate. And if you don't believe that, just look at the chat that follows every time a new feature gets added or an interface gets changed on the viewer. They are very passionate about that. And there is some need to tap into the momentum that exists in the community of people who have certain expectations. The flip side of that is that by being so tied into those second life expectations, it also forces us to limit the kinds of innovation that we can have. We have to get a little creative about how we do new and interesting things. And that's been kind of the challenge. Thanks, Mick. I think that really addressed that question. I have another question that's sort of on another track and certainly I am also interested in hearing the answer because I'm sure as you're aware, we've had to sort of limit, at least initially anyway, the attendance on the grid today because at this point, being able to host a certain number of simultaneous users on either second life or open sim, there's a maximum at which it no longer becomes usable. And so the question is, at what point do you feel that open sim core code will be able to accommodate a higher max capacity of users? Or is that something where the distributed scene graph work is going to need to come into play? And a related question is, will open sim ever be viewable on the web so that you don't have to have a special client? So I think that's kind of related to the viewer question too, but also about getting mass numbers of people together in these virtual environments, however it's delivered. So let me just talk to the mass numbers of things. And the viewer is certainly a big part of this and the ease of use and what kind of our audience are we talking to? Are we talking to someone who's experienced with virtual worlds or somebody that we want to bring in because they're interested in the topic that we're having or the application that we have. But let me just, the mass number of users issue and the reason why Intel focused on distributed scene graph and those applications is really one about, for us was one about business models, that there's interest in both small communities all the way up to large communities. But when we looked at it and did the kind of cost benefit analysis of things that it was the large organizations, the large interactions that were really expensive to support in real life. And if we could find an alternative in the virtual environments, that it would be a great opportunity for people to actually find business incentive for investing in the virtual worlds. And Doug Maxwell will talk a little bit later about how they're doing training in the military and trying to take advantage of the relatively low cost and flexibility of virtual worlds versus real world interactions. And his use cases specifically involve 500, 600 people that are interacting in a very realistic environment. Thanks, Mick. Did anyone else on the panel want to comment on that? Yeah, I'd like to comment. So with respect to the capacity, how many people can an open-scene instance hold, we have done some gigantic performance improvements because of this conference. So we had, the prospect of this conference was coming up and open-scene back in February was not able to do this, what we are doing right now. So if we wanted to actually have a conference with a decent size, we had to actually improve things and we did. So a huge performance improvement set we did, as you can see, we now can hold up to 60, 70, 80 avatars in one simulator without it being a terrible experience. And that is a very good thing. There will always be limitations with the architecture that we have. There will always, we will always reach a limit. And in fact, with the system, what we found out is that the limit is actually reached first by the viewer. The viewer cannot handle many, many, many avatars. It starts hurting us pretty this way. So there needs to be some optimizations also on the viewer side, if we want to hold environments with 1,000 people or something like that. And Mick can actually talk more about that because he has been making those experiments through the distributed scene graph which re-architects the server, but then he hits the problem with the viewer. Sorry, that's it. Okay, great, thank you. So we have about five minutes left for Q and A, so we might have to get through these as quickly as we can because I'm hoping to get to most of the questions. This one comes in and it's more about contributing to the OpenSim project. And the question comes in, what's the distinction between code that you, how do you determine what code goes into core and who is a core developer versus a contributor? Things have changed over time. What's the standard these days? Okay, let me say something to that then. So, essentially anybody can submit a patch in our mental system and it will get looked at equally just like any other patch. It doesn't matter who you are, it just depends on the code quality. Now, there is certainly a bar, and this is where it becomes difficult to draw the line. Because some things are obvious core bug fixes, for instance, that's a pretty obvious thing to have in. When you start going to things like kind of more peripheral features, for instance, like web interfaces, for instance. I think we've effectively agreed to draw the line in OpenSim over time in that we don't have things like web interfaces in code bits because it's already a large code base. And that is both introduces things like, and maybe other people can disagree with me, that introduces things like another language and a whole different kind of system to maintain. And you're also kind of limiting to one particular web system. So that kind of thing seems better done as a separate project. So it does depend upon exactly what it is. As regards who is a core developer, so this is one of the things I brought up in my slide. I'm always concerned, I think I've been concerned for years now basically. This is kind of an ongoing thing, this isn't new. In that the project does have to have vitality of people to keep going. I think we'll be very lucky in that a lot of the core people are pretty dedicated for one reason or another, can kind of devote a lot of time to it or want to. There's an idealism going on here certainly. But it does require quite a high bar because the code base is very complex. Certainly for me, it's very easy to introduce kind of very subtle bugs, which are very difficult to work out and then very difficult to even identify, especially if they're kind of race conditions between threads. So the bar, I would say, for a core developer is actually quite high, but if somebody were to make good patches over time and be cooperative with the core devs, basically because to have somebody in the project, you do need to trust them. It's not purely, to me, it's not purely about the code. You actually need to get on with them to some extent. I mean, not perfectly, but you do need to be able to kind of discuss technical things without any real issues. So if they can have good kind of contributions over time and they kind of like they can work with the existing core developers, then what happens is that there's kind of like, there's kind of a short discussion about it and there's a vote. And if anybody is uncomfortable, then we kind of delay, but if everybody's in favor, then we invite them to be in core. Now that hasn't happened for some time, which is a concern of mine, but that is the procedure. And that's just it, right? There's no other thing apart from that. You just have to have good, you have to show you a good developer who understands the code base and you have to kind of like be willing to work with others. That's what it comes down to, I think. Great, thanks, Justin. We're getting to the end here. So I'm going to ask one more question. If I didn't get to your question, I do apologize. I might be able to pass these on to the panel for us to address in the future. But the last question, and if you guys can make the answer short, will all of the second life scripting functions eventually be enabled in OpenSim? Are there plans to enable all of those calls for scripters? I'll take that one because I'm effectively the one who's looking after scripting the most. It's our intention to enable all the calls in the second life that LSL has. However, of course, there's a little point in enabling or adding function calls for things that the code base doesn't support at all, like for instance, pathfinding. Now, if somebody could make a case for adding the pathfinding functions anyway just to make the scripts compile that contain them, but then that would give the false impression of them working so we haven't gone that route yet. It has not yet been a use case that needed that. But yes, it is our intention to implement LSL fully and we are nearly there. Great, thank you so much, Melanie. And I would just like to say truly to the panel here, most of the folks on the stage have also been the core planners for this conference. Thank you, thank you for all of your efforts and for what I think has been a really great panel. Gosh knows there's lots of good discussion. So thank you again to our panelists. Thank you to our audience on the web and who are tweeting away. If you're using Twitter, please use the hashtag O-S-C-C-13, add the 13 on the end because that's what we're looking for. And to our in-world audience, thanks for your questions as well. As we move on for the rest of the day for the conference, just a couple of quick reminders. If you need to customize your avatar or want to visit our sponsor areas, those are in the expo regions and those are open to the public. So if your friends didn't get a ticket, you can meet with them on the expo regions and they can hyper grid over. So feel free to invite your friends to join you on the conference grid in the expo regions. We have five breakout sessions that'll be coming up in about 10 minutes. We have, if I can find the tab with the schedule again, we have a track in the art and community that will be breakout zone one on game modeling and open simulator. In the business track, breakout zone two, we'll be talking about Bitcoin on your grid using decentralized virtual currencies in the metaverse. That'll be very interesting. In the development and open source track in breakout zone three, Nick will probably be talking some more about the distributed scene graph and Robert Adams from Intel. And then in education, we've got a presentation about language acquisition in breakout zone four. And then finally in the social, I am avatar, how to survive the metaverse. And that's in breakout zone six. So just as a reminder for our in world audience, when you stand up from here and teleport out to your breakout regions, please when you arrive there, take a seat as soon as you can that will help the grid stay functioning well and smoothly. And we hope that you will enjoy the next round of sessions. We'll see you back here. The next keynote session will be after the meal break at 1130. Thanks so much, everyone. Enjoy the conference.