 Hello everyone and welcome to the 8.30am to 9am session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view our full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to at Opensim CC or use the hashtag hashtag OSCC17. Our next session is entitled The Economy of Appreciation in Open Simulator, HG Safari. And our speaker today is Thurza Ember. Thurza organizes the Open Simulator Travel Group, HG Safari, which has been promoting the community spirit by arranging weekly group visits to grids all over the Open Simulator hypergrid for the past three and a half years. And I want to just toss it over to her to let her talk about what things she's seen along the way. Thanks very much. I'd like to begin today by unpacking the title of this talk. So it's The Economy of Appreciation in Open Sim. To begin with talking about Open Sim, it's really referring to the hypergrid friendly worlds. And you should be able to see a poster behind us that shows the Safari Embassy in Second Life. And this is one of the posters that we have up. It's just pointing out how although Second Life is a very large and diverse place, Open Sim is even larger and even more diverse. It can be broken up into many different divisions or realms. We can talk about the adult worlds in Open Sim versus the child friendly ones. We can talk about the commercial worlds versus the money free worlds. But a notable distinction and important for this talk is the distinction between the professional and the hobbyist use of Open Sim. These two realms are very much associated with one another, but there is a big distinction in that when a professional uses Open Sim, they tend to use it as a tool in the context of another community. For example, a school or a research facility might be in the world of art or machinima. There are people who use Open Sim as an inexpensive place to experiment when they're making things to sell on a marketplace. On the other hand, you have the realm of the so-called hobbyists. The term is sometimes used rather with a certain amount of contempt, it seems sometimes. However, this group of people, they see Open Sim very differently. It's not a means to an end, it is the end itself. And that's whether they're testing code, whether they're making content or creating environments, if they're preserving art installations, or if they're simply socializing. And of course, many people do breach the gap between these two realms, the professional and the hobbyist world. But it's an important distinction when we're talking about the context of an economy of appreciation. I chose the word economy on purpose. It's a word that immediately makes us all think of money or financial give and take. But of course, an economy that can be so much more. For you professionals who use Open Sim, there's a concrete process of putting in grants and proposals, making lesson plans, finding customers, getting feedback from your students, and of course, payments too. And I know that's very, very challenging in real world circumstances, but it's a fairly concrete existence. Whereas for hobbyists, it's a little bit different. There's a nebulous connection between others in Open Sim. On a money-oriented grid, it's fairly easy. You put your content on Marketplace and you just sell it. But where you have open source and share alike individuals who think of this philosophy as the way they want to live their Open Sim life, it can create a lot of challenges. There's a creative paradox too, because to make things, you tend to need isolation and quiet time to create. But then of course, once you've made your things, you want people to come and see them. And one strategy that people use is by putting freebies on their region. You come and see the region, enjoy it, and you're rewarded with a freebie at the end. So the problem there is that it's a bit of a challenge. Sometimes you're giving things away and you don't feel acknowledged. And that can create a certain sort of generosity fatigue and paranoia too, but that's another story. This fragmentation of Open Sim and the technical challenges that there are too, mean that we really need an interchange of encouragement. But there's also another thing that's very important for Open Sim's economy of appreciation, and that is the reality check. A couple of years ago, I made the poster that's showing now, it's the hypergrid tonic. In the hypergrid tonic, it talks about the various ways that regular hypergridding can strengthen you as a person using Open Sim. And this applies, of course, to professionals and hobbyists alike. By going to see what others are doing and making, you can put your own work into perspective. It can help you see solutions to problems. It can bring about new collaborative partnerships and new friendships. And of course, it can stop you being too self-centered and braggadocious, which is good for your mental health and for ours. So that's what I mean when I talk about the economy of appreciation in Open Sim. As you know, I'm not a technical person and I'm not a sociologist either. So I can only speak about the technology and the sociology of Open Sim in terms of hypergrid safari. And I'd like to show you a few stats of what we've been able to do so far. We've been on the road for three and a half years now. We've been doing trips for that whole period, but actually only 167 weeks have we actually gone on safari. There have been 500 hours of grid jumping. There have been more than 300 people who've joined us over that years. We've been to 87 grids and we've been to hundreds of regions, more regions than we can say. So because of that, we've had a lot of opportunities to see how people live their life in Open Sim. And we've visited places that are both to do with hobbyists and to do with professionals. The origins of HG safari come from about seven years ago, when John Lester, otherwise known as Pathfinder, established the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. This had regular weekly meet-ups on a Sunday. And it was a place where you could go and get help if you were in Open Sim, Newby. It was a chance to talk and compare notes and listen to people who knew, for me at least, far more about Open Sim than I ever will, talk about their experiences. And Pathfinder, he took us to see many places on Reaction Grid, on Jocadia, New World Grid, a lot of places that no longer exist, but also places that are still there, like Lanny Mall on Ausgrid and Craft Grid and so forth. By the time the Hypergrid Adventurers Club wrapped up, I was still very interested in blogging about grids and meeting people all over the Open Sim. But I noticed that my friends back in Second Life who wanted to explore Open Sim, they seemed to always mention the same three problems. Number one, they would crash a lot. Number two, they didn't know where they should go. And number three, they didn't know how to find people when they got there. Of course, I was certainly not the only person interested in hypergrid travel. If you think of the other bloggers that there have been, like GridJumper and Virtual Christine, and there's certainly been many websites. So we think of Hyperica and Hypergrid Business by Maria. There's been the hubs for hypergrid travel made by Sean Emerald and Spike Soul. And of course, around the same time that the safari began, Sata Gator was setting up Open Sim World website. And Makalia Beck had had for a long time her travel office, which still you can find on Right Plaza on Ausgrid. Sunbeam Magic, too, was beginning to issue the Visions magazine each month. And of course, many other grids have their own hypergrid gates available at their welcome area. But my idea was that I wanted to approach a subject, not as any kind of expert, but just as a friend, so we could all learn and crash together. And that's how the safari came about. So I called it safari because I wanted lower expectations. I wanted to promise that people would see exotic sites, but there would definitely be a bumpy ride and that probably not everybody would make it to the end. And I chose a time when I knew I could be available pretty much every week. Open Sim is so unpredictable that at least we needed to have a fixed time and a fixed day every week when the event could happen. Of course, that's obvious that you cannot have a time that fits every part of the world. So having it at 12 noon on a Wednesday excludes many people. At 12 noon on a Wednesday Pacific time, most people in America work. But of course, other people have organized other trips and so that works out fine. There's hypergrid tour groups happening on weekends and even in the evening. The main aims of the safari are quite simple. They are to teach other people how to grid jump. That's our main reason. We also wanted to focus on finding people. So that's another reason why we went on Wednesdays. It's because many different grids have their community meeting on a Wednesday, or at least did at the time. So that meant that we could go and see people. And that brings a similar life when you have a crowd. It makes a build have a certain relevance that it wouldn't have otherwise. If you think about it, most people when they do build, they make places where a crowd would naturally gather. It might be a market square or a dance hall or an auditorium or even a castle. And when you see them full of people, it's quite astonishing how wonderful they look. Of course, there have been many challenges. One thing people just really a lot of people just don't like to move. I remember back in 2011, there was a report on New World Notes blog where a Linden Lab insider revealed that 70% of second life residents never leave their home region. And so some people also we have to take into consideration. Some people just came to open sim because they wanted to get away from the crowds. They don't really want to be associated with other people. So we've always tried to take into consideration that. We began with two people. The first week of the safari, there were just two of us. There was Wizard Genoid and myself. The second week, we were four. There was Wizard. There was myself. There was Fuchsia Nightfire and Wizard Ours Chrome. And week three, we were seven. And we've never been less than seven since then. Usually between 20 and 30 of us come. Again, the fixed time and the fixed day has helped because people get information blindness. They are told something, but it just doesn't sink in. And it has taken a long time for people to become aware of our trips. And now it's a little bit easier after three years. However, you can imagine moving 20 and 30 people from grid to grid can present a couple of problems. The number itself just presents problems even if we were on the same grid, no doubt. But of course, OpenSim isn't built like that. So much of it's on private servers, not really decided for more than just the local person to use. So we've always known that we're pushing the envelope. And that's been part of the fun of it. Crashing is the fun of it. You crash, you just come back. We have our clubhouses. And in the picture, you should be able to see the Franco grid clubhouse, which as you can see, everybody's wearing different clothes. People have strange attachments that cause trouble. Some people don't load properly. And so it can be a nightmare for another grid. But by insisting on this subject, we've managed to perhaps strengthen people's setup so that they're ready to receive more people over time. Of course, we've warned people before we go to the grid so that they can take precautions. And some of the main ones are encouraging people to shut down any regions they're not going to be using to restart the region or even the whole grid just before we arrive. And to give us somewhere to sit down, that really seems to work very well just as it does here in the OSCC. The advantage of a planned visit, of course, is that we don't just rudely march in there and break somebody's grid. And the grid owner is on hand usually to tell the story. And that gives immense added value to the experience of visiting a place. When the person can tell you why they made it, how they made it, you get a whole other fourth dimension to the three-dimensional world. And of course, it's lovely for the grid owners themselves to see their grid full of people and enjoying the things they've made. A pre-organized visit, though, that involves some organization, as you can imagine. And that means getting hold of people. Sometimes the only way you can get hold of them is in-world because you don't know what their real name is and you don't know where they are in the world. So that involves a lot of instant messages. And instant messages are still, especially offline, inter-grid instant messages, a big problem for us still. Once upon a time, you could pretty much guarantee that you could talk to somebody or leave somebody a message from your grid on their grid. But now, sadly, we have to travel to the other grid. We have to leave the message. We have to warn the person, don't reply to me here. You have to come back to my grid and leave a reply if you want me to get it. Or else, obviously, use some external method like an email or something like that. And, of course, time zones make it hard for people to be available. Although, I have to say, we've been very lucky. For example, Greybeard Thinker, Uriah Heap, and Pearl Erickson all come to mind. These are Australians who got up before dawn to be able to host us on the safari. And we've appreciated both the wonderful bills they have and the time they took to show it to us. And that's true of many Americans too who've been able to meet us during the day. Some of them even taken a day off work for it. But that doesn't mean it always all works out. There have been many occasions when somebody ten minutes before the safari has said, can you come back tomorrow? Which, of course, creates its own exciting drama. So it's never boring. Usually, in fact, talking about planning, I tried to have about six weeks of safari destinations planned in advance. The advantage of that is it gives people time to think about what build they want to show. Maybe it gives them also the impetus to finish a project. And we always have a plan B. So we're ready if some grid should go offline. Suddenly, that's not a real huge problem. It also means that there's something for everybody. We try and mix up the destinations. And we have multiple clubhouses. We have principally on Franco grid and OS grid. But we have them on a bunch of other grids too. People have been very generous with that. The main thing we do is to keep it simple. There have been many, many suggestions about how we could do the safari with HUDs and so forth. But at the end of the day, it's just so much easier to just use the URI, the so-called hypergrid address, or just a landmark, although landmarks don't always work out perfectly. Another thing we have is groups. We have groups all over OpenSim on OS grid, Metropolis, Franco grid, Kytley, Kraft, Mobius, Great Canadian grid, and so forth. And I'm very lucky to have a lot of helpers like Sunshine Savannah and George Equus and Lucy Afarensis and Juliette Sorial Dreaming and of course, Wizardos Chrome, who's been with the safari from the very start. They help out putting the notices that are required. Of course, it would be so much easier for us if we had hypergrid groups that we could just put the notices in one group and everybody could get them. That would save a huge amount of time. And obviously, that's not something we have right now. So we've retreated, if you like, into social media. Is retreat the right word? Perhaps I should say diversify, because we have large groups on Facebook and Google+, and that means that people get to post their photos, which is another nice feature. They post their little videos of what's been happening on the trip so that other people can see it. It would, of course, be lovely to have a pan-group group also because so many people who are in OpenSim don't like Google and don't like Facebook. So to try and combat that, we have also a blog that you can go and look at if you look for HG Safari or find it. And I just put a transcript usually in a bunch of pictures so that people can see the places and many, many people go after the trip is over, go around and take a look at the various destinations by themselves or with friends. So if you ask what is the state of the economy of appreciation in OpenSim, I would have to say it's booming. New friendships are at the heart of it. There's collaboration. We're inundated by kindness and generosity, both in terms of content and land. And we've just been amazed by how many people have gone out of their way to welcome us and to show us their regions. And there's so many different regions to be seen, both fantasy, factual, historical, scientific. We've seen a little bit of everything. One good thing for the people who are hosting us is that they get some feedback about how their grid is performing and maybe they can make some improvements or maybe they can just pat themselves on the back for a good job. We've certainly learned that the OpenSim universe is vast and unmathepable and it's always changing. Grids disappear and new ones appear all the time. It's been fun going around with the friendly people of the safari too. I've loved it. And we've also learned another thing. You can't be a community if you don't communicate. You have to communicate, whether that's the technical side of it or whether that's just people reaching out to one another and telling their story and listening to the stories of others. There's plenty more out to explore. And as you know, we have a safari organized for later today and I hope some of you will be able to join us. All right. Thank you so much for that presentation. I know I'm going to try and make that safari because I love them so. One question I just had. If someone has a grid that they'd like to get on the tour. Yeah, you could just I am me or look for me on Google plus is a good way to get hold of me. And just let me know we usually try. As I say, we usually got about six weeks already sorted. So somebody who asks today we're talking about February. No, no sooner than February. But that gives people time to figure things out. Yeah. All right. We have time for a question or two. Does anyone have a question for those? Okay. Well, thank you very much. And I think they're all waiting for the tour. What are some of the places we're going to today? Okay, we're going to five very different places. We're going to see an oil rig. We're going to see a Christmas fair. We're going to see an expo zone. We're going to see the welcome area on open sim life, which has just got a little sample of all their different regions. So there's something for everybody there. And we're also going to see the great hyper grid hub on sanctuary. And all the owners of those places will be on hand to tell you about their regions and their grid. Awesome. There was a question. Can you talk a little bit about chat VR's voice in Safari? Well, the Safari group is, first of all, V-vox doesn't always work. And it doesn't like a huge group of people from different grids to be gathered in one place. It often will fail. It will fail even on grids as illustrious as quietly. Usually people are too polite to say that voices stop working for them. But if it stops working for part of the group, that excludes that part of the group from the conversation. And there's also the issue that we're a multi-language group. There's usually at least four or five languages represented amongst the actual tourists. And many of them can read English without too much of a difficulty. But once we begin speaking, whatever the dominant language is, that means the others can't understand. If it's spoken at the normal rate of conversation. And so we tend to use local chat because that way everybody can participate and be part of the experience. All right, great. Well, Thurston, once again, I want to thank you very much for being here and giving us this great presentation about what you do. Okay, thank you. All right. We're about to take about a half-hour break here. Our next session begins at 9.30 a.m. and it will be in the keynote region. It's entitled Bridging Worlds. We also want to encourage you during the break to stop by OSCC 17 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowdfunding booths located throughout the OSCC Expo regions. All really interesting things to visit and lots of freebies to find. So enjoy your break and we will see you back here at 9.30 a.m.