 to the 2 p.m., 3 p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. My name is Bella Luna Gigalia, and I am your moderator. In this session, we are happy to introduce a panel discussion called Crafting Gemischof. Did I say that correctly? For resiliency in times of social disassociation. Our panelists are Andrew Stricker, Spinoza Cunel, Francesca Yonakura, Avatar Frankie Antonelli, and Cynthia Colom, Avatar Lier Lobo. Dr. Andrew is an education innovation analyst with Air University's LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education. Andrew also engages in collaborative design of assistive immersive 3D virtual and augmented reality simulations for helping to improve complex problems solving among teams. In 2020, he was elected to the board of directors of the International Board of Standards in Performance, Training, and Instruction. Francesca Yonakura, Frankie, comes from the higher education world where she specializes in instructional systems and emerging technologies in support of learning. Frankie is also known to be a curious traveler immersed in virtual worlds for empowering learning experiences in the company of Kindred Spirits, FTW for the win. Dr. Cynthia Alier Lobo is a professor at Colorado Technical University and CCC Online fell in love with the virtual reality environments in 1995 when she developed a system and ran usability experiments with data gloves and head mounted display devices. She loves game and simulation design and dreams of the future of open simulator. Unable to join us today are Dr. Barbara Truman, Delightful Dewwaggle, and JJ Drinkwater, Ms. Elizabeth Stricker, and Ms. Kathy Flitter. Now please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensim.cc with the hashtag O-S-C-C-20. Welcome everyone and let's begin the panel discussion. Thank you and thank you to our audience and my fellow panelists. This is Lear and I wanted to give a shout out to Dr. Barbara Truman who I believe is listening. She's a strategic advisor for immersive learning and collaboration at the University of Central Florida. And we think of her as our inspiration. She keeps us strong and she works with Frankie here but she has been a guiding light for us and we just wanted to give a shout out to her to JJ Drinkwater, our science fiction librarian to of course, Mrs. Betty Stricker and Mrs. Kathy Flitter who you're going to meet in our slides coming up. So Andy, I'll turn it over to you. Okay, great. Well, we thought we'd give you a little background about the title. We had a little fondness for the use of German. So much of what we do centers around a German utopian community called the Harmony Society and they settled, they built a couple of communities in the early 1820s and actually myself and Lear and Barbara, we were from the area of new harmony. So German has a wonderful way of putting a lot of thought into a single word that, and so Gemeinenschacht represents a community but it has a very rich history of thinking about how important it is for us to be connected with others that almost seems like family. And so we're going to talk to that in our panel during our visit with you. And as always, it is a wonderful, wonderful privilege to be with the OpenSim community and its conference and to share about our work. Now, I just want to highlight from this opening image here why we have it. If you're like some of us, we're living in strange times and the world can seem like it's upside down. And so part of what JJ has been so thoughtful in helping us over quite some time is she's always encouraging us to thrive, to stay close to each other, connect with each other and to thrive. Even when things seem out of whack and difficult and challenging and the events that happen to us in our daily lives, we believe that one of the most powerful benefits of OpenSim and these immersive shared spaces is the means to stay connected and to have the experience of community. And we'll talk in more detail about what that community, as we try to practice it in our virtual harmony group of people that are participating in it. Yeah, thank you. And there's gonna share some images here from our experience. Andy has a masterful way of capturing emotion and the angst we all feel at being sheltered in place, at watching our loved ones suffer and of course, seeing the world in crisis. And of course, we get together every Sunday and we normally conduct research, design simulations, test them and do all kinds of quirky things, right? But this year, we took some time out to also think about healing and to think about our world and how we can help strengthen it. Here you see us inside the Loire village on the Loire grid and we are in Barbara Truman, delightful do-angles home. She's sitting there at the piano and I'm standing next to her and we're all gathered around. And of course, we're celebrating. We created wine bottles with wine labels which may sound terribly frivolous, right? I know what you're thinking. You're supposed to be working, right? And yet, we had to do all of these various things to strengthen our spirit. I think of this shot as hearth and home. This is March of 2020 when we all realized that COVID was quite real and we had to do something. Frankie, did you have anything you wanted to add to that? Yeah, no. This is... My audio is not coming through. I don't know why. Oh, you sound great. We can hear you. Okay. Yeah, this is actually a very meaningful photo for myself because this is when I was able to rejoin again the virtual worlds to give me strength to go through these difficult times we are all living as a society. Andy, I love this photo. He organizes these beautiful imagery and these beautiful ways of thinking about our experiences together. So it's not just that we get together and we create content, we design, we simulate, we test, we reflect. I'm the one who's going around saying, hey, watch those permissions. I'm always the person who's very interested in the collaborative side of each of us having equal access. But Andy captures the magic of that experience so well in this image. Andy, over to you. Thank you. This is a powerful visual because not all of us, of course, start off in life with the warmth of things that can be with family life. But at least at some level, as we come into an awareness of our identity and how we're going to fit in with the world, usually there's people around us and our families that give us a touchstone of warmth and acceptance and we have a sense of trust with them. And this is from Ferdinand Tony's view of Gmine and Schaft where he says, basically it's that family-centeredness that creates the right foundation for us in life. And so, but we don't stay there. We have to grow and develop and take up a larger identity as we fit in with others outside of our smaller communities. And so we have to travel, as it were, from the warmth of our home to the larger society. And this is Gilchelschacht. And so this visual just struck home because you can imagine yourself walking across the bridge. And we talk about bridges quite a bit in our work because there's so much that is symbolic with a bridge. But as we go from what is familiar to that, which is unfamiliar and maybe perhaps even frightening, that's why I love the image of the wolf over on the far left-hand lower corner. But it can seem dangerous as we go out into the world. And so part of what we try to do is we try to help people as they trans across bridges in life and explore and try new things out, but give them a sense of community that they wouldn't otherwise feel. So Lyra, over to you. Well, Andy, we didn't start with 12 grids. It happened over the course of this year. We started with, let's say, three or four grids. And the reason we had them architected the way we did was we had the space program. And we had the mission to Mars where you would fly in a rocket. You'd go up to the space station only we had a very futuristic, fantasy kind of space station at first. Very Star Wars, right? And then we started thinking about, well, maybe we need to craft a little reality that actually bridges with our vision of the future. And so Andy started redesigning all of our builds and re-architecting everything. And every week or two, he'd say, hey, we have a new grid, come on over. And this is one day, yeah, this was in May. And he had a family member who was graduating from, I think, college. And so he said, hey, let's hold a graduation party for someone who can't have their own graduation party and can't get out. We're all sheltered in place. This is May, 2020. So we're all in these sailboats sailing over to this yacht, this amazing 10-bedroom place. We all have our own cabins there. And it's called The Wind Song, right, Andy? Yes. And I take, I'm the photographer for the group in case you're wondering. So I just want the people who'd still use windlight to realize I use it. And I love it because I love these emotional ways of thinking about the sun on my face and thinking about the play of light on the objects around me. And I'm singing this song, Sailing, Take Me Away to Where I'm Going. And Andy wound up becoming DJ. He had no DJ, well, limited DJ skills beforehand. The next thing you know, we all made our favorite playlist. We all went to YouTube and said, pick your favorite music videos. Let's assemble them in a Google Doc and let's create our own playlist, be our own DJs, create these experiences, and then have our own dances. For the rest of you, you're going, well, that's trivial. We do this all the time. Well, for us, we're a collection of geeks, okay? No offense, guys. But we're researchers and we're all people who think very seriously about our work in these spaces and we're like, we need to move and dance and laugh. And of course, Kathy is sitting there a couple of seats over from me. I'm the one in the hat on the right, right? And her son's next to her. And of course, so here's an image of him graduating. And of course, he's surrounded by all of us, right? But what was amazing to me is this is their first day in world, okay? So this is the sign of someone who comes into world, has a graduation ceremony, is able to get his clothes on, right? And of course, his mom too. And they became part of our community. And of course, there's Betty Stricker as well between Andy and myself and Barbara, delightful do-angles over by the guardrail. Andy, over to you. So, as we go further along in life, Ferdinand Tonny's talks about that, we're on this journey towards how to fit in to larger Kasselshoff society where there's rules and laws and you have to enter into contractual basis for agreements for how things are gonna be done. And they're not driven by trust and so much what you may give your word to do. And so there is that kind of sense of having to fit in as it were to, or it's more formal way of how we get to know other people and connect with them. But we wanna take as it were a bit of our home with us. And so I love this visual where we have this young person who is basically got her seashell and it's a wonderful metaphor for taking with us all the things that are precious to us in life and trying to keep a little bit of that home no matter where we go, right? And of course, as an aviator, I like the propellers at the end, but... So this is something and when you start out on this journey, for many cases it's daunting, but it can be very thrilling about what could be, what is the possibility as we discover ourselves and how we fit into a larger society? Over to you, Lira. Well, I love these images, but we have 30 of them and I'm mindful of the time being one of the organizers. So next thing you know, he gives us these submersibles and you have to realize Andy is designing all this mesh, he's scripted everything, he's a cognitive psychologist who is a learning architect for Air Force Education and rethinking new ways for people to learn and have these wonderful immersive experiences. So he's busy, busy, busy all the time and yet every week, there's new content. I'm sure he doesn't sleep. Right now, one of the reasons some of the folks in our group are not with us is he had a flood and of course, much of his house was sitting outside, but the servers survived. So we were still online, but of course, they're repairing everything, right? Two floors flooded out and so we are so thankful for everything he does, but I love these submersibles and the submarine and I know whenever I go around the virtual world, you guys have all this stuff. What makes it special to us is it's our stuff, stuff that has been created by our team and if we need something a little bit different, we say, hey, what would happen if we did this? And next thing you know, it's different, you know, it's customized to us. And here's what happened when we got out of these submersibles, we decided to let our hair down and I don't know if many of you know me, you know, I'm always dressed as if I'm, you know, stem to stern, right? But here we are having a really good time relaxing and taking joy in this beauty and this is what I think about when I think about the value of these spaces. There's really no, the words are futile, they're parts, they're sparse, they don't really capture the excitement, the joy, the passion. You know, when I hear people say open, similar, no offense Bart, is boring, I know your point was that it isn't and you're absolutely right. It's this place of the imagination and it's where we take ourselves, this is where we spent time healing. Sen, could I interrupt? Yes, go ahead. Yeah, on the topic of Andy, not just because he's here, but I wanted to highlight what a phenomenal job he has done to create these beautiful spaces. You know, we, and it's not just people's moments that we spend, we have a rich intellectual as well as fun conversations. I mean, we have learned about history, sustainability, transportation and technology in general that keeps my mind occupied, right? And engage with everybody. And not only that, he has created these collaborative moments in time that is receptive to modifications. He comes together with his designs based on our feedback, but then he's also willing to modify it right on at that moment, you know, to suit the needs of what each one of us wanna do at that moment. And what I'd also like to highlight is that subliminally or not, he has encouraged us to kind of come prepare, experiment on our own by giving us our own space to play in his grid. I haven't taken that advantage as much as I should, but I really appreciate that. Thank you. And Andy, I love this image because, you know, I'm just looking forward to the future. I know you're talking about social dissociation, but that's the good news is because we have this community, because we gather, and it just feeds our spirit, even if we're having virtual chocolate, it is amazing. I'm going over to you, Andy. Yes, you know, we start out with high hopes, but a lot of times we can end up sort of what this visual is depicting, you know, you know, we feel like that what's keeping the nutrients in our hearts and going forward is drying up. And so here we have the young person who's sort of feeling very isolated, and she can look off into the horizon and see the flocking of these birds and the rays of hope there, but she needs nutrients. She needs to have the things around her to blossom again, as it were. And so part of what we're trying to do in the immersive spaces that we're co-creating together is to say, okay, you know, what can we do to help people to, you know, get fed those nutrients of when you feel like you're connected with other people and you are in trustful relationships and you can, you know, feel like there's a place, even if you're living in large metropolitan areas or you're out isolated in rural areas, but how can we, regardless of your geographical location, feel connected and get all the social benefits of community layer? Hey, I'm going to go a little faster on some of the slides, but when we get to Andy's part, we will pause. On this one, I'm just so mesmerized by the sky. I have a new system and the way I see the world these days just really captures my imagination and of course, we're not alone. Even though we're all in these little sailboats, we're chasing each other. We're having such a good time because we can't find the buoys. We're on a race, by the way, but we're going around in circles like, did you see the buoys? I didn't see the buoys. Hey. That's right. That's hysterical. And these are resable ones that he's created. And I know they exist everywhere else, but there's something magical when it's your stuff and you've crafted this and you've shared it, right? It's incredible. And here is, this is Frankie. I included this because I just loved watching her take off and just scuba and she wasn't aware that I was following her with my camera just enamored with how she was exploring and she looks actually natural like this. This looks like our next vacation, frankly. That's true. I tend to wander a little too much. No, I love it. I love it. And I'm gonna put a shout out to Kathy Flitter. You know, she is Andy's sister-in-law and such a brave lady. She has come and joined us, never having been in a virtual world before to the best of my knowledge. And you know what? It was like her third or fourth week. It might've been a little more. We said, hey, you should fly our rocket. And of course what we didn't tell her is that Andy has written these very detailed schematics on what you do when you're a true astronaut. You have to flip all those switches and change all those little red things to green and the upper panel. You have to do all this stuff or else you run out and you don't have fuel. That's right. You can't break off the second stage. So she's literally about to take off and we're all snickering, right? Cause we're like, this'll be good. And you know, she did it. She figured it all out. And I didn't know she was a computer scientist, but you know what I'm saying? Most of us, the first time you sit in a rocket, you wouldn't successfully fly it to the space station. So a shout out to you, Kathy. I know you're watching. She goes with Barbara Truman and she lands and it drops her off and she says, man, no space suit. That's true. And of course, we have these space simulations because we're thinking about the future. We're thinking, you know, going to Mars and living or breathing on Mars is an impossible thing to do today. It's a complex challenge that has incomplete data and incomplete discoveries. And we have thought, what would it be like if we crowdsourced, you know, how to behave, how to do these things? And if we tried to learn something from people who have no background in this subject, what could we discover if they didn't have boundaries? If they didn't know what was not possible, would they try to solve the problem in interesting ways that might teach us something? So we're really learning a lesson in humility and in an appreciation of diversity through these simulations. Over to you, Andy. Great, and we can quickly go through this slide, but this is where, and all the things that you're hearing Lear and Frankie share, we're wanting people to connect the benefits of what they know from their close friendships and family with the benefits of thriving in larger society. And so, you know, and we want this to be, so people can soar and, you know, stay healthy all the way through life's journey. If you go to the next one, Lear, thank you. We know what's fun about this. This is Betty Stricker, Andy's wife. And she runs a therapy program for her community where she goes around to folks who perhaps they're not able to walk or perhaps they have a learning disability or whatever. And she brings the little bitty horse, Molly May West. And that's Molly, all dolled up on the right there, the little bitty one. And she takes her around and helps people to feel connected and in touch with nature when they're not able to get out. And not just because of COVID, they're just not able to get out, period. And so she does these amazing things with people. And I have this slide and then I want to show you the next one. Look what she's doing in the times of COVID. Okay, oops, I must have put it, I put it right after this one. Let me go forward one, because we showed this earlier. And we'll get back to it in just a sec. But let's see, this is Betty, what she's doing when she's not here, okay? She's off with her horse, Heff. And of course, she's showing us how to truly be alive and to enjoy nature even when you're staying at home. Yeah, we can go through this one quickly too, but this is our sense of how we connect all of our different talents together to create these kinds of spaces for people to feel connected with one another. So it's given the opportunity to be able to take your imagination and put things together. And we do it in such a way as Frankie was sharing earlier that we may build the foundation for the possibility but then others come in with a story. Cynthia, for example, is a wonderful writer and storyteller and with Barbara and Betty's stories and Kathy's and JJ. JJ is our librarian and she enriches the stories with a wealth of references to all kinds of works in literature. And so by the crafting, it's like you're living in a story actually when you go into these places and they're dynamic, you get to change it, Lear. You know, I wanna do a shout out also to Frank Ruloff and Lisa Laxton and our Infinite Metaverse Alliance and the Moses community. And we've been part of all these different communities. And of course, we have a deep appreciation for everything you're doing because you're really thinking about the interface which is how the user perceives our world. We love the open similar software but we recognize it's the viewer and it's the interface and it's how people use it to create content that creates a personalized magical experience for them. And you know, I went to Magnolia Gardens that Lisa was talking about yesterday and you know, I was so enamored. She gives me this fishing pole and I started fishing and I will not fish in real life, okay? So that requires touching worms or flies and actually touching fish, you know? That's obviously not me. But what's funny is I start fishing and I catch all these fish and next thing you know, one of her bots comes by and steals my fish, okay? And I'm like, hey, give that back. And proceeds to plant with it and starts creating amazing and magical things and different things. I start watching and they're not on a base script. They have some randomizing functions and it was so funny, I took the fishing pole back with me to virtual harmony and I started fishing up and of course I have nothing to fish and of course it complains at regular intervals but I don't care, it's my fishing pole, okay? And I love it. Anyway, thank you for that. Well, here we are gathered on the wind song. This could be the Capri because we made two copies of the boat thanks to Andy and we also have something we call Gilligan's Island and those of you who have ever watched old time television know that's a bunch of castaways who've been stranded on an island and of course there, you could call them misfits because they're all from different walks of life. I would call them a diverse crowd to a certain degree that have a variety of backgrounds that are very interesting when they come together. There's Barbara Truman in the foreground with Frankie Antonelli next to her. Betty Stricker and I are sitting there and we're thinking about our next venture and I have my tiki parrot on my shoulder and of course I'm wearing a cardinal because we're from Indiana and of course the cardinal is our bird and I love having nature all around me everywhere we go. Now I'm gonna move a little faster and then turn it back over to Frankie and to Andy. Andy, this one's for you. The only thing I wanna point out here is at the bottom those are the 12 grids that every two or three weeks he'd say, hey, let's go to such and such grid. So we are hyper gridding but what he has done is he's created a little tool for us so we never have to put in the destination in the world map. Now I still do it because I'm kicking at old school, right? But everyone else can actually kick the guided kiosks and signs and all this. So the rest of you go from region to region we go from grid to grid so we don't have regions in the classical sense. Andy, over to you. So what you've been hearing from us and the things that we write about is putting all these pieces together that this visual represents. So we want to have places where we can come together that has no physical boundaries. We want people to thrive psychologically, spiritually and all the ways that is right for them. And we want them to have this wonderful opportunity to let their imaginations take off and to create the kinds of experiences that they would like to share with others. And so as Lear mentioned earlier we have a little French community that we all have residences in. And so each of us can create ways to welcome others to come and visit and share the things in our life that matter. We have collaborative design spaces that we support not only for our students but for our close contacts and virtual harmony. And we also have this very strange thing that's happened in the last few years. We talk about it as transcendentalism where we feel as if we're transcending some of the limitations of the issues and challenges in life. And some of you can probably talk to this in much greater detail than what we can. But we think that when you connect the virtual experiences with the things in your life, in the physical world you transcend to a better place. If all the parts that we've been talking about come together for creating this combined and shopped experience we think that in the future society is gonna be much better because of these opportunities that open simulator communities is actually offering the world. And so when people and each of you out there hearing us talk about this they're doing your own open simulator work. I think many of you can speak to this that maybe you came in it because of a technological curiosity but what we've found is actually life changing. It really does change your perspective about your life and how community is possible with others. Someone the other day was saying this distinction between the real life and the virtual life. And I says, you know I'm real in every space that I occupy. And some of them are in my mind. Some of them are visualized and shared and others are around my body but none of them lack a certain degree of reality. So I don't really think in those terms. Now he's given little descriptions for all of us underneath and we're not gonna get into that but I do wanna tease him for just a moment. He gave everyone these amazing apartments and I just love them and I visit them because I love them. I wouldn't wanna be in my own space by myself anyway but I wanna tease him because he turned to me and he says, I know you love books which is so true. I had over 10,000 pounds of books, right? Last time I moved. And so he gives me this bookstore in this little French village and we walk inside it's two meters by let's say three meters, okay? I have bathrooms that are larger, okay? And I'm like, oh my gosh, my camera's outside the building. Because I set it at three meters isometric. So we all gathered in all five or six of us and some of us look like our heads are stuck in the bookshelves and all. I says, well I love books but this might be a little closer than I had in mind. It was cozy for sure. It was very cozy. I love that we left it lying and this is over the Grand Canyon. He did give us a Grand Canyon and you know, we use the same space. We retexture it and use it for some of Mars. We're constantly reusing things that we have. Now in this scene, we're getting close with our balloons cause we're trying to use voice within 60 meters, right? And so we're thinking about that as we go and here's Betty dancing on her birthday. We've celebrated, there's like four of us who have birthdays in May. So May is a big month for us and then of course this celebration and he's the DJ in the background. And I love the Art Deco imagery above his head and this whole effect, this being able to dance and to feel this connectedness. It's not just a special event. This is something we can do often and well. Frankie, did you have anything you wanted to add on this? There's Frankie on the right there. That's true. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what we were confabulating here. But we're planning this talk. That's what I thought was so funny. Like I'm the photographer, we'll get to talking about something. I just start snapping and I'll look around the camera angles, change the windlight, think about what we're all doing. And of course we were, and I'm the one who's constantly saying, well, we have to talk. We have to have a conference. We have to do things, we have to share. None of these experiences can we keep to ourselves. They have to be shared. Now, Andy, this one's the Paul Tillich garden in New Harmony, Indiana, where that utopian society used to be. And Paul Tillich was a famous theologian. The reason I love this scene, it may not look like much to you guys, but the real life one is a collection of pine trees that even in the hottest point in summer, when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it's cool there. And the pine needles smell so beautiful, that warm pine smell. And you sit on these little benches and one of the best restaurants in the world is right there behind you with incredible food and in the winter of fireplace, you know. And so it has all these sensory experiences that make us feel so connected. Andy, did you have anything to add to that? Yes, we highlighted just a bit at the beginning. A lot of our inspiration comes from the early American experiments with new forms of community. And that tradition is still very much in us, I think. We can always reshape how we think about community and try to take advantage. And I love what I'm reading the comments in the chat window about, it's all real, virtual and physical, and we couldn't agree more, it's all real. And just to open up people's minds to what is possible. Back to you, Lear. Well, you know, I mentioned, we come from a city that normally shuts down for a week to hold a fall festival because it's a German city in Indiana, five communities that got together. And they call it the Westside Nut Club Fall Festival, right? And growing up, I used to think, wow, this is the time when you celebrate from 10 in the morning till two in the morning. Just a non-stop party for an entire mile of shops and food and you name it. And so Andy, I started talking about that and saying how I missed that. Next thing I know, the next week we have our own Oktoberfest, right? We had booths, we got to decorate them. And of course, you see the little cat holding the pumpkin and there's a lot of quirky images. I didn't feature them all here, but it was just a lot of fun. And we're just being silly for pre-Halloween. Meanwhile, Andy has created this space for us to dance and to celebrate and under the awning there and has featured some birthdays. And that's J.J. and White in the center there. You know, and you can see some of our booths for our fall festival off in the distance. And of course, we're celebrating Betty's birthday party and I just wanted to remind you that as you experience things in your life, I love to curate these experiences and to think about why they mattered. And if I should go away tomorrow, you know, how will people remember and what kind of impact have I had? You know, how do we connect in these amazing ways? Well, there's Barbara on the left sitting there relaxing and of course, those are her cats. She got little kittens this year to help her with her healing and they've grown up. Rascal or mischief, yeah. Yes. And so we're about to, actually I went a little fast through those last slides. So Andy, or excuse me, Frankie, I tend to talk too much, I know that, but I love, you know, I met Frankie when the New Media Consortium came to Defense Game Tech. Sun Tzu was there and we just won the grand prize for our space simulation and that's when I met Barbara too. And so we all, yeah, we all bridged and the NFC was responsible for the Horizon Report, which is the next five years of technology and education. And they were always looking ahead, thinking about where are we going? What should we do next to shape our world? How can we strengthen it so that our young people, so they're not just reading facts and thinking in a distant fashion about the past and the future, but they're actually living it, having experiences that are memorable. Not just watching video, not passive, but actually going inside and having deep probing questions that matter. You know, what is it about these spaces that we want to preserve and long after we move to other technologies, whatever that is, whether it's better systems, better graphics cards, better interfaces, whatever that is, how will we preserve these magical moments that help shape us and our society? I love that picture. It kind of reminded me of moments in which although we are actively interacting with each other and learning, there are those moments in which we kind of reflect upon. There is those quiet moments together to see where we're going next. So, Andy, this is wonderful. Tell us about this image. Well, as we talked about in our time together with this panel about ways of thriving, and I mentioned about Barbara, and she's so inspirational too for what we refer to as soaring. So when you thrive, you can soar. So this visual just speaks to our heart of what happens in your spirit when you soar. And so there's this wonderful way that you can go way beyond the limits of what you might have thought were constraints in your life and experience things that you otherwise may not ever thought you could in a virtual way. So as Lear and Frankie and others have talked about, we can go on these wonderful journeys of imagination to worlds that have not yet been created, but we've envisioned them. We can participate through our efforts with some of the science discoveries and share with our students. And when we're participating in these kinds of environments that inspire, I think as educators, we've seen that regardless of where you're at in your life, it's like Carol Dwight has talked about. You get this growth mindset and where you can realize that no matter where you're at in the journey, now however, whatever your age may be, these kinds of experiences can cause you to feel like you can soar and keep soaring all the way through to the very end. So we'll open up the questions right now. But again, thank you so very much for having us today and participating with you on this through this panel. No, thank you all. I'm reading a message, Mary Steprocki on YouTube says, great photos, Lear. Definitely a beautiful visualization and a way to take ideation to the next level. So thank you for that. Any other questions from the audience that you might see on the in-chat? We had a question from Larissa Firehawk who asks, how can we come out and join and tour? And I know Gamisa has been out before, but that was before we re-architected in a big way. So all of our links, everything changed quite a bit. And by the way, we want to put a shout out to, and if I'm saying your name wrong, my apologies, right? But to Gamisa, he scripted the hat that I normally wear for the conference, the clocktop hat. And of course, you have to realize when I received the Thinker Award from Virtual World's Best Practices in Education, they said it was because they looked in their inventories. One reason. And they saw a lot of content from me, the owner creator. And I got to thinking about that. And I thought, in our connectedness, we have so much content from you. Each one of you has made a stamp in our lives. We may not have it on virtual harmony. But as I go around the grid and I look at everything that comprises our universe, our metaverse, right? Each of you has made a profound impact. Even the folks who don't create, you've touched things. You've owned things. Maybe you've left them behind, right? And of course, even as we stumble upon content that others have left, you've left your mark. You're a part of that society. And interestingly enough, the things we touch, love, open, share, wear, even when we wear a box on our head, right? We've all been there. And of course, these experiences have a sense of whimsy that we can all appreciate. We never want to lose track or lose touch with that humility of being new, of being a stranger in a strange land and having a deep and probing appreciation for these worlds. I love that you brought up Robert Heinlein. Oh, yeah. Well, the gang knows me. I'm a science fiction fan. Plus, JJ Drinkwater, best known as perhaps the Library of Caledon, is a science fiction librarian, curator of science fiction content for a university. And of course, it's always keeping us in mindfulness value. We'd appreciate this. YouTube, Bethany, and A Marine Vans. Always making us think about our content, getting our ideas down, curating everything we do. And then of course, making sure we are digitally responsible with our intellectual property. Now, you'll notice I share everything on slides and imagery. And I invite you to be able to download my slides and use any of my images. Now, Andy, he may not be as sharing, but somehow through association with me, I'm afraid I share for the group. And the reason I do that is we really want our world to grow stronger. We want everyone to survive, to be stronger, and to think about what have we learned through 2020 and how can we make our world a better place? See, I don't think of COVID as this disease that trots on through and disappears. I think of this as a lesson learned in how we have to bridge and reach out to one another and be a good neighbor and to care for one another. Even if we're stuck at home, we can still reach out. And, Frankie, did you have anything you'd like to add for two minutes? Sure. I'll be quick. I just wanted to say thank you to you, Leera and Andy, but also the whole community of OpenSim and those of us in InWorld, because this year in particular, it just cemented in me how powerful, how meaningful, how I can't have enough adjectives to add to these, to be able to build that grit, the strength, to be able to manage through all these challenges that we are facing. Surely they can main shaft that Andy introduced us to, to gather in world, to engage not as regular as I like to be or but definitely at least during the conference times, the community conference, to be able to go and manage the trials and tribulations of our everyday life, to maintain most of all a positive outlook and have those nourishing moments, experiences for us to keep going and then, again, share with the rest of us with our neighbors, like you said, Leera. Now, we have a question that came in through YouTube and this is for all of you. Have you actually tried a Zoom-like meeting with all of you on it to compare from that? I know. We haven't, I don't know if that we've used Zoom, but we have the Harmony Society, we have our own Harmony Arts channel in Discord, in case you're wondering. And then we've used a big blue button, Andy's used it, because he uses it for some of their church services and things like that, but technologies like that, I only use them in case a community member cannot talk and voice or Vivox is not working for them or something. So I use it as an enabler, but I don't use it to replace the virtual world. I think of it as giving everyone a voice and then we get into the virtual world, right? So that's me personally. The others may have another thought. Before we're out of time, so you have to have a quick thought, but I'd like to thank the organizing committee, because when I asked about this conference, they were like, well, are we sure everyone wants to meet? And I says, yes, we never wanted to meet more than we do this year. And I wanna thank all our volunteers. You guys are amazing. Your streaming team, you guys make it happen and you give us memories that will last. The core developers, if you weren't here, and I mean historically, all of you, everyone and you, you, but who keep us vibrant and alive without you, we would all be so sad. And you have to realize the viewer developers, how we see our world, how we shape it. The educators who give us new ideas, ask questions and challenge us. The third party creators and the research that's going on, each of you, when you ask questions, when you're demanding, you make our world better. We wanna thank you. Okay, final thoughts, Frankie and Andy. I just, I'm just really enjoying all the wonderful comments in the chat log and thank you so very much, everyone. So, and yes, you're welcome to come visit us through our great, so you can hypergrid into virtual harmony. So we'd love to host you and if you have an opportunity to visit us. And we meet each week, each Sunday at three o'clock central time, so you're always welcome to visit. I know you guys may be wondering, why does she just drop the URL in the chat? It's because I have two more weeks of class and I've promised them a closed environment. And teachers are always good with their promises, right? Go ahead there, Frankie. Oh, no, no, I just wanted to thank you, thank the OS community joys, you know, and all of you who organized in, provide the platform today and yesterday and every year. And I look forward to 2021. Yes. All right. Thank you, everyone. It's a 2021. Thank you. Thank you to the panelists for this terrific discussion. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. And following the session, there is a break followed by the next session, which starts at 3.30 PM in this keynote region. It is entitled, dystopia rising how emergency remote education opens the portal to the metaverse. Also, we encourage you to visit the OCC20 poster expo and expo region three to find accompanying information on all the presentations, also to explore the hyper grid tour resources and expo region two, along with sponsor and crowd funder boots, located throughout the entire expo regions. Thank you to all of you and to our speakers and audience and we'll see you at 3.30.