Projects I’m excited to grow in 2009

While this is a personal list of food on my burners, I’m reposting to Amoration for focus throughout our volunteer base and future endeavors. Ideas, feedback, connections always welcome, I love it when you suggest friends, movies, resources to help us grow these projects.  We are especially looking for talented singers, musicians, builders and other lightning rods to join the temple touring team for 2009, we meet again on January 8th.

1)  Lightning Temple Tour, Events, Writing, Education and Resourcing the Best Possible Futures….our interactive work is broad and wonderful and we’re turning up the juice on the tesla coils to try new performance stunts never seen before live.  We will change the way millions play with energy in their daily lives through a global green core of altenergy leadership.

2)  Transitions: Place for Dreams is an extraordinary collaboration of education and digital resource leaders from many nonprofits who are designing new tools to help transitional populations build new homes, businesses and lives through social media…currently looking for programmers familiar with open API development for search tools and widgets.

3)  Sugar Shack Arts: After 8 years of growing intentional community in Los Angeles we are hitting our stride and welcoming amazing new people into our home for 2009 creative pursuits such as the Lightning Temple design meetings

4)  Social Action Media:  Causecast, Social Actions, Change.org, Nurture, SocialVibe, Causes on Facebook…time to integrate action everywhere.

5)  TekFarms:  Solar and Alternative Energy and Agriculture model farming, connecting small communities for best practices, a larger database that has the potential to inform a larger EcoData endeavor.

6)  ManorMeta Mysteries: Red Lightning   The stories and comix behind the Lightning, problem solving series for young audiences to tour with the Lightning Temple.

7)  Nonprofit Commons:  I joined this community as TechSoup back in 2006 and look forward to envisioning 3D nonprofit web landscapes with many organizations within the commons in 2009.  We’re currently finishing the build of a new EcoCommons for 20+ green and earth-friendly organizations to collaborate and grow new works.

8)  SMS & Color-based Emergency Awareness Systems: moving toward a mobile and easily scalable way to communicate in many languages about pending disasters such as tornadoes, fires and other fast-moving situations where quick text messages and mobile applications can save lives.

9)  Expanding knowledge of herbal plant, root, seed medicines: intention is to work on healing natural teas, oils, foods that can eradicate tumors and unwelcome growths in the human body.

10)  LoveNet:  The inner structure that allows the farms and intentional community network to grow, a cross-disciplinary group of leaders who understand love to be their first mission in every work.

Peter Sistrom’s Illustration of the Lightning Temple, 2008

Lightning Temple poster

temple poster, originally uploaded by .inKenzo. evonne@amo.

More details on the tour for 2009 and experience design and development from the growing Lightning Temple team, now nearly 100 top artists and performers joining us to electrify the core and energize the masses. We will be sharing documents with potential sponsors and partners for tour and events and you are welcome to contact Evonne directly for more information.

Isn’t this artwork from Peter amazing? I want to be there NOW! Can’t wait to see you all out there, in the fields and deserts of America in 2009. Thank you for supporting the work of AMO volunteers around the design table and everywhere we live and work together.

Lightning Temple updates

Lightning Temple at WordPress will soon become our main site for updates while we maintain the wiki for public details and idea sharing.  Enjoy recent updates including 3D video walkthrough of the temple as it is being built by our team of engineers and artists.

Tags: lightningtemplevideo 3d sketchup

Dallasheals.chipin.com

dallas loves the beat, originally uploaded by .inKenzo. evonne@amo.

Dallas loves the beat…..unfortunately his rear flank and leg are badly wounded and his tail will likely be amputated. He’s freaking out and keeps asking why he can’t fully feel his tail…there’s some feeling there we think, he seems to have slight reactions but not more than numbness.

We set up http://dallasheals.chipin.com to help work out his future care and surgical needs. Our familiar is very appreciative and glad to be alive and we are thankful that so many in our community have cared enough to help with his care and attention while we were away on honeymoon. It is so wonderful to know that no matter where you go you have community and people ready to embrace you, whether you’re a cat or a human.

Essentials of Virtual Community Building

No matter who you are, where you come from or what challenges you are hitting right now, there are a few things we all share in common.  We need a few basic things: food, water and shelter are followed by education and communication with others who share our experiences.  Deep down we want to bond and experience a sense of connection.

Connections thrive when we create solid and healthy communities and this is where virtual worlds excel: the immersive landscape is appealing to network weavers as it provides an infinite canvas for collaboration and experimentation.  My avatar In Kenzo wears her wings as a visible reminder to crosspollinate between the worlds and bring people together so that millions can come together and create the emerging 3D web.

When I first sat down with Douglas Thomas of the USC Network Culture Project he excited me with an idea:  Create a challenge to grow the communities of the virtual world.  Together with a stellar team we crafted The Second Life and the Public Good Community Challenge and successfully gave away a million L$ to winning projects chosen by a panel of experts.

Through the process of reading over 20 proposals and helping our panel through the process of picking their top five, I recognized that listening is essential to community building.  If there’s one secret ingredient to success from events to metaverse productions it’s deep engaged receptivity, not only to words but to actions and creations expressing the ideas that proposals sometimes struggle to capture.  Once you listen to what others say and do you are able to connect them with new ideas and resources to help them grow, which helps the whole community in turn.

During our event on Monday 11/17 I sat with our awardees and discussed the real world impacts that their communities have created in the last few months.  The awardees shared many triumphs including new sims and groups now hosting events along with challenges such as responsible research management in the nebulous terrain of virtual worlds.  Some tested the strength of virtual bonds as dynamic personalities make conversation a complex game about identity; one sim away excited groups at the Nonprofit Commons shared about the strength of their alliances built effectively in these networked spaces.

As avatars learning to work remotely for the first time our panelists for the challenge tested new tools including a graphic consensus-building device that allows groups to map themselves and see statistically significant data made by Alpine EMS. We relied on the talents of the Vesuvius Group to help us produce podcasts and content for USC Network Culture Project and many content creators throughout Second Life who brought their best to the table as artists and activists.  Global Kids, our virtual worlds collaborators for many events including the mini-conference this week, detailed their birds of a feather sessions and RezEd talks on their blog Holy Meatballs for youth audiences (and in the podcast below!).

Together we witness blooming artistic communities, machinima that tells stories of good created in virtual spaces that echoes into our daily lives.  Amazing storytellers like Draxtor Despres are now being recognized for machinima works; Draxtor is accepting an international humanitarian award for his work with the Virtual Guantanamo team who also brought us Wallsickness, a memorial to the walls that divide us and how we have systematically built them up and torn them down.  How do these virtual teams evolve over time as relationships extend beyond the platform?  The Wallsickness team is one example of a solid partnership sustained over years while other groups find their footing as new 501(c)3 organizations.

There are a few rare leaders who can gather a group of people and enjoy that space together over a long period of time, enriching each others lives in ways that we rarely reach in the real world.  Collaborations are more common, requiring great glue and gumption to form a sustainable community that grows and evolves with the people involved. Enrichment can take so many forms, like the support spaces created by the Ability Commons or the International Health Challenge created by the Texas Obesity Research Center.  The people behind these groups are just as fascinating as the beautiful places they create together; a conversation with Nany Kayo of Native Lands or Eme and Gentle of Ability Commons reinforced my belief in these spaces as viable for true social change.

The new Foundations sim brings avatars new life in a handful of ways, providing an encyclopedic museum of the various lifeforms we know and understand now while offering maps of conservation areas and local community building efforts throughout Chicago.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has been a unique presence in Second Life over the last few years as leaders in philanthropic exploration into virtual worlds, choosing not only to build their own presence but to give to other leaders to grow and explore what we can do together.  Few institutions have the foresight to allocate resources to these brave new worlds and it has been a joy to learn and grow with the Digital Media and Learning staff at the MacArthur Foundation this year.

Craig MacFound welcomed attendees at Monday’s event, speaking about Doctor Ludovico (Douglas Thomas) and his definition of Network Imagination as it relates to the freedom and agency of invention shared with copresence available in virtual worlds such as the new Foundations sim.  “This notion of community and imagination and the way they intersect motivates our presence here”, Craig MacFound noted as he expressed gratitude for the work of Aimee Weber studios bringing “beauty, imagination and playfulness” to the new Foundations sim.

In Draxtor’s video seen above he hits on four key affordances as outlined by Thomas’ upcoming paper from the USC Network Culture Project.  The communities we work with in Second Life embody 1) Awareness 2) Desemination 3) Organization and Action and 4) Intercultural Dialogue that breaks through traditional media resources into the daily lives of their members.  Each of our communities has learned to leverage at least one of these affordances very well to grow a community of likeminded avatars who care about political advocacy, health or engagement with their tribal brethren like the Native Lands project has provided in these photos of their Veterans Day honoring dedication and drum circle.

We share a desire to connect people and resources with our friends at Global Kids who have created RezEd and the Justice Commons.  Barry Joseph and Rik Riel hosted a discussion at Monday’s mini-conference that speaks to the future of these platforms for community building; listen to their podcast below and stay tuned for links to the USC Network Culture podcast of Monday’s panel with these amazing community leaders.

Wisdom and silences broken

Sent to me by a spiritual sister, Krupa:

“Where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibilities to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them… there are so many silences to be broken…”-Audre Lorde

This image I created a few years back when we first discussed the Beijing Olympics and human rights around the world.  It still rings true now.  I ask you, in your comments, to please help us break new silences, not people.

Alt Energy Part 2

Satire and animation are two of our best tools for showing the truth in bold statements made in the industrial/governmental sphere. When complex times call for multilayered answers, bring in the mashups and videoblogs!

The recent propaganda around the Pickens Plan was discussed in this blog along with other alternatives like solar microgeneration (putting some panels into your life!). Now TapRoot has dug deeper into the history of this plan and why we should be wary of single-sided solutions.

Truth About The Pickens Plan | ZapRoot

Over the next few days we will be talking more about our new websites going up this week to grow sustainability, energy and love in everything we do.
Stay tuned.

Alternative Energy Options

The Pickens Plan: a fascinating video on how to get off of foreign oil, from a billionaire oilman.

Pickens calls for 20% of our power to come from wind in the US, primarily large wind farms in the midwest. He says that this move alone, along with natural gas cars would reduce imports by 38%; saving $300 billion dollars a year in imports by switching to CNG cars and using more wind for our power generation needs.

Add solar into the mix and we’ve got a recipe for microgeneration at the local community level that may not only sustain our homes and local areas, but also become a source of profit and sustenance as these communities learn to sell back this power to neighbors who cannot generate for themselves.

I find this short video from Pickens compelling for a number of reasons, yet we can do so much more. There’s DIY Solar plans all over the web and easy ways to rethink your transportation use by the BTU. In a few years we will know exactly how much every light in our house costs us in energy use so that we can begin to measure our wastefulness.

Or we can start now by living simpler, using external power sources only when needed, maybe even walking or biking more often. It’s a nice day out, a good day to start.

Berzerk!

For great photos of the Cirque Berzerk shows here in LA visit:
http://pixievisionproductions.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amoration
http://www.latimes.com/theguide/events-and-festivals/la-gd-events24-2008jul24,0,475023.story

Deeply proud of our AMO friends for putting together one of the best shows we’ve seen under the big top! Tremendous work, all of you….beautiful.

Filling in the gaps: Tekfarms

Learn more in our upcoming postst about our journeys and desire to create integrated networks of knowledge for microgeneration systems and safe sustainable practices at the home, village and community level.  We are currently meeting with partners in Los Angeles and worldwide capable of building new villages with sustainable power, food and lifestyle systems that can grow new opportunities in many climates.

From Amoration’s Tekfarms wiki:

Currently half of the people on this planet die of poverty, because they do not have basic access to resources.  * Starvation and food/water borne diseases  * Smoke inhalation from indoor cooking fires. Simple things contribute to over 30 million deaths a year.

Open technology can prevent half of global death — can we prevent several holocausts a year by sharing open technology?

Here’s to an interesting life!  http://ping.fm/Tf7vA (a test of Ping.FM broadcasting)