15 posts tagged “media”
You can read more about Transitions here, but I'd like to ask you one favor as you read.
Please take a moment to register as a Netsquared participant and vote for our team! Go on right now, sign up (takes just a second) then stop back by and vote for Transitions before Monday!
OPEN DOORS FOR THOSE WITHOUT HOMES
Together we are providing free voicemail/phone, email and resume assistance, lifeskills training and opportunities to build virtual businesses in Second Life with real world mentors around the world.
The MASHUP tool is key, bringing together service providers in an easy to use search....the goal being a very simple search applet for websites where anyone in transition can find services (food, shelter, medical care) in any area or zip code without searching the web for 15 minutes. We aim to close the gap between those in need and those who can provide new opportunities.
This is A PLACE FOR DREAMS. We want to help others build new lives, imagine their potential from virtual worlds back to their everyday lives. I am one of the lucky ones who has built an amazing new life based on virtual dreams....I know it can be done.
Will you help us win thousands in free services, hacking and technical assistance? We need your support now to make this project possible!
Stop by Transitions today.
Every day I am reminded just how lucky we are to share space on this planet.
Life has been incredibly kind to me lately. Two weeks ago I started a new position at the USC Network Culture project working on events and experiments in virtual worlds, bringing together my interest in public good, philanthropy and social care with the art of this new landscape. It is a dream job, working with people I like doing what I love. I get to create brave new communities, if not whole worlds. My role is to bring together unique collaborations.
We have tremendous opportunities here to imagine our lives as we choose them to be, as we plan to manifest them. In the old world of magick there's no shortage of discussion about imagination and manifestation as the keys to creating any new presence, real or somehow collectively imagined.
New media and animation inspires me; this week the happy song has been this track from LemonJelly. Enjoy, and don't miss 2:40 on this video.
As many of you know parts of my job include creating new media shorts and immersion experiences for large and small audiences. Some of my work is very much designed for a niche audience, in this case those interested in philanthropy, law and the unique community-building challenges that entangle our digital lives. This emerging field of study has been led by USC, MacArthur and others as we try to chart a productive course through the etheric digital universe.
While some wrestle with the relevance of these spaces I am always encouraged to see 100+ leaders gather together for honest dialogue without the cost of travel or carbon in the air. We can do far better and we will continue to learn how to maximize these experiences for the masses. I for one need to learn how to buy new hard drives faster to keep up with the machinima documentary flubug that keeps infecting my mouse trigger key....lost the bulk of the footage today to a full disk!
Those of you who know our work know that we've stopped producing machinima over the last few months. There's a handful of reasons why we've put our machinima releases on hold for 2007:
1) Overheating laptops!
2) Waiting for Windlight
3) Hoping for a Machinima Camera for true broadcast-quality captures (see the pic at right from Hollywood Games Summit for the Gamecaster machinima camera)
4) Unreliable access to platforms and sims
You can help us take on at least one of these challenges by voting for Amoration in the Blackbird/Wikia challenge to win a new HP desktop with a water cooling system that claims to be up to the virtual world overheating challenge. Help us out and vote today, leave us comments and let's move this media forward!
The AMO are at it again, sharing good will and tools for change around the world. This time you can get involved very easily and get a laptop for a child at the same time!
Starting on November 12th at www.xogiving.org you can sign onto the One Laptop Per Child giving challenge and receive a laptop for yourself or a child you love while also giving a laptop to a child in another part of the world. Right now you can also choose to donate $200 to send a laptop to a child.
I'm glad to see xogiving.org featuring the Cambodian youth on their main page, as Beth Kanter and friends have been doing a ton to bring digital media tools to that country.
On the TED blog, Engadget and others they're reporting that production looks to be solid now that Intel has signed on to support the project. Their Give1Get1 campaign will be short lived (a few weeks) and machines will hopefully ship by Christmas. $400 will buy two laptops: one for you and one for a child in another part of the world.
After using one this summer I'm eager to get a few available for our AMO team so that we can begin to develop digital media curricula and projects with the XO. I was lucky to visit their office in Boston on a day when Negroponte and Intel were meeting this summer, a good sign of collaborations to come as hundreds of little green froglike machines dangled from the ceiling while they undertook advanced mesh network tests. When playing with it, the keys on the XO feel child-sized but the applications are fairly robust, especially so with the mesh they've developed that allows a classroom of kids to effectively share information far more easily than most classrooms currently can in America.
So here's the AMO Challenge for you: we're looking for 10 people who will commit to GiveXO this holiday season. It's easy to do, a few clicks and you've bought a very cool little green machine for someone you love and have given a big gift to a child around the world. Amazingly simple.
This is leapfrogging technology at its finest and we want to see more projects like the XO grow in popularity around the world. Thanks to ALL OF YOU for helping to make sure that these tools end up in the hands of kids who are eager to join the digital media revolution. Think how much better our music will be when the kids in Africa, Asia and South America have access to music production tools!
Elucidate my friends!
Holden @ GiveWell challenged us this week to speak from the heart and get to the core of why we support our primary cause. This is your AMO Challenge for the week....write your own blog post explaining your contribution to the Giving Carnival and link your blog back to Holden by 8/4/07.
Why Do You Do What You Do?
My friend Tony Deifell asks it this way...wdydwyd? When he asked me a few years ago back when Omidyar Network was young, I considered love to be the renewable resource that could move us beyond our complex problems; love is the gift within all of us that must be held as primary for all other solutions and opportunities to arise. What I was seeing back in 2005 was a fundamental closedness and hardness within us towards the world, many layers of walls and boundaries set in place to keep away the pain and fear thrust upon us by unfriendly fire.
LOVE is still my primary cause, it's the root of the Amoration inquiry. But has my pursuit of wisdom through love brought greater or less impact in the lives of others around me?
There are certain things our avatars cannot fully do for us. For the past few years I have grown deeply quiet, speaking more through blogs and threads than through direct hand and eye contact. DIRECT CARE AND TOUCH is what we need now more than any other gift we can give to one another. As much as we need to plug in, we also need to feel the flow that we share with others as a direct current, a circuit formed every time we invest in each other.
Every motion we make in this world is an investment.
Our lives are full of practices that bring us closer to the world or away from it.
To be honest, right now I feel deeply wrong at some level, a bridge with little land to anchor in.
We have a great time moving others into AMO Action Dances, PeaceTiles project workshop, OYA and Sugar Arts there are missing pieces, ways that I have not been able to successfully bridge in my community. Serving on my local neighborhood council has been a trial by fire and I'm not made for long meetings in hard chairs. At heart I want to be home, creating, mentoring and working with others to amplify and spotlight their dreams in development.
Admitting imperfection in love gives me room to grow
There are so many things I would like to change about myself...first on the list is my weariness with the homelessness and displacement so common in our world (and on my doorstep!). It is inhumane how we allow so many people to suffer right in front of us without care or compassion. I do this every day, pass a homeless person without offering them food or anything that can help them. When I think of 10,000 people here, another 70,000 ejected from another refugee camp in Darfur forced to close by the Sudanese government....how can we let our people die right in front of our eyes in silence, without a tear? Have we lost all touch with ourselves?
Sometimes it saddens me that two decades of love inquiry has not moved me past these fundamental fears. I still feel every emotion in the book and struggle with the silly ideas and presuppositions that my culture tries to thrust upon me. Inundated with messages on beauty, fear and imperfection as airbrushed fantasy....here is my ocean to bridge, the walkway to a reality where you are beautiful no matter what is going on at surface level. I strive to give room for these passions to grow into fruitful endeavors, large and small. Every movement, every moment.
Each of us has a glow to share....we choose how to let that out, how to share it with others and use it to power the lives we manifest. Love is the access point, the opening to life and energy in movement. I do not know if it will change the world, nor would I make such presumptions or claim to know The Path to Transformation....I know one path, my own, the smiles I see and eyes I look into every day. Making that decision to look into others eyes is the first step for me in an endless process of reaching out and holding those around me, no matter what background, cause or party they support.
I want to be more for you, and for me too
There's nothing too big, too impossible. We specialize in dreambuilding and love creating new visions for the future. I feel so blessed to live this life of creative pursuit yet want to do much more with this space, with you. Help me help you grow by telling me here what you need most and how we can help you create more love throughout your circles.
Visit the OYA installation in Black Rock City from August 27-31st for a demonstration of free energy flow using water as the primary source of electric power.
Make a gift to the AMO Arts team for supplies to help build this project: we currently need ~$2000 in construction materials to manifest OYA for this unique green technology project; you can help by picking up AMO goodstorm shirts, OYA edible love rocks and other gifts to help us grow. Our Next Toyshoppe Thursday Theatre (and OYA fundraiser) in Los Angeles will be August 16th; in Boston on August 9th we will also host an OYA resonance event.
Special thanks to Ryan Wartena at MIT, Elizabeth Marley (Farmlab, Growing Architecture), Brent Heyning (Toyshoppe Productions), Evonne Heyning (Toyshoppe/AMO) along with Carmen, Blue, Tomas, Crimson, Larry and the Burning Man community for helping this project grow from seed to full power.
Hello from NYC! After yesterday's panel on Second Life, nonprofits and games here at the festival I've taken some time AFK for discussion with game designers and interactive media leaders. Here's the highlights from just one session from Games4Change at New School in NYC: not word for word, but the highlights are here. On the panel:
Diana Rhoten (Cyberinfrastructure @ NSF)
Connie Yowell (Digital Learning @ MacArthur Foundation)
Lucy Bernholz (Blueprint Design)
Alison Knox (Microsoft)
Connie Yowell at MacArthur Foundation:
Much
of what I've learned about games....comes out of the Games4Change
community. I've benefitted extraordinarily from these conversations.
Last October MacArthur
announced a $50million, 5 year digital media initiative: focused on
how to use handhelds, games, social networks and what it means in the
lives of young people today to rethink learning. In games we are
focused on 1) research, 2) learning environments, 3) reshaping
institutions through this visualization. In a concrete way, how do we
solve problems? No one foundation can fund all of this but we think
carefully about how to partner. I hope that we will have a new set of
research techniques and practices to study human behavior in virtual
worlds.
Diana Rhoten at NSF:
High performance
data visualization
virtual organizations
Learning and workforce development: Cyber education program (nomenclature is wrong here...go to website)
$250,000 - $1,000,000 for development on programs at the K-20 level to train students to become cybersaavy, use computational tools, access remote information, science and engineering education. I expanded this solicitation to train AND teach. We have a virtual webcast workshop next month.
Areas for the future: Less about training, but thinking about cyberlearning. Within the foundation funding comes from other directorates, education and research within NSF. Games for informal learning, not so much the explicit educational aspects funded in the past. We are in the pedagogical problem-solving, collaborative learning environment.
How can we build teams that have the technology, infrastructure, content and science in one package? Collaborative funding and how do we make these teams functional and work for you. We want to study more of the ripple effects and we are looking at better methodologies from Ted Castronova. We need METRICS!
Elsa from Microsoft:
Not
the Gates Foundation, from Microsoft corp: we are interested in games
for learning and social change. Microsoft has a citizenship world with
two pillars; we consider ourselves a social venture company. There is
a lot of room with collaboration! Partners in Learning is our
program: $450million in 100 countries, 65 million students reached.
3 areas
- digital literacy for all
- more competitive workforce
- improved quality of life
As you are looking for funders, utilize the web and look at how it helps you to scale quickly.
Issues
How do we know that the quality of the game will be good?
Who will test it?
What are the metrics, what are the evaluation tools?
What is the meaning that students are getting from this space?
Lucy at Blueprint asks the panel: Any notable funding models?
NSF: We often fund universities directly but we've opened it up with some of the work we are putting forward. Getting a lot of inquiries from small research nonprofits, partnering with industry and universities. Collaborative proposals are coming in more frequently now.
Microsoft: The applicants collaborate, but also the funders are collaborating now. Making a priority for our organizations to work together to fund, common metrics; we need to work together to create these standards and agreements.
NSF: MacArthur and NSF and will be recruiting others (HP, Microsoft): LETS HAVE COLLABORATIVE FUNDING INITIATIVES! Private philanthropy, private industries and researchers coming together.
MacArthur: We've engaged with Lucy and Blueprint on how we handle metrics but we haven't shared our metrics policies with other orgs yet. The challenge and joy of this grantmaking is that we rarely partner with industry and forprofits; this work will not go forward without these collaborations. The grant we gave to UWisc was also given to Eric Zimmerman, GameLab and Parsons to get design done quickly -- funding blended ventures gets it done much faster. It's a different kind of expectation around getting the work done. IP and royalty issues will need new models and we will have to figure out how to create these partnerships so that everyone can benefit while game designers have a sustainable revenue moving forward. From a traditional foundation perspective it is no small move for our older organization to make us move: kids make things happen. The raising up of kids voices: TIG and GK, how are kids thinking and what are they doing?
Additional questions about metrics, IP, partnerships yielded good notes on Creative Commons use, creatively thinking about new language, research and opportunities to study within these new environments.
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