Heh, I don’t know if that title makes sense, so let me unpack it a little… I will be going to the iSummit conference in Sapporo, Japan, where I’ve been invited to coordinate the Second Life version of the event. We will be streaming the keynotes of the speakers physically present in Sapporo. Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, and founder of Wikia, will be delivering his keynote in Second Life directly on Japan Sapporo island!

This all came together just a few days ago, and of course we are still in the middle of the preparations, but we are planning some cool stuff that should make it so that the Second Life experience of those who come to see the event in-world is more than just passive sitting around, watching a webcast. We announced some details on a press release sent out yesterday…

For example we will be announcing a contest for designing the 3D logo for iSummit among Second Life content creators. The more dynamic, interactive, innovative the logo is, the better, starting from its original 2D version, to make sure that it lives as it should in a proper form attuned to its new environment.

Sometimes with popular events it happens that the sim hosting it is full, so we are making sure that we have also additional sims participating available to stream what we are going to show, and do. Currently, on top of Japan Sapporo, we have Vulcano, Lipari, and Okapi Island lined up, for a total number of Second Life attendees that can exceed that of the ones who are physically present!

In interesting tweak that I haven’t seen before (but that might be just my ignorance, so tell me if that is so), will make sure that Jimmy Wales’ keynote is also watchable from the additional sims. We will make an SL2SL stream! I hope to be able and quickly put up a video to show what this is, and how it is set up. It is a cool trick, with a fairly astounding visual effect in-world.

I want to thank Topix, and 2lifecast of Stex Auer, and friends for their precious help in making sure that on one hand we have all the bandwith we need to serve 200-300 simultaneous streams, or more, and that on the other all the technical parts are duly debugged and working. The people at iCommons are working day and night to make sure that everything goes ahead as smoothly as possible, and I will try to make sure that the same happens in Second Life on Japan Sapporo island!

PS: You might have noticed that the links to the sims in this post are not slurls, but secondlife:// handles. So what is the difference? The first is a convenient way to point somebody to a webpage that tells them “Hey, if you had the Second Life client installed, this is where you could go clicking!”, with the rather preposterous assumption that if they didn’t actually have the client, they’d proceed to download and install it, create an account and an avatar, go through the excercises that need to be completed before entering the wider world, and lo and behold, remember where they were, in the stack of their memories, and click on the teleport button on the slurl window that prompted them to this cascade of actions in the first place. Yeah, right. So slurls are useless in my opinion. Worse than that, they are a nuisance for those who have the client already, and even more so because a very quick connection mechanism is available right there. Instead of using a slurl, people can link with the secondlife:// handle, which loads the client if it is not already, and teleports to the location, without delay, and silly useless interstitials. There you go!

My friend Roo is going to moderate a panel today at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York on ‘Evolution of Games and Social Networks’, with people from Sony, Google, and Millions of Us on, and he said “What would you like me to ask them?“.

Now you know my favorite question is “What is the question that I should be asking?“, so when a friend asks it, I must oblige, and help!

Hey Roo, give them a hard time! Ask them WTF?

Why? Hear…

Online worlds are persistent, three dimensional social spaces, where people who are simultaneously present can interact, in a highly empathic and emotionally fulfilling manner. Some of the worlds have set goals, others allow unbounded fantasy, and creativity.

Social Networks are facilitators of connections among people who are personally or professionally related, directly or indirectly. The connections are typically used for casual activities, or business networking, through the facilities of the platform, or small additional modules.

My question is not necessarily new, but looks like it has to be asked again: where are the people? And my answer is: in Online Worlds!

The synchronicity of communication, the way online worlds absorb your attention completely, the collaboration in topologies that are biologically familiar to all, our limbic response to the closeness of one to another, are totally unmatched by the aseptic efficiency, and grinding bore of accepting an invite, joining a group, filling a form, sending a message, which is what fills the time on today’s social networks. In social networks the social is missing. There is no town square to share. You are watching, and feeding the urges of the machine, instead of building a life there.

To shade my judgement a little: one exception is Twitter. The rhythm, and the the pulse, and the flow of people, there emotions, needs, conversations, and activities is so different from what is going on a Facebook, for example. It is closer to online worlds’ human-centered life, and an indication in my opinion to where the ‘social’ in social networks must tend to go.

[13:04] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Hey everybody, welcome – we’ll be starting in a few minutes – still lots of people coming in – If this is your first time here, please feel free to grab a gift bag and some treats from the back tables – and welcome to to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon

[13:06] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Our Salon Spotlight Guest this week is Davidorban Agnon. David is the Founder of OpenSpime, Inc., Vulcano, a community in SL, Lunarez, and numerous other companies and nonprofits, is a blogger, inventor and creative thinker – and David’s going to be talking about his activities, and about The New Renaissance – welcome, David!

[13:08] Davidorban:
Thanks Soph, for the kind intro. Hello everybody! Thanks for having me in front of such an interesting and stimulating audience.

I will speek for about 20-30 minutes and then it will be great to open the floor for discussion and questions and all the fun we can have. But first, I would like to ask some of you some questions.

When I speak in front of a physical audience I always try and establish their ‘breaking point’ in terms of what tools online they do use or even have heard of so let me ask each of you, and just answer with a yes or no.

First question: have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?

[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: no
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Nope
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: yes
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Yes
[13:12] Chimera Cosmos: read only
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: yes
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yeds
[13:12] Extropia DaSilva: No.
[13:12] Galatea Gynoid: minor edits
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: and went to wikimania
[13:12] Tara Yeats: -d
[13:12] Malburns Writer: once or twice
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: I try to aviod acting like I know things…
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes once or twice
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes

[13:12] Davidorban: Second question: do you use Twitter?
[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: no
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: gods yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: addictively
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Yepyep!
[13:12] Yel Oh: hi Alanagh
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yes
[13:12] Dani Revnik: no
[13:12] Kanomi Pikajuna: not any more
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Twitter uses me
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:13] Galatea Gynoid: reluctantly :p
[13:13] Chimera Cosmos: yes, a litle

[13:13] Davidorban:
Third question: would you go as far in lifestreaming as to put (assuming you have any) biological signals online in realtime (for example heartbeats)?
[13:13] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:13] Zentinal Ziskey: nope
[13:13] Velicia Llewellyn: No
[13:14] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: n/a
[13:14] Nikitten Ninetails: no
[13:14] Grace McDunnough has no heartbeat
[13:14] Stan Aichi: sure
[13:14] Yel Oh: if I could think of a good reason to . . yes
[13:14] Extropia DaSilva: Me? No. My primary might but not me.
[13:14] Tara Yeats: unlkiekly
[13:14] Crap Mariner pleads the Fifth
[13:14] Galatea Gynoid: Not sure there’d be a point…
[13:14] Shava Suntzu: unlikely
[13:14] Chimera Cosmos: sure

[13:15] Davidorban:
Fourth question: assuming you could (with an implant or upgrade) merge thoughts, and PURPOSE, with more entities, would you do it?
[13:15] Malburns Writer: Mal hopes to put memories online before heartbeat fades, but …
[13:15] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:15] Centrasian Wise: yep
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Yes
[13:15] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: yes
[13:15] Crap Mariner: No
[13:15] Velicia Llewellyn: …..come again Dave?
[13:15] Yel Oh: yes
[13:15] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Crap: Resistance is futile. :p
[13:15] Shava Suntzu: I want to know more about it before I’d say yes or no
[13:16] Grace McDunnough: Join the merge, Vel . you know you want to
[13:16] Zentinal Ziskey: yes, selectively and voluntarily
[13:16] Velicia Llewellyn: Gotcha

[13:16] Davidorban: So.. thanks for this. It is interesting how when speaking to different audiences you can always lose them after a while with the answers becoming prevalently no, or huh, but not here!
[13:16] Grace McDunnough winks
[13:17] Davidorban: So, let’s start!

And then come back to see what the questions could/should mean, if anything… Let me start with a little dash into history. The ages of humanity have been determined by the evolution of ideas, and their implementations in technology, and societal organization. We have had several epochs, that have been characterized by the interplay between structures and aggregations of various levels: the individual, the family, the clan, the village, the city, the kingdom, the nation state.

Today’s dominant organization, the nation state, is creaking under the forces of globalization. Not only global commerce of products, but also services, and in general the flow of ideas. The metaverse is one of the most important harbingers of the forthcoming changes. And we, in Second Life are experiencing the approaching shockwaves: all the various crackdowns on innovative and controversial practices in SL are a sign of how disquieting, and at the same time how important these experiments are for the physical world.

They are just afraid and rightly so: change is too hard for lazy mammals.

And we are the ones who have to reassure the physical world that change can be beneficial, and while hard, not drammatic, or tragic.

One of my main interests in memetics, and universal Darwinism in general… Dynamic evolution in the metaverse in omnipresent. The evolutionary aspects of Second Life itself are undeniable:
- an environment with constraints hosts
- activities that are observed and copied
- with variation through reinvention
…this is the basic recipe for any universal Darwinian evolution.

I created Vulcano in SL, which you are all welcome not only to visit, but also to be part of, as an evolving social structure. Vulcano on Second Life has been born as an experiment in applying these rules within a social structure. What happens if you let everybody do what they most want to do and learn in SL, to build whatever they want?

The only ‘seed’ as the starting point of the evolution being “apply common sense”!

Since everybody’s definition of common sense is different, there will be a lot of variation, as the news of Vulcano is passed around and people here “Hey you can do anything on Vulcano, as long as it makes sense”. And given the maximum number of prims on a land, there is an environmental constraint that is applied, eliminating what are the stupid ideas, and keeping the ones that in this context make most sense.

After more than a year of evolution on Vulcano we are ready to start and abstract some of the things we learned!

Lesson one: stakes must not always be raised!
We have had thermonuclear attacks, which we survived, and decided not to ban the attacker. The biological necessity of always trumping the enemy so that you won’t be exterminated doesn’t apply!

Lesson two: you can encourage mistakes!
The wonderful sensation of being free to experiment (the childlike wonder, as FSJ would say) is here to stay even as adults when you realize that other people are making the same at the same time as you are or that they went through the same experiences as you are.

Lesson three: metarules are fundamentally important!
In order not to burden the growing community with more and more rules, we have metarules that establish the survival value of the social structures, and the rules that sustain them.

Our next excersise running right now is going to be the design of a dynamic constitution that will have an XML formulation in order to be machine readable, and allow the evaluation of DIFFERENCES between different forumlations. Why is this very important in our opinion? When different online worlds in the metaverse interoperate the frontier crossing them will beeven more important than those between countries today as the changes will impact the laws not only of the social structure, but ownership, DRM, control, identity. When you are crossing in an Open Source world, you shall leave all your nice DRM protected dresses behind!

(BTW: as a consequence, since this filter is not symmetrical, Open Source creation is bound to overcome greatly close sourced creation in the metaverse as well)

So, to start the final part of my speech…
When ideas flow freely, since they are not a scarce resource, what you must keep is adding value through further elements of invention, and creativity.

What happens to humanity as we merge with machines?
What will become of natural humans in a world of automation, where white collar jobs are as regularly mechanised, as blue collar ones in the ’70s or the ’80s?

Too many people are living in a state of fear. Because they confuse evolution with extermination. Still today the most numerous life forms on the planet are bacteria.

Humans are the foundation of the technological evolution, which is going to acquire a large degree of autonomous life. When humans decoupled themselves from the grind of the natural environment 10000 years ago with the invention of agriculture, they took on the new grind of organizing their new life as mechanizers. After 10000 years of trying we are now on the verge of actually being able and go back to what we are good at: chatting, grooming, telling stories, etc.

Without the heartbreaking realities of a 20 year long average lifespan and without the incredible loss of ideas being born just to be extinguished becaue of lack of connectedness.

This is what I call the New Renaissance!

Going back, by going forward: embracing technological tools, to achieve fulfilling and stimulating lives where creativity is unbounded by commercial rules and flows openly adding to humanity’s happiness in an inclusive society that is not afraid of the future that it is building

[13:41] Davidorban: THE END

Please read the full Q/A session on Scribd

Tomorrow I will be speaking at Extropia Core at 1PM PST, invited by Sophrosyne Stenvaag for her ‘Saturday Salon‘ conversations. The title of my speech is going to be “The New Renaissance“

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David Orban
“Strategic Marketing Evolves – The changing role of brands in the network age”
Disintermediation is immediacy. After a hiatus of ten thousand years, during which more and more sophisticated tools were needed to overcome the lack of contact between the producers and consumers, today, with the new opportunities that the network gives us, we can go back to rely on reputation as the surest guide on which to base our transactions.

You can also download the slides, and the audio of the lecture separately if you prefer.

[Update: I also uploaded the audio of the QA session following the lecture]

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

Nowadays there is no programmer probably who doesn’t feel at home using mice and windows, and who is not glad that high level tools help in the development of rich client or web applications.

Online worlds have been attracting content creators, especially Second Life, which is famous for having started out as an empty desert, and was filled with millions of objects by its inhabitants. This however is a little different than the attitude of hackers. These have a natural tendency for self-reflection, whereas whatever they place their hands on is turned into a further tool for making new tools, to program better. An example could be the passive attitude of many users of Second Life, who lament the low quality of the debugging tools that can be used in-world. This would be never accepted by a true hacker spirit, where the quality of a debugger is especially important for the creation of highly evolved code.

We have to watch, consequently, very alertly, any attempt at luring programmers, developers, hackers, to any online world, as the one which wins their hearts will leapfrog the others.

Today IBM announced their Project Bluegrass, a virtual world in which they will immerse the Rational CASE toolset, and the Jazz collaboration platform. For the moment Bluegrass is not apparently open, so I can’t comment on it further, but the move in itself, if followed by something that people can try out and use, could be a good one.

Not a lot of people remember VPL Research these days, even if many know Jaron Lanier, the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality’. VPL Research produced and marketed at the end of the ’80s and the very beginning of the ’90s the original DataGlove, and other groundbreaking virtual reality tools. Jaron Lanier was convinced that virtual realities were necessary for making sure that the computing metaphor could advance.

And VPL in the name of the company stood for ‘Visual Programming Languages’.

Thanks to Michele for the original article!

“From e-tail to v-business: are virtual goods an entirely new category?”

The conversation was very lively, and well moderated by Adam Pasick. I am especially proud of Cory Doctorow having sat through it, and asked a question as well! I met him in the speakers’ lounge after lunch, and he said that he wasn’t sure he could make it, so it looks like my short pitch helped (as well as the fact that he was on the panel after ours!).

• The Times: “At Least The Chicken Kebab Was Real”: gotta love that title! Worthy of the best classics from The Onion (like the immortal “God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed LIttle Boy – ‘No,’ Says God“). “David Orban, chief executive of Questar, a software firm, thought they could: “I disagree with the idea that it’s not possible to regulate supply. [The goods have] an artificial scarcity, but there can still be a rarity factor,” he said.” That doesn’t sound like me, but I will look at the recording! I recall of having actually quoted Cory, and said that bits won’t become less easy to copy in the future then today. Yes, ‘limited editions’ will be of great emotional value, but their limitedness will have to come someplace else then lack of copiability or unforgeable timestamps… (They originally misspelled my name, and only a friend’s pointing the article out to me let me know abou it. I wrote them for a correction, which they did within
• Tech Digest: Live Blog: “David Orban, from Questar, loads up his Powerpoint presentation (well, the Mac version…he’s been sitting next to me the whole day typing away on his Mac). He talks a lot about 3D printers, and the possibility of owning a good in a virtual world, and being able to print it out and own it in real life, too. Somehow I think this is several years off still!” Well, yes, Katherine, and some of us are actually thinking farther ahead than the end of the current quarter!
• Ugotrade: “Cory Doctorow – A Reverse Surveillance Society” In this fantastic almost-book-length post, Tish, the publisher of Ugotrade, covers many, many areas of the Forum. It is the third time she quotes me in a month, and hope her readers are not fed up with it. There’s more to come, so they’d better not! “In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!“. I suggested Tish to list an index to the post, and put anchors in the text, so that people can actually point to parts of it, it is so long…
• Inside the Metaverse: “We managed to get some in depth interviews with the following people: Aleks Krotoski (The Guardian), David Orban (Questar), Corey Bridges (Multiverse), Betsy Book (There), Ginsu Yoon (Linden Lab), Richard Bartle (University of Essex), Robert Lai (CRD China) and Frank Campbell (Mindark). Many different opinions and many diverse views on the future, but always with great nuance and never black and white.” I am very much looking forward to see what comes out of this. At least a teaser-trailer asap, please!
• The Guardian: Talking points from the Virtual Worlds Forum. They don’t quote me actually, but used and credited a photo I shot of the special CSI-themed Onrez SL viewer created by Electric Sheep. All the photos I took, and ever take, are Creative Commons Attribution licensed, so anybody can use them, for commercial purposes as well, as long as they credit me as the source of the photo (if somebody wants to do away with that requirement, that is possible too, under separate special arrangements).

The organizers of the Virtual Worlds Forum also graciously agreed to allow me to post the video of the panel I recorded (Thanks, Sasha!), and I am busy editing that as well. As it is longer then ten minutes, and I am not Google which is evidently not bound by the rules it sets for others posting on YouTube with hour long videos of its own there, I will upload it on Google Video.

I was very pleased with his questions, and hope that my answers were meaningful. Steven is now going to produce a trailer with the material collected, and they are aiming to have the documentary ready by the second half of 2008, and start showing it at various film festivals, aiming for a proper cinema release.

The questions Steve posed were in my opinion very good, and at least according to my sensibilities, are going to lead to a great film, worthy of Kevin Kelly’s ‘True Films’ list. We covered the sociological, and philosophical implications of the widespread use of online worlds, and spread into issues of human nature, future worlds, and the Singularity. That at least was the spread of the gross quantity of recordings taken, with obviously a potentially different end result after the necessary editing taking place.