3 posts tagged “microlending”
While there is currently only a single live project in the kiosk at the moment (and a personal uplift for a community member), there are 6 more projects about to go into the kiosk in the next day or two.
If you're interested in kicking the tires, here's where you can check it out:
Ubuntu Test Kiosk, Intemptesta Nox (170,241,49)
Clicking on that link will port you directly in front of the first Ubuntu test kiosk, which has quietly been put out to see how people respond. It's at the entrance to the old French village on my SIM, Intemptesta Nox.
(Girlie Sidebar: I'm grumbling loudly because once again SL is on the DL list following another update, and no one seems to be able to log in or port. My partner, Baron, logged out to fetch a document to work on and cannot get back in. Love/hate relationship with technology when you come to depend on it and it's as flakey as SL has been for the last handful of months. SL is our virtual office, and when it's cranky, our productivity gets borked. ~grrrr~ )
I've talked before about a kiosk that I've been working on in Second Life. It's part of the new "Ubuntu" island project, and intended to be a simple way of spreading better world investment opportunities virally.
People spend over 1 million U.S. dollars in Second Life each day. Imagine if only 1% of that total was spent on building a better world in our first lives?
Pretty powerful thought.
A few years ago I became part of a very important online community called omidyar.net. I've avoided blogging about it until now for two reasons: 1) it's part of my family and something so large that I have a hard time getting my arms around a place to start, and 2) I've been very ill for a long time and have been quietly watching, not acting, so there's guilt.
omidyar.net is the thing that brought me to Second Life in the first place. A few private reasons I'll keep to myself, but suffice to say it was driven by a healthy respect for friends and allies who were starting to forge new trails here, and made me want to explore it myself.
There were a few things that became profoundly important to me at omidyar.net. The first was a very deep personal need to connect with natural allies who cared greatly about leaving the world a better place than it was when we came into it. The second was being a hopeless bridge builder and connector, and seeing lots, and lot of little dots to connect at omidyar.net. People and resources and ideas flowing through in a very exciting way, and I felt like I had something to contribute. Not only was I able to talk with my wallet, choosing to invest in little projects I stumbled across and wanted to help scale up, but I was able to participate in a very personal way, creating tools like "Fridge Magnets" and "1 Tin Cup" to help connect people with the resources they needed to make things work.
A number of us came together under the Second Life umbrella of "Better World Island". Tom Munnecke began thinking out loud in a "what if" fashion. What if we had a private island in Second Life where we could all work together in a more intuitive way? How might we create a shared space where we could meet and cultivate stronger and more personal relationships with each other in spite of our very diverse global geographies and time zones? How might we use a virtual space to work on projects that were important to us in meatspace, and add value to them in ways that just text logs could not? So we did. We created the island, and today Riversong Garden is it's curator, attracting the attention of some wonderful new allies.
Hence, Ubuntu. One of the things that is a given when it comes to finding good things that work in real life communities and scaling them up: it takes money. In addition to being a powerful new place to strengthen the way we've been working together, Second Life is also a place where some of us have created viable new businesses to finance our better world projects. In doing so, we have something to give back, and we also recognize that there is a very vital real world economy to tap into beyond our own means. Not only does Second Life create a means for discovering wonderful natural allies in the projects we care about, but it also allows us to think creatively about how we can fund those things and scale them up.
One million U.S. dollars each day. 1% of that ...
Simplest way to tap in? People love to spend, and while it's fun to go out and buy virtual flowers and chocolates and a getaway for your main squeeze on Valentine's Day, I'm betting that a lot of people would also enjoy the opportunity to send an alternative gift. By creating a vendor to sell unconventional products, we give people the chance to make a quick purchase, but instead of buying virtual goods, they buy "shares" in a project, a gift with real heart. I know I've found a really wonderful connection to web portals that have allowed me to invest in building a new school in a community wiped out by the tsunami, or digging a well or stocking a medical center in a a community in Africa, or buying handmade cards from a widowed artisan in Uganda for whom rebuilding his life after becoming crippled meant finding new ways to support himself and his children. I love unconventional gifts. I love being able to buy computers for an alternative school in New York for at-risk kids, or soccer balls for kids in Internally Displaced Peoples camps in Uganda for whom the reality is war and playing next to tanks, or buying seeds or a goat to help a family start their own farm so that they can become self-sustaining, or investing in women starting new businesses for themselves in Bangladesh, where the loan is repaid and reinvested into more new business people for whom poverty has been irrepressible. Buying shares in these first life projects and giving them as gifts at Christmas and for birthdays has been something I've chosen as the way I want to live, and why not extend that model into Second Life?
Gifts with meaning are easy enough to share. Selling sharing in first life projects is as easy as selling virtual goods. Hence, the Ubuntu kiosks, where you will in fact be able to walk up to one in shops around the grid, take a few moments to find a project that speaks to your own heart, and buy a share in it on the spot. Imagine giving that kind of gift to your best friend in Second Life?
The first kiosk is live now and on a test basis, and hence the brainstorming session in the picture above. Riversong Garden and Zeke Poutine are "better world scouts", two of the people who have become trusted allies in finding good things that work in real communities around the world, and bringing them back to the rest of us at omidyar.net so that we can in turn invest our own time, resources and skills into these things to help scale them up. That's where I'm starting, initially drawing on a small network of trust allies, better world scouts, who I know are able to "authenticate" better world investment opportunities to start sharing through the kiosks.
Throughout the spring you will start to see these portals crop up in shops and event venues throughout Second Life, as community members are already asking to place one in their space to share.
Ask me if I'm excited? It's a powerful thing to think about tapping into such a vital new economy to see if we can in fact put it to work in new ways in our first life worlds.
In a future posting I want to share more about a second piece to the Ubuntu project: "The 1% Club," a group of designers who are committing to invest one percent of their personal Second Life profits each month into a microlending fund to scale up even more great things in our own first life communities and abroad.
Count on me sharing more as this rolls out and we see if the experiment works ...
Ubuntu! ... because my humanity really -is- tied to your's.
There are too many shiny things.
And I like to follow them.
I'm sitting here this morning, energized because I've finally managed to get a couple of things out of the corrale that have been haunting me for months. I have folder after folder of finished and half-finished products in my inventory in Second Life, things that should be out on the shelves and in my revenue stream were it not for my butterscotch ripple streak of "it's not quite good enough". Sometimes you just have to put the damned thing out and be done with it, and yet this art seems almost to escape me.
The first sign of runaway adrenaline festivals: an inventory bloated to over 51,000 items now. How do you do that? I can't even fathom what that looks like as things set out in a room, or on a football field, let alone how my head manages to find it's way through that and justify the need for it all. Bits and pieces of things built, scripts, notecards, picture, too many things. Time to clean out.
I've taken to treating my Basecamp milestones like a calendar, lots of little round pegs in square holes, just to guilt myself into finishing because of the email reminders sent out each time one approaches, arrives, goes whizzing by in another redmapped haze. I've even taken the time to jot down a task list for the day and take a picture of it as a graphic just to bring the darned thing in and tack it to the wall above my desk in Second Life as yet one more visual cue to guilt me into staying on task. (I -wish, wish, wish- there was a better way to integrate a dynamic calendar that meant I didn't have to keep running in and out of the office to do what I need to do. But wait -- that's one more thing in my half-finished scripted/built pile). ~sighs~
I've been sick for almost a year and a half now, and it slowed me down, made me less organized and hungry, but radiation is farther behind me now, and I am getting better, so it's time to get back on the horse. I'm just having a heck of a time finding my rhythm again.
I've been treating Vox like a bit of a confessional lately because I'm finding it's actually helped me get things done. If I say it out loud, I'm accountable. Kind of like the breakfast club I miss from cities past, where a group of friends got together once a week to share our goals, and see if we'd managed to stay on task the 6 days prior. Guilt is a beautiful thing, and being a person of your word means something. Hence, the talking out loud.
There are times I miss the ball and chain, being in an office rather than working for myself. I'm self-disciplined enough to make it work, and have for 15 years now, but oi, to have that sense that someone other than you is going to be disappointed if you don't stick to The Plan ...
So, in I trudge, to the virtual office once more, coffee in hand to set out the "Better World Investment Portal" that I finally managed to "finish" last night. I've been messing with it for months, worrying that it didn't look professional enough, that the notecards were too detailed or not detailed enough, that I might have missed something important in keeping it transparent and authentic and secure. But sometimes you just have to put the damned thing out, and call it a place to start.
It will feel good to say "finished" to the extent that it's actually live (looking back over shoulder at the 50 other things behind it waiting for the "f" word too ...)
(.... writing Carpe Diem on the back of my hand and logging in ...)
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