5 posts tagged “omidyar.net”
Today is my friend Pierre's birthday, and it's got me thinking about the value of a life. While there are some people who would measure it with extrinsic successes -- money, fame, toys -- P's a guy who kinda challenges you turn that on it's head. Doesn't matter who he is in terms of labels. What moves me is his ability to mobilize people beyond that numb, too-much-bad-news, hopeless kind of place we some times get stuck at. Sort of turns the question "what have you done for me lately?" on it's head and shakes it till it's heart falls back down into a chest cavity somewhere and does it's thing.
While I was busy making digital pianos and baubbles, Mr. O. was out trying to kick the great unconscious response to a global flu pandemic in it's flabby tires. Instead of the kind of movie-of-the-week fear mongering that some folks tend to do, Pierre was not only providing global leadership on this, but doing it through a set of small, thoughtful, pragmatic little bloglets that spoke plainly to everyday people about what something like this might mean, and what we can reasonably do about it.
So maybe groking 28-weeks-later come to life doesn't hold the cool factor for you? He and his wife, Pam, have quietly started a revolution in every-day things people can do to connect with each other and mobilize healthier, more sustainable communities globally. Instead of throwing fistfuls of money at things, they invited discourse, set the table and asked everyday people to put their elbows on it and start talking, collaborating, imagineering at a place called omidyar.net. In many ways it seemed like a pretty audacious experiment, but it was the kickstart to my own tired-out bleeding heart when I reconnected with a handful of better world scouts who were just quiet, everyday people like myself looking for ways to make a difference in their own way.
It's what lead me to want to find a way to give back through my success in Second Life through the SL Ubuntu program.
You might not know Pierre, but you probably know someone like him. Someone who challenges us to think beyond ourselves, to care deeply and actively about each other and the world in a non-tree-hugger kind of way ~winks~. Whether you do it for Pierre just because I say he's intrinsically cool (down to his geeky-sweet, über-techie core), or as a tribute to that person you know who shakes you out of that soul-comma and back into actively caring, I invite you to give a gift from the heart, and I've even got the cajones to suggest what that might be ~grins~ ...
1) Read his blog entry on preparing for a pandemic, think about it, and share that wisdom with at least one other person.
2) Visit omidyar.net and simply trust fate to take you where you need to be. She's a pretty smart gal and has a habit of guiding our path in spite of us. Connect with at least one thing that calls you there, whether it's a project, or a challenge, or simply the words of a kindred soul. Just pick a small, simple place and dig in.
3) Just get off your ass and do something nice, for somebody, somewhere out there today. Doesn't matter who, or how, or why. Just do it.
So, Pierre, my gift to you today on your 40th birthday is a "ripple". I'm sending one out hoping it will make more, and spread the way your own do in such simple, heartfelt ways.
Here's to your integrity, your insanity, and your very great heart. Here's to another 40, then another 40, and yet another 40 more ...
Rock the world, baby.
Sue.
(and you know I'm going to be walking around in those damned socks and sandals today, humiliating myself just for you, bud-dee ~grins~ )
It's been a long time since I've posted here.
I find that I often explore a new tool, crawl inside of it and make it home for awhile, then move on. There's a lack of friction with so many of the social networking tools. I don't want to date, toss a shout out to a new band, or increase my network. I don't think anybody hanging out over the Twitter watercooler really gives a damn about what I just put in my coffee or fed my cats. In first life I'm a public figure, so in my second one I find myself compelled to hide. Running a successful business means being swallowed whole by IMs most days in Second Life, and the lack of any truly tangible privacy tools there makes it really damned tough to get a day's work done.
So, I became a bit of a hermit. Okay, a lot of one. And I liked it. (And yes, I admit that it's a real hardship holing myself up with Baron frigging Grayson to build and play ... ~cough~)
I really have enjoyed reinventing myself as a recluse the past two years. I'm a workaholic, and having a partner that shares the same insane work ethic and obsessions has made it all the easier still. So much for the best laid plans ~grins~
Second Life has been a grand retreat, but the past few months I'm finding myself drawn into a very different kind of playground: one that doesn't exist in a single online community, but rather spanning a handful of mixed media tools and sites. It started when Baron rekindled a love of seeing the world through old film cameras again. He began posting notes and discoveries on his own blog here, and some rather cool, kindred spirits were gathering round. Several were people we'd aleady connected with in Second Life as customers, and those connections were rarely more than a handful of brief encounters because of the tendency to cultivate a precious reclusiveness for the reasons I talked about above. But I noticed something odd happening here. In sharing a picture and some personal nugget, we were swapping stories. It wasn't a transaction. There was no obligation on either end. It didn't demand lengthy, real time responses, dropping things in the middle of an inspired work session to reply. No, this was more like slinking down into a favourite old chair in a beat-up pair of slippers with a big mugga joe in your hand, and quietly inviting familiar hearts in.
This began to spill over onto Flickr when we started posting pics there too. Same faces. Same fun, easy-going way of connecting. People that I once thought of as customers I now think of as friends. You see there's this odd little backyard fence, and it doesn't inhabit a space between just two yards, but bridges many, making them feel like the same kind of small, intimate shared space instead of some overwhelming digital geography.
omidyar.net, Second Life, Vox, Flickr, Twitter ... they all feel like rooms in the same house right now. Where before I once dreaded the demands placed on my time by the human interaction, I now find myself craving it. I watch Thaumata's video blog about her grandma Dorothy and am moved in ways I cannot describe. I see this tender, vibrant person, and not just a name on a posting. I watch Arteer romp through digital playgrounds and master them and make them so much fun. I see her pictures on Flickr and her little notes and often end up laughing or connecting to some idea in some new way, and I love it.
It's sort of silly to just share these two women, just two names, but they are both such marvellous examples of the very thing that made me want to come back and post today: a sense of kindred spirits with elbows on the kitchen table, and people I'd love to know in first life. Zeke Poutine, Riversong Garden, Pam Omidyar and Callie Cline were people I connected with that way several years ago, and the ability to dive into Second Life together and culitvate our relationship in new ways was pretty damned incredible at times. Okay, so I admit that having Zeke as a fairygodmother-in-garters (her words, not mine, but damn are they good!) with the same insane fetish for chocolate has less to do with social networking and more to do with Adventures with the Estrogen Army, but that's another post for another day, and my five minutes are up.
Would love to hear how others are thinking and feeling about connecting simultaneously through mixed media and networks. Maybe you'd consider sharing some of your own favourite digital haunts with me here?
Robert Scoble pointed to an interesting blog that Andy Carvin posted about the potential for Twitter to save lives. For those of you who aren't familiar with Twitter yet, it's a social networking tool that's sort of like the office water cooler and RSS headlines all rolled into one. My buddy Kitto gave me a nudge on it about a month ago, and while I was scratching my head at the time (good lord, not another social networking nightmare) I've actually come to appreciate the less tangible advantages of recreating the backyard fence in the digital hood.
In his post, Andy is suggesting that Twitter just might be the thing to save lives, where cellphones and other messaging systems fail. He points to Hurricane Katrina as an example, with cellular networks and similar systems downed. Text messaging appeared to work inspite of the outages because it's a relatively low-bandwidth communication tool.
Rather than repeating the wisdom of his post, I'll just offer a link to it. It's worth the grok ...
http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2007/03/can_twitter_save_lives.html
He's a colleague of mine at omidyar.net, and always has some profound musings on the digital divide.
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.
This posting is more of a mental bookmark to guilt myself into sitting down to think long thoughts on this particular subject, because it's been tickling my brain for so long, and I'm prone to excessive bouts of mental wanderlust. While I've been yammering about these core ideas for maybe four years now or so, at the moment, I'm like a kid in a candy shop eyeing them in the context of "Second Life".
Another 18 hour day working inworld and non-stop yesterday. Having a house all to yourself on the weekend isn't good. You forget to eat, take breaks, breathe ... Yesterday was a mental marathon. Lots of organizing inworld, and it only got worse when my partner came online around 3am my time and had one of the worst thinking infections I've ever seen. You know those moments where you just cannot shut your head off, and everything you think seems like the next killer idea?
So, another pretty neural meltdown, and it left me grasping at straws for ways to try to capture some of this exotic mental windfall fruit that lands everytime you shake your noggin' that hard. The first thing that occured to me was that I'd love to create a HUD that let me just press a button (like on the handheld recorder I used to take into meetings and keep by me during the day before high tech made that such a yesterday thing) and simply start talking, then have that little self-chat snippet piped out to the web db suite I've been creating for inworld CSM relief. Would also be nice to teach it how to snag a handful of chat from the kind of brainstorming sessions that melted my right hemisphere last night when my partner decided to get brilliant again, and didn't stop. The SL chat log is a nice start, but barely a tickler when it comes to the ability to easily snatch snippets from meetings and simply store that into even a flatfile db to be queried via the web after the fact. (I know I've talked about this idea twenty times before and have stored snippets of conversations in notecards, on the backs of napkins, in wordpad ... but I'll be damned if I can pull them all together and find them when I need them, let alone see the common threads when there's 20 pages of raw chat text).
This is where "The Brain" comes in. (I keep warning Kitto that I want to bend his ear on this, and probably his brain, because -- and you can insert a whiney three year old voice here -- it's really, really, really important whether I can adequately articulate it or not). So, back to wanting to store hundreds of pieces of chat in a way that makes them more accessible, and why this makes me think of "The Brain": as my own was failing, I kept thinking "why stop at a db?" when what I was really pining for was the ability to not simply save these little brainstorming junkets for future retrieval, but to be able to see the relationships between the little content mcnuggets visually. Topic maps, ontologies and folksonomies, oh my. I love using "Personal Brain" to dump key artifacts from my head (recipes, family tree, business articles, pictures, favourite web digs, videos, books, articles, music, allies) and then to be able to see this unexpected garden of context come out of places where none had existed before, at least not in my active thinking. The nice thing about Personal Brain is that I can suddenly see very clear lines between ideas and resources and allies and knowledge capital and put them all together, and when it comes to the kind of brainstorming that happened last night, and that continues to happen cumulatively over a period of months, this can be the secret sauce. There's a reason we keep coming back and hitting on the same things again and again, and while we cannot always see the links, a tool like Personal Brain would be a slightly orgasmic connector to have access to in a business context here.
If you've ever seen or used the "Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus", you already know what I am talking about. Look for a word, and it's presented in a visual cloud of related words. It's a smarter database, one that you can crawl through visually, and it recognizes the relationships between sometimes seemingly disparate things and allows you to fall down the rabbit hole into the most magical mental places. It leads to significant "Aha!" moments as you are able see right there, in a "data cloud", a picture of things pulled all together.
This is where I will fail today: I'm too tired to really get into the nuts and bolts of this tool and how and why it would be the next killer mash-up in SL, but I want to, because it's important. It must be, because I keep coming back to it again and again. Hence, the mental bookmark to remind myself to think out loud in a more organized way, and in a way that might even draw a little feedback that will help me find the ultimate prize: a pipeline out of The Brain that allows me to connect to other people's Brains, and, God help me, embed it into SL, to facilitate the cultivation of a kind of delicious community intelligence. Four million people (and these aren't just potential customers, but I'm thinking now of the kind of collective wisdom I thrive on in terms of Better World Island and Ubuntu style projects). Give me "Google Map" (come on, if they can map the moon, they can map Second Life), and add to that "The Brain", and what the hell, maybe even Trisenx's "scratch-and-sniff" olfactive marketing tools so that I can taste the pizza I'm eating in that virtual meeting and smell my partner's cologne now and then ~winks~. Aye, now there's the Holy Trinity of embeds in a Second Life mashed-up Utopia.
The age of spiritual machines is more than just a frighteningly compelling/repulsive bit of Kurzweil thinking out loud, it's my daily playground, and I find myself getting drawn into the guts of the "community think" level of Second Life and resources, and getting more and more agitated about my current inability to use or create tools to effectively build bridges and connect it.
I was noodling this more than a year ago at omidyar.net, and I know I confused the hell out of people when it came to why I was even excited about this in the first place, which means I either need to find a better way of explaining why this is important to me when I take the next run at it, or I need to be able to do a show-and-tell (without spending about USD $15,000 on the enterprise version of this puppy or trying to cram a round peg into a square hole with "Web Brain" if it's even still alive).
If you happen to be reading this, go ahead and hold me accountable. Make me try to explain this in English in a way that actually makes you give a damn (something like "Sue, give me an example for crying out loud, and keep it simple"). At the moment, I'm just thinking out loud again so that maybe I will, because I have a hunch this is one of those important things.
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