[info] [croquet-dev] How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Janet Plato <techgrrl at gmail.com> -----

From: Janet Plato <techgrrl at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 18:16:36 -0600
To: Matthew Schmidt <matthew.schmidt at gmail.com>
Cc: croquet-dev <croquet-dev at duke.edu>
Subject: Re: [croquet-dev] How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
Reply-To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, Janet Plato <techgrrl at gmail.com>

  I have quite a few thoughts on this, but since I am only doing a
small portion of the work I am afraid of coming off as pushy.   The
basic idea is that in order to suceed we need a large group.  One man
can have a vision, but you need a team to realize it.  You get a team
by holding up a vision of what could be, and showing people how they
can help it become reality.  I feel that a lot of people like me
exist, that are enthusiastic but without the required coding skills.
I can acquire those skills in time (I am an old school procedural
language programmer) but many of these people can perform useful
volunteer work without coding.  These people are a huge resource if we
can get them over the learning curve and get them making avatars, art,
buildings, 3D meshes and other work.  This should be going on in
parallel with the coding.

That is the point I keep pushing.  Coding is vitally important, but
getting the basic tutorials made to allow people to build worlds in
parallel with coding is essential, so both tasks can continue at the
same time.

This requires a web site with documentation on downloading croquet
images, getting started and connecting to a real world.  This is
largely done, but the world referenced in the getting started docs is
no longer reachable.  It also requires a place to go to find other
people to interact with.  IRC works, jabber works and a stable
reference world could work.   And finally it needs sample code and
sample worlds for people to see what could be done.  I had a lot of
trouble finding examples worlds beyond "I am a rabbit being driven
over a field"    I was very sad to learn the arts metaverse folks made
an entire ancient city, but there is no way to connect to it, or use
the data sets they created.

I do not want to sound negative.  What has already been down exceeds
my wildest expectations from a mere 20 years ago.   But the open
source paradigm, that people will contribute just for the joy of it,
boggles the mind with what could become reality if we only make the
tools to engage a fraction of the people willing to help.

9 billion hours of solitaire were played last year.  If we can get the
tools and tutorials to the small percentage of  people eager to help,
worlds will get built beyond our ability to imagine.

I have not been active on the list, but I have been working on getting
a server up and running and getting some of my friends involved in
using it.  If something comes of it, I'll post the results.

Thanks to everyone who have worked to make what we have available.

Cheers,

Janet

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Matthew Schmidt
<matthew.schmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Janet & others,
> >
> > PS It seems a lot of people are building large worlds for various
> > grants, but I cannot seem to get access to those spaces or datasets.
> > Is anyone making there worlds open for others to copy?
> >
>
> I can't answer your specific question, but taking a different perspective
> around the issue of creating a more coherent community around Cobalt, I
> anticipate that if people would make customized, larger worlds available,
> we'd see more interest in the project. I think that's Julian and Mark's
> vision with the current world that's available in the Cobalt build... but it
> is rather vanilla and more attractive to computer techy folks than to end
> users.
>
> We have input into Cobalt as part of its open source community, so what
> would you like to see in the Cobalt world? It might be productive not to
> think of this in terms of "I need VNC and a sweet web browser" but rather in
> terms of "I need spaces to play, spaces to work, and spaces to socialize...
> and here's what those spaces should look like and here's how those spaces
> should behave... And here's how my avatar should look and behave."
>
> Thoughts?
>

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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