It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The first day of the Second Life Community Convention was a day of controlled chaos and the halls of the ornate Westin-St. Francis hhandwritten being adorned with signs made from from pages torn notebooks. The chaos was so bad that members weren’t given name badges and weren’t even registered. Anyone could have walked in for free. The picture to the right, of the registration desk, tells is best.

There was only one printed schedule, which a Linden Lab employee was keeping a careful eye on, but at one point a Second Life member, furious at the chaos, took it from her, saying "I paid two hundred dollars and I deserve at least this!"

The two workshops I attended, "Building Community" and "Mixed Reality Presentations",
went well.

 

The "Building Community" workshop presented the experiences in creating communities in Second Life from four perspectives: people with disabilities, a corporate region (Nokia), and two social regions, Dublin (famous for its Blarney Stone pub), and Orange Island. The presenters were Gentle Heron, Han Rambler, Hydra Shaftoo, and Fabian Alexander. Kathleen Linden moderated the workshop.

Gentle Heron pointed out that although Second Life is often referred to as a "level playing field" for people with special challenges, it really is not so much level as more level than real life.

In general, the panel discussed issues involved in creating a successful community, such as having a clearly understood goal and rules, getting people around you whose judgment you trust and to delegate authority to them, and to be prepared for the unexpected.

 

In Kenzo and Rhiannon Chatnoir led the "Mixed Reality Presentations" workshop, assisted by a team in making the workshop itseld a mixed reality presentation. People in Second Life were taking part in the workshop via streaming media and could see us while we saw them on a large projection screen.

SLCC 2009 continues through Sunday August 16, 2009/

Whether you are like me, a fan of some Star Trek series, or you’re a diehard Trekkie, or you simply want to learn a little of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, you’ll find something to learn at Second Life’s Star Trek Museum. The sheer amount and scope of information available is amazing.

A few of the thousands of facts you can learn there:

• Star Trek’s Enterprise-D has a button on the engineering console marked "Infinite Improbability Drive"? (a reference to Douglas Adams‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• The US Navy’s Aegis-class destroyers were influenced heavily by some design elements of the Enterprise bridge.
• The Enterprise appears in the Battlestar Galactica TV series, in the background of a shot featuring the rag tag fleet in the upper right of the scene.

Space Fleet’s dry dock

The Museum consists of several buildings containing the various parts of the Enterprise, along with a movie theater, art gallery, games, downloadable paper models, and hydroponics lab. There are also Orion, Ferengi, Borg, Andorian,Romulan, Klingon, Cardassian, Bajoran, Maquis, Chameloid, and Betazoid “embassies”, When you enter the Sick Bay, the Doctor’s disembodied voice inquires, “Please state the nature of your medical emergency.” The Astrometrics Lab and 3D Starmaps are particularly impressive. Be sure to check them out.

Nearly every object in the Museum can be clicked on to get a notecard or webpage for more information. Topics range from extreme trivia of Star Trek history to technical explanations of real world science.

Standing inside our solar system in the Astrometrics Lab

High in the sky over the museum, you’ll find a drydock and a Star Fleet station. You can travel between them either by teleporting or using a shuttle, which also gives an auto-pilot aerial tour of the area around the Museum.

If you’re a Second Life member, you can beam yourself onboard the Enterprise (actually into the Museum) by clicking slurl.com/secondlife/TovaDok%20II/25/211/35.