Most people have no idea how hard it is the work of creating events in Second Life. Most of the RL individuals we work with arrive and see things done. They arrive, sit, speak and leave. All that simple. For us? It’s a bit more complicated. I remember the hours Hugo and I spend building, creating, networking, producing machinimas. I remember all the stress before live events, when firewalls are blocked, sound is missing or that very tinny detail no one will care about is making us mad.

The launching of Meglena Kuneva in Second Life was no different. I was so nervous before sitting at that table as I was in the day my computer decided to crash 3 hours before one of Mr. Casaca’s conferences, last year.

Today? I’m smiling. I’m glad that is simple for them – that is our goal, in Babel. To make technology simple enough, so that individuals like Mrs. Kuneva or Mr. Casaca can come and use it to dialogue, to interact, to actually understand this new generation of users.

Yesterday, I achieved my goal, because I saw a politician using the web as I believe the web should be used – by the politician in person.  In the end of the conference, I had the chance to speak to a member of a Portuguese university, who told me “We used to have an Island in Second Life, but the SL fashion passed in Portugal, so we decided to leave”. I think he was convinced to try again and I think I just found another project for Babel team. “No man is an island, they say”. That reality is so true in Second Life. Having an Island means nothing. But live conferences do.

The second best thing about these events is…friends. Because in Babel we work, not for money or public recognition, but with the strong conviction that the world needs real and active citizenship, we can actually say that the friends who support us are real friends and active citizens. Some excellent examples of this are Ana Paula Gomes and Marco Silva (Portuguese journalists) Sergio Botha (SL and RL Architect who sponsored all our buildings), Tiago Reis (portuguese student), Marc Montague, AWM Mars (SL dev) and  and many many more.

But most of all, I end this day happy for being a little bit more confident in European Politicians. During the event, Mrs. Kuneva said: “I am committed to pay, with my hard work, every cent that European citizens invest in the European Union”.

Many people tell us that we should be smarter, sell Babel Project’s image in a better way. We had many opportunities to work with many RL personalities, interested in this new thing called Second Life, mostly to promote their public image. I’m glad we are not smart. I am proud that we deny working with the first person who shows interest. I try to avoid my ego or self promotion but….today? I’m happy and I am proud. I started Babel project with the conviction that if I worked hard to make thing easy enough, interesting people would come and use SL to improve the knowledge of future generations. Yesterday, I sat at the same table then Meglena Kuneva and Mr. Casaca. It was a fine table and I know they are people whose work should be as promoted as possible. I am a citizen. Europe and the world are mine too. And I am committed to pay, with my hard work, all the freedom and democracy I have.  Babel Project might never become a big project. But it will always continue to be a project made of strong beliefs and faith in something better. Because the world CAN be better. And we all have responsibilities in that area.

Ana Isabel Alves/ Irah Anatine

Official info at: www.babelproject.eu

I’ve met Rita J. King a few months ago in Second Life, by accident – again, one of the great things about Second Life is that, like in real life, you can find the most spectacular people just around the corner. This happens because Second Life is a shared platform, where many different people are forced to use the same space to produce very different contents. A little bit like in the world most cosmopolitan centers – when people share the same offices, the same supermarkets, the same schools and the same coffee shops, eventually we’ll end up having a higher level of tolerance and cultural diversity.

At the time, I was completely consumed by Babel, Mr. Paulo Casaca’s conferences and, of course, Iraq. And Rita was consumed by a project called Understanding Islam trough Virtual Worlds. Today, we sat for a while in her beautiful island in Second Life, Imagination Age, and spoke about my journey to Iraq, Babel Project, Dancing Ink Productions and Understanding Islam Trough Virtual Worlds.

Rita and I share the same conviction: the world will become a better place in the future if more and more citizens have access to the internet and to virtual worlds. Because, if virtual worlds become a stage for work, dialogue, development and education, then the real world will, for sure, become a better place.

The second conviction we share is that there are millions of citizens around the world who actually want to participate into positive change: they just don’t know how. Information is produced and out there, but too complex and time consuming for people to assimilate it, digest it and, then, actually believe they can make a difference. This again falls into my passion: the deep believe that Second Life and other 3.0 Web tools can be used to make valid content achievable to normal citizens. Rita mentioned the six months she spent investigating post-Katrina corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast and how she saw billions in taxes being spent in such an inconsequent way. I would mention the same, regarding the meeting I had in Iraq (June 2008) with several tribal leaders who referred that most of the money sent by the European Union to support reconstruction was actually used to sponsor political armed militias, responsible for the murderer of thousands of innocent civilians. All this information is out there available to all the ones willing to find it, understand it and create concrete actions against it. The question is: how to explain it in two lines (and a simple language) fundament it in three lines and create mechanisms for “common people” to actively fight against it? And, of course, how to use a game-like platform to do all this?

This has been one of the main challenges of Babel since the very beginning. And we consider that Rita is one of the most exceptional examples of how virtual worlds can actually be used to promote positive change. With her work, Rita has succeed, not only to bring really urgent and valid content to Second Life, but also to present Virtual Worlds to institutions (like the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs), who should really be using Second Life to spread knowledge globally.

“When things happen, we look back and say ´we should have seen it coming´”, Rita said. But the truth is that to see what’s coming, vision is required. The world is definitely changing. Vision is, not only required, but vital and urgent at this stage. Knowledge, awareness and global engagement (or the lack of it) will be key factors to determine the future of areas like Economy, Environment, Health, Human Rights, Politics and Terrorism. The web provides all the necessary tools. Now, we all need to take care of the contents. 

READ MORE AT IQARE

“If anyone asked me to define myself, I would say I am a woman. Then I am from Kirkurk and then I am a Kurd citizen. I suffered because I am a woman, I suffered because I am from Kirkurk and, of course, I suffered because I am a Kurd”. These are the most impressive words that Surod M.Falih said to me, when I met her in Kirkurk.

Surod is the director of Iraqi Al-amal Association, www.iraqi-alamal.org, especially dedicated to support women and children, the most obvious victims of any war. “We cannot forget that our next two generations will face major challenges. They are damaged by the Operation Anfal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign (massacre of Kurdish population, sometimes using chemical weapons, by Saddam. From 1986 to 1989 millions of citizens from Kirkurk were forced to leave they homes and look for refugee in the mountains) and by the 2003 war”.

According to Surod, extreme poverty and the lack of hope is being used by political parties to lead people into fanaticism and ethnical hate. “In despair, you will do anything to keep your family alive. You will vote for whoever gives you money, you will join an armed militia, you will even sell your body for one dollar or less, if you are a widow and you need to feed your babies.” And this is what she is fighting against, when she works in her center: she created a workshop of manufacturing for women, she develops campaigns with the youth to clean Kirkuk’s streets and engage young people to act trough positive change (instead of joining a militia, for example).

About the general NGO’s Surod (as many other citizens of Kirkurk I’ve met) says: “NGO’s are mostly corrupt in Iraq. They get funds from international communities to support the citizens, but the citizens are not being supported. Many of the members of NGO’s are corrupt and controlled by political interests.”

Today, Surod faces a new challenge:  the Al-amal clinic, opened 3 months ago in Kirkurk, where 12 people have been working to provide free healthcare to women and children. The clinic, that will be closed down in the next few days due the lack of funds, is also responsible for local school campaigns of health awareness.

What can we do?

a)     Surod has a list of children who need urgent surgery and medical treatments, which do not exist in Iraq at the moment. In order to save children’s lives, it would be necessary to bring them to another country, find doctors and perhaps institutions/clinics/universities to sponsor it. If you have the time/knowledge to support this area, please send an email to babelproject@gmail.com and we will be glad to get you in touch with Surod.

b)    Surod and I spoke about the possibility of using new technologies to engage youth from Kirkurk in Education. For example, to learn English and, after that…the sky is the limit: they can have attend classes on the web, apply to western schools, participate in youth contests, learn about Science, IT, Business, Environment, Health, Social projects…if this idea interests you and you have some time/talent to spend on it, please send an email to babelproject@gmail.com.

c)     Letters have been sent to the President of the European Union, José Manuel Durão Barroso and to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres regarding the clinic. However, it is never too much to send awareness letters to our authorities. Write a letter to your Senator, Member of the European Parliament and, of course, to the UN. I will try to contact Mr. Guterres and ask him for a public statement regarding the course of the process within the UNHCR. If you need any help writing such a letter, please send us an email. We will provide you a simple model. Then just google the contact you want to address it to and…email it.

“One of the reasons why Second Life is a unique experience for business is because of the brain experience”, Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), the creator of Linden Labs said yesterday, during an event hosted by Train for Success.

It was an interesting conversation for me, mostly because that was what brought me to Second Life in the first place. In all my presentations, during the last year, I have referred an article I found in the Financial Times saying that “human brains do not separate a virtual emotion from a real one”. Meaning: if you find a great new friend in a virtual world, your mind will be as happy as if you have made the same friend during a real life coffee break.

And yes, even if it’s not the same, even if nobody likes to spend the entire day sitting in front of the computer and even if hugs are needed these days, the truth is: work is work, knowledge is knowledge, goals are goals and, by the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is how much could you really achieve. And, of course, the possibility of having more for less (more communication, more external support and feedback, better access to external sources for less money, in less time and without distance being a problem) is always a plus.

The other interesting thing Rosedale mentioned (and I didn’t know about it) is that our brains learn better over unique experiences, rather than in normal ones.  So, there is a better chance for all the workers of a company to assimilate the content of a meeting if they are, for example, sitting on a beautiful beach scenery in Second Life instead of assisting to boring video conference. This of course, is also valid for students and educators. My argument so far was that youth would be much more engaged to learn about specific and boring subjects like politics if institutions adopted a user-friendly language, similar to video games.

By the end of the meeting, I had the feeling that Second Life is going just where it should (or at least where I would love to see it going). It’s good that Lindens understand the need of making things easier for all the ones who need to use Second Life as work tool instead of a hobby. It’s great to see how more and more people pay attention to this type of use and how LL support this vision. The truth is Second Life has always been a place where you can built whatever you want and we don’t really need Linden’s to do so. We have always been free to promote real life projects and SL as the new era of communication (instead of bad marketing campaigns, like too many companies tried). The only real advantage is how the public image of SL can benefit from a more “business focused” official speech.

Who knows, maybe LL will happen to be one of the few companies in the world benefiting from the global crisis. Several creators have told me how they started selling much less virtual items because many users were spending less money, buying less land and, of course, need not SL items to go with it. In result, the creators did also abandon the land where they used to have profitable shops. I’m not sure if the official numbers confirm this (I’m reporting nothing but informal conversations) but it sounds logical scenery. As logic as the other way around, where you can imagine that, because of the crisis, people will look more and more for cheaper types of entertainment, such as Second Life. Plus, companies will be forced to reduce expenses and look for the best results for the lowest price (again, more for less). In this case, crisis could mean nothing else but “change” to Linden’s and… a good change, for me. Mostly because of my deep belief that, if used in the right way, Second Life can really help changing the real world into a better one.

Growing means pain. When we are kids, we dream about growing up, about the day when we will, finally, become “big”. In life, we are always looking for growing up. Get a better job, a better social position, a senior status, a “big” label under our name. But then, when we grow, we hope for the days with less worries, less responsabilities, less complex problems. Yes, growing up only means we get more capable of performing more tasks and success means that we succeed in taking more weight to longer distances. In the web, growing up means that you are present in many social works, several blogs, microblogs, instant message programs, etc etc etc. And, of course, that you keep up with many websites, news, micro updates, and lots of very very interesting information available, at one click. Well, in the web, growing up means that you have the very complex task of being burried in information. And, at some point, getting online in all the “must” platforms actually takes you more time then the production of interesting contents itself. Do you ever feel like shutting down the computer and go back to the simple and traditional “reading a book”? I do. 

Thank you Halden, for making my life so much easier. Today, I go to sleep with all my websites in one, all my instant messengers in one, all my social networks in one. Tomorrow, I’ll go back to my precious contents. Because the web is a mean, not an end:)