Second Life is full of interesting places and fascinating people, but when the two come together in a community: that's when the real fun of SL comes to life. I was invited to write about an incredible community in SL called Chilbo. Chilbo Public Library is one of SL's most famous libraries. And the community itself is very intriguing. Chilbo comprises multiple sims which are inhabited by artists, musicians, poets, writers, and many other creatives. One current project is Poetry Benches. Chilbo is inviting poets gridwide to participate. You sit for a spell on a Poetry Bench and a poem appears! Cool! In the picture, I am having an SL brunch with Chilbo resident artist Kristine Kristan and our friend Kelp Parkin. Behind us is the Cat Cage, Kristen's very arty SL house. Check out the community website and blogs at Chilbo.org; which are quite impressive resources about SL culture (great links on the side navibars!).
Kelp Parkin and I met through another great SL community, New Citizens Inc (NCI). I've been teaching free classes at NCI for 2 years, and we just started a new course on Photography & SL Journalism. Kelp is an NCI Helper, one of our many volunteers and students. NCI hosts social events and build contests, as well as free classes on just about everything to know about SL.
I've invested quite a bit of time in 2 other SL communities... one I'd describe as inherently activist, and the other are RL professionals working for social benefits organizations.
Four Bridges Project sim is a collaboration of Amnesty International-E, PeaceTrain, and many other activist groups (a few logos are pictured). Four Bridges groups have organized numerous gridwide events, week-long Woodstock-like affairs, like Peace Fest, Earth Week SL, SL Human Rights Festival, Second Pride Festival, and Imagine Festival. These folks are very spontaneous and thoroughly knowledgeable about RL activist issues and how to utilize SL for action and creating awareness! You can meet a lot of high powered activists through their community and get involved in world rocking projects. The Four Bridges team works effectively across group lines gridwide to bring together terrific art, music, talent, ideas, and energy. Nonprofit Commons has achieved cross-group collaboration in the real world of charities and social benefit organizations and brought them all into Second Life. They have gathered together over 100 RL groups and concentrated them on several sims such as Aloft NonProfit Commons (pictured). Groups like Kiva.org for RL microlending and The Jason Project for RL missing children, and OpenCafe.org.za which teaches South African youth about open source technologies. I've done the music promotion for a few of their sim launches and it's clear that everyone wants to work with them (easiest gigs I’ve ever done!). They are great do-gooders one and all. Check out their meetings on 8:30am on Fridays in SL at Plush Nonprofit Commons. You'll meet dozens of RL nonprofit organizers, sharing their best ideas. Now that's SL community!
By Any1 Gynoid