Building an eco-feminist metaverse

This is chewing through the philosophy of the biosphere metaverse project. It’s still messy, and trigger warning, it involves mention of patriarchy and ecofeminism. In more developed framing it won’t mention these to avoid the hangups around the words. Probably won’t mention metaverse either for the same reason.

outline:

  1. Background: why does patriarchy persist
  2. Pathological defences against loss applied to our relationship with nature
  3. Repairing relationship through association, ways of listening
  4. A globally accessible ecosystem of integrated data
  5. Case study: UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) 
  6. Funding
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Building the ecology of the Metaverse

We are a collective, using digital technologies to address the challenge of interacting with complex knowledge ecosystems. We use people-centric technology development to empower informed, accountable action from the bottom up. Using digital hyper-connected, integrated technologies – what we understand as the Metaverse – potentially gives grassroots initiatives the ability to contribute to the growing integrated knowledge ecosystem – the Metaverse as an ecosystem – and thereby scale their efforts and networks globally. We are looking for consortium members to pursue research funding, or strategic partnerships with companies interested in the commercial potential of these approaches. Please find some use cases below with more information. We also welcome anyone to join the journey; find us on Discord – the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (OMI) (website: omigroup.org/) or email me at bernellev@gmail.com.

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Sci-Curious – final

A month ago I submitted this project to the MCSA-PF fellowship call. It is a very competitive call, the chance of success is about 9.6%! I really enjoyed the process of unpacking my idea to the core essence so I consider it a win anyway. (but man I want the fellowship so bad!)

Cultivating scientific curiosity: Digitally-mediated approaches for enhancing engagement and behavioral transformation.

The overall aim of Sci-Curious is to develop a method that cultivates scientific curiosity in
participants, leading to better engagement in and between contributor groups who deal with politically charged scientific questions. This will be achieved through developing a digitally mediated deep canvassing method that incorporates scientific challenges through digital knowledge infrastructures. This method balances a feminist ethic of care with critical accountability. By bridging scientific rigor with transformative societal engagement, this project promises to unlock new pathways for addressing intractable scientific challenges and affecting societal transformation.

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What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite

The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.

I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting  Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.

Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.

Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. 

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What we play is life. Project v5.1 – focus on measuring behaviour change, or: focus on the “play”, and less on the “what”.

After thinking through the fifth iteration and asking for help about being stuck in the weeds, Ricardo reminded me that what we’re trying to do is influence behaviour, more than contributing to understanding it (because I was also inspired by Chan’s article about a cohesive theory of value). I was really stuck with my methodology, and he suggested I look into causal approaches. Things that measure actual behaviour, not just what people say they would do, or like, or believe in.

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Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture

I started reading Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) up to where the free sample ends, around page 78. Right before I chose to buy the ebook, I found a more recent book, Participatory Culture: Interviews (2019) as well as his blog, https://henryjenkins.org/. Ooh, and then also the book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (2020). So, distracted. But great notes here and the thoughts they triggered.

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Talk: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity

This is a talk I gave for the Distributed Immersive Participation group, Stockholm University on 28 March 2025. I was happy to have a reason to update my talk, as the ones I gave on this topic in 2019 and 2022 were terribly out of date by now.

Slides: https://indiebio.co.za/curiosity_metaverse_adapted_24mar2025.html
pdf (27MB)
recording: on youtube

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