In the past week, friends have had intertwining conversations that I want to try weave together here. The overarching theme is the power of information to make care, visible. To make the connections and relationships between everything visible. If this in turn has the power to change anything, well, that is another thing and where the post unravels towards the end.
Continue reading “Care-giving, care-taking, and the feminist metaverse”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.
Continue reading “Building the ecology of the Metaverse”OSCC2025 talk: MetaCulture = Metagaming + Integrated knowledge infrastructures
The Open Simulator Community Conference is my first virtual conference!
OSCC2025 schedule: https://conference.opensimulator.org/schedule/
my talk: https://conference.opensimulator.org/events/metaculture-metagaming-integrated-knowledge-infrastructures/
Watch it on Youtube : www.youtube.com/AvaconOrg/
Join the conversation:
The conference Discord is at AvaCon
The conversation in OMI Discord (long term): Inclusive Communities Research
MetaCulture = Metagaming + Integrated knowledge infrastructures
Incorporating game culture into community driven knowledge networks.
I’m applying to another post-doc position, this summary shook out from that.
Continue reading “MetaCulture = Metagaming + Integrated knowledge infrastructures”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.
Project 6.0: Sci-Curious
Cultivating scientific curiosity: Digitally-mediated approaches for promoting societal transformation through scientific curiosity and capacity.
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.
Continue reading “What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite”
What we play is life
This is the fifth iteration of my project idea. Wow. Previous version: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity
The quote “What we play is life” is attributed to Louis Armstrong, and suggests that the way we approach and engage with activities, whether they are games, hobbies, or even daily tasks, reflects our attitude towards life itself.
Continue reading “What we play is life”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
AquaSavvy (regenerated)
A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a DUT project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful. Update: we made it through to the final round. We will know if we were successful in July 2025. I’ve updated the abstract to reflect the improvements we did in round 2.
Continue reading “AquaSavvy (regenerated)”