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
MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence
The sentence, drumroll, is:
Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.
(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)
Continue reading “MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence”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”Notes from the book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher Tozzi
I enjoyed reading this book; a lot of nuances I didn’t quite get before is explained – like the ongoing grumbles between the “Free” and “Open” camps, what KDE and Gnome is, why there’s a Wayland and why despite it being better I have to keep going back to X11 instead. I also read this book to try and gaze into the crystal ball to see if we could perhaps learn from the mistakes of the earlier FOSS developments as we build the Metaverse. I add some questions regarding that after some of the highlights below.
Continue reading “Notes from the book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher Tozzi”Playfulness and truth.
Four recent blogs inspired me:
Starting with how to represent truth, moving to play, and then to belonging. The TL;DR:
The advances of structuring data in mapping unlocks potential for using physical world assets in games. Using physical world assets in emergent approaches to game design is well suited to allowing players to interact with their game worlds in varied ways. Exploring playing with the physical world – morphing and changing it – through games can allow us to learn about the world not through a top-down education, but through a curiosity that does not even have to involve the truth. Through these games we can build a new sense of belonging, that builds a common language across polarised opinions, because it’s just for fun, after all.
Continue reading “Playfulness and truth.”Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger
I mangle the quotes to tell me story. The gist is a true reflection but it’s not the exact words.
p4 – Both “our” world and the “mirror world” – the world of the conspiracy theorists, agree that post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts. Both groups have a (p24) skepticism of elite power. p53 – The words the mirror world use are essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to many people they clearly feel true. And the reason they feel true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.
Continue reading “Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger”Academic components of peduncle
This project aims to create an interactive real-world based game or platform, visualising complex data onto a stylised, simplified digital twin earth, in order to facilitate insight into how to take action in an uncertain world, at the end of expertise, through an ethic of care and curiosity. It is aimed at grassroots, everyday people and their engagement with data and knowledge, in a visual, 3D, gamified way.
Perpetually in draft and evolving, of course.
Continue reading “Academic components of peduncle”