Congratulations on the early completion of the monastery. I noticed that Tanoujin and Arria asked for ideas and input on what kind of NGO activity for which the project could serve as a base. Well, I have two ideas that I'd like to share with you:
1) A Society for the Study and Advancement of Virtual Governance: Already, Neufreistadt and Colonia Nova have played host to a number of efforts to discuss aspects of governance in a virtual world. Laudable initiatives such as the original Neualtenburg projekt, Thinkers, the Democracy study group and the local governance study group have all benefitted from the involvement of CDS communities. Perhaps we could somehow fuse this desire to participate in a non-partisan, visionary discussion about aspects of virtual governance with the successful, pragmatic and result-oriented approach exercised in the New Guild to form a new kind of permanent society with the purpose to serve as a non-partisan testing ground for ideas and solutions, which at the same time would act as a lighthouse to promote some of the knowledge and experience gained in the process of enacting virtual governance in the CDS?
Specifically, I'm thinking of a [b:3azt867j]Governance Society[/b:3azt867j] that would bring together scripters and administrators in an interesting experiment of collaboration to make pragmatic solutions out of visionary ideas within virtual governance and maintain and promote the results to the world of SL at large.
A number of initiatives could be launched under the auspices of such a Governance Society:
[list:3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]identifying and describing peculiar phenomenae of social life in virtual communities and analysing the extent to which these pose particular challenges from a perspective of governance[/*
3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]identifying and describing different approaches to implementing governance decisions providing analysis of the strong and weak points of each approach[/*3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]identifying and describing the information systems (i.e. scripts and web-based applications) that already exist to support governance in virtual communities[/*3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]identifying and customising existing information systems to facilitate the exercise of governance in virtual communities[/*3azt867j][/list:u:3azt867j]
2) My other idea for an NGO that might find a hospitable environment in the Alpine Meadows Monastery would be [b:3azt867j]The Waterfall Society[/b:3azt867j], which aims to promote the knowledge and enjoyment of waterfalls in Second Life (considering that there will be a huge waterfall not far away from the monastery in AM, if I'm not mistaken). The society already has a 'showroom' in Colonia Nova but perhaps some meeting facilities and a location next to a significant waterfall could facilitate a higher level of activity within the society. I've listed a few ideas for such activities in the below:
[list:3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]training and chartering 'explorers' to be sent out into the world of SL to discover, map and document waterfalls of interest in the library of the society.[/*3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]staging discussions and lectures between waterfall designers on techniques for how to design a beautiful waterfall[/*3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]acting as the starting grounds for guided tours to visit selected waterfalls of SL[/*3azt867j]
[*:3azt867j]hosting irregular bazaars/flohmarkts of waterfall-relevant merchandise[/*3azt867j][/list:u:3azt867j]
I'd love to play an active role in setting up either of these societies as part of the monastery project if you deem them of relevance for your theme but I'm afraid that my current RL business and past SL experience prevent me from making any concrete promises of involvement for the time being..
)