Minutes of February 6, 2009 ScienceSim Senate

On the call: Andrew Fitz Gibbon, Charlie Peck, John Hengeveld, Mic Bowman, Tom Murphy, Wilf Pinfold

Next senate meeting: Feb 13, 2009 in SciSim at Kepler (193, 191, 45)

Inworld transcript from Keplar: voice is still being worked on so we can do entire meeting inworld

virtualized opensim servers

• Earlham doing conventional OpenSim server, rather than one within Virtualbox
• Mic said some info on virtualising OPensim server is on ScienceSim wiki

OpenSim on cloud

• Chris Colons (of Linden Labs) working on this on EC2 (Amazon elastic computing)

ScienceSim activity

• upto 180 accounts
• have four requests for islands in ScienceSim
  • South American group working on Educational Conference
  • Chris Colons and EC2 activity
  • Andy Adams of Sigma Aldretech (sial.com) doing molecular visulaization
  • Sean Flynn, an individual effort, who has worked with serious games and sims online for education
• Andy is interested in joining Senate
  • Mic thinks she would be good for effort
  • general consensus seemed to agree
  • lets invite her

Ways of broadcasting presentations

• stream sent to site that can reflect to URL which can then be shout'ed to everyone in the region
  • this can be worst form since just one way communication
• can have person at live presentation and broadcast of audio/video to inworld
  • person can relay questions from inworld into live session
• best is if speaker is inworld

On streaming audio/video

• Mic said George can help with the mechaics of setting up media stream
  • I am not clear on costs of this
  • Is this a service we can provide via university facilities
• Mic demonstrated
  • Projecting youtube inworld
  • displaying arbitrary url inworld
• Mic said inworld voice breaks down with more than ~10 inworld
• 3DI working on load balancing of region tasks which may help with large groups

Educational Presentations in ScienceSim

• everyone interested in starting this
• Mic and Wilf have been talking about this offline
• Tom wanted to be sure we coud capture events
  • Mic said easy to put it into youtube
• Various kinds of presentation mechanisms
  • How To Presentations
    • Mic on doing GIS terains
    • Johan on developing XSim (tying external apps to inworld)
    • Sean on creating region models
  • Distinguished lecture series every Friday
    • like Science Fridays in SL
    • Can pull from our SC contacts
  • Intel Series
    • depends on inworld person connected to live presentations to forward questions
  • Office Hours
    • Mic proposes running these after senate meetings and posting chat log on wiki

Wiki as collector

• Both Mic and Charlie strongly recommend using wiki to capture discussions, ideas, and directions of our efforts instead of email and other conversations

                                             ... Tom Murphy