Last year Second Life celebrated its tenth birthday, you don’t need to be a genius in maths to realise that this year will be its eleventh birthday, although technically it’s a tad older as Steller Sunshine celebrated turning twelve in March!
However let’s not let that spoil matters, the celebration this year is the eleventh birthday and there will be music and magic, fireworks, puzzles and much more in yet another celebration of the virtual world that leads all virtual worlds, the Mom and Dad of them all, yes I’m still talking about Second Life!
Originally, during the Alpha period, the grid was known as Lindenworld. As we were getting ready to launch the Beta, we decided we needed a name that would convey the expansiveness, involvement and complexity we hoped would characterize this world as it grew. We started by debating the merits of a ‘place’ name versus a ‘descriptive’ name. We believed a place name would give people a sense of destination, and possibly some added layer of meaning. And we thought a descriptive name would help people understand this new concept of a shared, 3D collaborative space.
We had a lot of ideas for place names — one of my favorites was Sansara, which was not only euphonic, but had an interesting meaning in the original Sanskrit, meaning roughly ‘ever changing world’. Ultimately, though, we chose to go with a descriptive name, and looked at many derivatives of Terra, Viva, and life. We kept coming back to Life2, and then landed on Second Life as more interesting, more evocative and more what we hoped the world could become as it evolved and grew to be as big as life.
And that’s how it came about!
Originally there were just 16 regions, eleven years on there are over 26,000. However enough of this, what of these celebrations, well I’ll post the press release after the cut.
Second Life™ 11th Birthday Community Celebration is coming!
The event will be held from Sunday June 22nd – Sunday June 29th—seven days of amazing exhibits, music, conversation, debate, firework displays, games, puzzles, sports and everything else the wonderfully inventive communities of Second Life™ can pack into seven days and 11 sims.
Actually, even that won’t be the end of it, as the sims will be open for a further seven days for everyone to explore.
What’s our theme?
The theme this year takes inspiration from a quote by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill:
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Last year’s theme was “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” but we focused mostly on looking back, and rightly so, as 10 years was an important milestone and a perfect opportunity to reflect back on where we came from.
This year it’s time to look forward; to imagine where we are headed.
When Winston Churchill said this in 1943, he could not have imagined a virtual world like Second Life, but now, more than seventy years later, his words have come true in this new world that we have created.
If there’s one thing that makes SL unique, it’s our community of users. Users from all corners of the globe come together under a single umbrella to build a community that comes from our minds and our imaginations. Everything we see, touch and use in Second Life is a product of our imaginations, our minds, and our community.
And this year, at the SL11B Community Celebration, we want to celebrate precisely that!
Get thinking. Get imagining. Get creative!
How do I get involved?
Applications are now open for Performers, Volunteers and speakers and performers in the Auditorium. We will need lots of volunteers to make this a success, so please consider whether you can give some time to helping out. We can promise you a lot of fun!
Applications for Exhibitors (i.e. people who want a plot to build on) will open on April 27th.
The closing date for Exhibitor, Performer and Auditorium applications is May 26th.
How do I find out more?
You can find out more by following this blog, and by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
We also have a Flickr page where you can paste your own images when the sims open. You make see some sneak images from the team before that so keep watching!
Main site: http://slcommunitycelebration.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SLBCommunity
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SLBCommunityCelebration
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/groups/slcommunitycelebration/pool/