This week the Summer Sailstice is running. In the virtual world of Second Life it’s a series of sailing events, the most prominent one being the large exposition that is hosted on the site of Cloud 9.
Close to the entry point I have placed the small mini-expo of the Flying Fizz and Fizz Fanatics group: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Banc%20auxCocos%20Isle/48/237/22. I made a few summaries for the Flying Fizz and the WWC documentation and added information about the open sourced code, where to obtain it, etc. You can also simply get the boat here and join our group.
Where I mostly left sailing other boats in 2011 for the Flying Fizz, besides joining the J-Classic run by my friend Jane Fossett, I entered racing this year again in the Star Class. It’s a nice boat, also as a racer, but no, I am not using it much outside the Free Spirit Cup.
Having raced a few boats the past few months, I must say I am not that convinced on the merits of many boats that have been created the past years. They simply do not give me the feel of actually being in a boat and having to work it, balance it and they are less suited to tactical sailing in a race. So I decided to put my time an effort where my heart is and work on the Fizz and the group of sailors that sails it.
There’s another motivation: I have received a couple of requests the past few months by people looking for a startline. I hadn’t realised it until last year: but there’s no startline vendor for sailing in Second Life anymore. People who want to run races are dependent on active sailors who own a line.
This pointed me to a serious issue: the lack of publicly owned infrastructure and technology in our community. There still is plenty publicly available code though, so not all builders are at a loss. Mothgirl Dibou’s Fizz Boat Builders kit is part of that. The WWC and it’s toolkit is part of that. So with this little stand I am showing people that we can still build new boats and that there’s still room for new creators to enter the scene and contribute to the community.
I will write a bit later on The Commons, Open Source and community infrastructure later, for now, I will just relax a bit and enjoy the sun.
Liv 