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How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
 
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Another cross post, but I think this question applies to users and devs alike.
I spoke with Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill yesterday about this briefly, but I'd like to solicit a community opinion. How do we build a coherent community around Cobalt? My first suggestion was to have an open Wiki--not closed like Croquet's wiki. My next suggestion was to have discussion forums where end users can ask and get answers to questions. That format lends itself well to community support. Instead of answering the same question 50 times, school the newbs for a post or two and they quickly learn to fend for themselves. Ubuntu forums is a shining example of a successful forum community. Other ideas? -Matt |
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Great Matt,
In the spirit of brainstorming (and possibly not worth considering for the Cobalt project) .... Their may be an interest in a Cobalt social Ning network (both for the early adopters as well as prospective developers). These little networks are pretty flexible and really give a sense of community to a project.... just as an example take a peak at the Classroom 2.0 network here http://www.classroom20.com I am looking forward to contributing to the Cobalt project and introducing it to our students throughout Kansas. Cheers, Rich ============ ============ On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:03 AM, Matthew Schmidt <[hidden email]> wrote: Another cross post, but I think this question applies to users and devs alike. |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Matthew Schmidt-2
I think Josh nailed it in his response to how the Croquet community
communicates. We need much more openness and communication. If an open Wiki and discussion forums help with that then I'm all for it. How many people on this list are actively developing in Croquet right now? How can we better pool our collective knowledge and experiences? What can we do in the short-term to make Croquet development less scary to someone downloading Cobalt for the first time? -Peter On Mar 5, 2008, at 8:03 AM, Matthew Schmidt wrote: > Another cross post, but I think this question applies to users and > devs alike. > > I spoke with Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill yesterday about this > briefly, but I'd like to solicit a community opinion. > > How do we build a coherent community around Cobalt? > > My first suggestion was to have an open Wiki--not closed like > Croquet's wiki. > > My next suggestion was to have discussion forums where end users > can ask and get answers to questions. That format lends itself well > to community support. Instead of answering the same question 50 > times, school the newbs for a post or two and they quickly learn to > fend for themselves. Ubuntu forums is a shining example of a > successful forum community. > > Other ideas? > > -Matt > > |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:35:19AM -0600, Peter Moore wrote:
> I think Josh nailed it in his response to how the Croquet community > communicates. We need much more openness and communication. If an open Wiki > and discussion forums help with that then I'm all for it. How many people > on this list are actively developing in Croquet right now? How can we > better pool our collective knowledge and experiences? What can we do in the > short-term to make Croquet development less scary to someone downloading > Cobalt for the first time? I'm not a Croquet developer, but I do know there is a need for more communication. Come hang out on the irc channel #croquet at freenode. We croquet fans from the squeak.org community created it and have discussions there sometimes. The more people join, the more useful it will be. The squeak irc portal has info on how to access the irc network: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/IRCPortal just substitute #squeak with #croquet and the instructions still apply. -- Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/ Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808 |
Re: [croquet-user] Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 10:43:56AM -0700, Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> I'm not a Croquet developer, but I do know there is a need for > more communication. Come hang out on the irc channel #croquet at Apropos, can someone rein in the Wikipedia juggernaut? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_croquet -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Peter Moore-5
Hi,
why not use Croquet/Cobalt for itself to build a community ? To use them as the medium ? Is that not a goal of these efforts in last consequence ? Or is Croquet/Cobalt to far away from use ? I can not wait until this moment where I can meet others in Croquet and trial out all these things Croquet is built for..... Regards Hans Am 05.03.2008 um 18:35 schrieb Peter Moore: > I think Josh nailed it in his response to how the Croquet community > communicates. We need much more openness and communication. If an > open Wiki and discussion forums help with that then I'm all for it. > How many people on this list are actively developing in Croquet > right now? How can we better pool our collective knowledge and > experiences? What can we do in the short-term to make Croquet > development less scary to someone downloading Cobalt for the first > time? > > -Peter > > On Mar 5, 2008, at 8:03 AM, Matthew Schmidt wrote: > >> Another cross post, but I think this question applies to users and >> devs alike. >> >> I spoke with Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill yesterday about this >> briefly, but I'd like to solicit a community opinion. >> >> How do we build a coherent community around Cobalt? >> >> My first suggestion was to have an open Wiki--not closed like >> Croquet's wiki. >> >> My next suggestion was to have discussion forums where end users >> can ask and get answers to questions. That format lends itself well >> to community support. Instead of answering the same question 50 >> times, school the newbs for a post or two and they quickly learn to >> fend for themselves. Ubuntu forums is a shining example of a >> successful forum community. >> >> Other ideas? >> >> -Matt >> >> > |
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On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Hans N Beck <[hidden email]> wrote:
> why not use Croquet/Cobalt for itself to build a community ? To use > them as the medium ? Forgive me for making a me-too post, but I was thinking this yesterday. How about have a portal in the "default place" that points somewhere other people might be? The only non-theoretical interest I've ever had in Croquet was when I ran across other actual humans tootling around in the Collaborative for Croquet public world. -- William S. Annis www.aoidoi.org |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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I think the idea of using the Cobalt browser as a space for getting support and building community is valid. However, my take is that the current build needs to be built out of (at least) alpha before we can consider this a viable idea. Hence the need for immediate tools for getting support.
Case in point, I've been getting personal e-mails about how folks can't get their image running asking me for help. They can't open a Cobalt browser, let alone use it to seek support. So what can we do RIGHT NOW to help these people out? A list-serv and an IRC channel is great and all, but there are additional tools that afford different kinds of interactivity and which are superior at supporting a community. In an effort to provide some moderation, here are the ongoing issues for this discussion thread: Nobody's dissed the ideas of a wiki and a forum, so I'm taking that as validation that those ideas are not bad. Please continue this discussion. Rich's idea about incorporating social networking needs to be discussed more. Using the current build of Cobalt for providing support needs to be discussed more. More ideas need to be submitted to the list. I'm getting all verklemmt so discuss amongst yourselves. -Matt |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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Using Cobalt to create a persistent meeting space poses some technical and logistical problems that I don't think will be resolved soon enough. I propose that we use Jabber (XMPP) as our main communication channel. The advantage to using Jabber vs. IRC is that there is already some support for Jabber in Cobalt. It's currently possible for someone running Adium or Pidgin (eventually gmail's chat) to communicate with people inside of any space. So rather than having a single persistent space we can create ad-hoc meeting spaces using Jabber to send Croquet "postcards" as invitations. -Peter On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Matthew Schmidt wrote:
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Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Wm Annis
I suggested something like that a while ago. I think we still need
the IRC channel for folks who cannot get started, but we also need at least one permanent stable croquet space for people to connect to and interact in, and a web page with pointers to the IRC channel and the various stable croquet spaces. Folks are making some nice tutorials and there are some nice data sets that have been made (but are not publically available) but we need some place to collect and collate that information. Sort of a google for croquet-space. Within the stable croquet world could be a series of portals to other stable worlds. The stable world would be a server on a public network and have a croquet space that resembles a virtual bizarre or park, with a bulletin board, some basic instructions and some portals to other worlds. It would be similiar to the intro world on second life, so new folks could get oriented. There would be other worlds with tutorials and AI entities to help folks get up to speed. It's just a thought. Janet PS It seems a lot of people are building large worlds for various grants, but I cannot seem to get access to those spaces or datasets. Is anyone making there worlds open for others to copy? On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Wm Annis <[hidden email]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Hans N Beck <[hidden email]> wrote: > > why not use Croquet/Cobalt for itself to build a community ? To use > > them as the medium ? > > Forgive me for making a me-too post, but I was thinking this yesterday. > How about have a portal in the "default place" that points somewhere > other people might be? The only non-theoretical interest I've ever had > in Croquet was when I ran across other actual humans tootling around > in the Collaborative for Croquet public world. > > -- > William S. Annis > www.aoidoi.org > |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Hans N Beck-2
The pre-alpha version isn't that stable yet. We should keep it as one of the eventual goals.
Darius On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:02 AM, Hans N Beck <[hidden email]> wrote: Hi, |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by RichWhite
Regarding Ning ...
My concerns may be unfounded, but because of Google's name recognition and pedigree, their Google Groups may have more access for those inside more secure systems than the obviously social chatty Ning site. We can regularly check our growing community's accessibility to Ning and review if its worth switching. I propose we stay with the Cobalt Google Groups for now. What community functionality do you think important for us which Ning provides and which we couldn't preform to some degree or another with Google Groups discussion forum, Google Groups pages (like a wiki), and Google Docs for spreadsheets, documents, and presentation? Cheers, Darius |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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Darius
We can regularly check our growing community's accessibility to Ning and review if its worth switching. I propose we stay with the Cobalt Google Groups for now. For the short term, I agree. What community functionality do you think important for us which Ning provides and which we couldn't preform to some degree or another with Google Groups discussion forum, Google Groups pages (like a wiki), and Google Docs for spreadsheets, documents, and presentation? Can't speak to Ning, but in terms of relying on Google Groups, I do not see that as a sustainable long-term solution. I see this as a branding issue and an identity issue. "Go to the Google Groups Cobalt discussion forum" doesn't hold a candle to "Hit the Cobalt forums, n00b." ;-) -Matt |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Janet Plato
Janet & others,
I can't answer your specific question, but taking a different perspective around the issue of creating a more coherent community around Cobalt, I anticipate that if people would make customized, larger worlds available, we'd see more interest in the project. I think that's Julian and Mark's vision with the current world that's available in the Cobalt build... but it is rather vanilla and more attractive to computer techy folks than to end users. We have input into Cobalt as part of its open source community, so what would you like to see in the Cobalt world? It might be productive not to think of this in terms of "I need VNC and a sweet web browser" but rather in terms of "I need spaces to play, spaces to work, and spaces to socialize... and here's what those spaces should look like and here's how those spaces should behave... And here's how my avatar should look and behave." Thoughts? |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Matthew Schmidt-2
I haven't posted all to much on this list,
and as a lurking croquet user I can deffinitivly confirm, that I have been dying for a Forum. I do hang out in the IRC channel, and it seems not as active as it should be. Perhaps it needs more promotion. However I do believe there is a need for both. IRC is a perfect medium when you want a quick response or some more direct interaction with each other. Forums great for the times IRC isn't providing it's quick response (if a user asks a question no one can answer, if after 1 hour the backlog pushes his question out of people's view, no one will ever answer. - people rarely scroll up). Another advantage to the forum medium, as with mailing lists, is that user questions and the answers that go with them are permanently stored for other people with the same problem. Most people are more comfortable with searching, navigating and posting on a forum than they are with mailing lists. A Wiki would be great to put some of the best or most frequent question/answers from the forums and irc in a website-like form with easy navigation sorted by topic. It is also a great medium for posting tutorials. All in all, I honestly think we need ALL of them. Really bad. We NEED a forum, we NEED irc, we NEED a wiki. I don't think it's a matter of choice of with which to go, we should go with all of them. They each serve a very unique purpose, and are essential tools in community building. Matthew Schmidt wrote: > I think the idea of using the Cobalt browser as a space for getting support > and building community is valid. However, my take is that the current build > needs to be built out of (at least) alpha before we can consider this a > viable idea. Hence the need for immediate tools for getting support. > > Case in point, I've been getting personal e-mails about how folks can't get > their image running asking me for help. They can't open a Cobalt browser, > let alone use it to seek support. So what can we do RIGHT NOW to help these > people out? A list-serv and an IRC channel is great and all, but there are > additional tools that afford different kinds of interactivity and which are > superior at supporting a community. > > In an effort to provide some moderation, here are the ongoing issues for > this discussion thread: > > Nobody's dissed the ideas of a wiki and a forum, so I'm taking that as > validation that those ideas are not bad. Please continue this discussion. > > Rich's idea about incorporating social networking needs to be discussed > more. > > Using the current build of Cobalt for providing support needs to be > discussed more. > > More ideas need to be submitted to the list. > > I'm getting all verklemmt so discuss amongst yourselves. > > -Matt > |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Matthew Schmidt-2
I'm new to the squeak/croquet world... Hi All! :)
On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Matthew Schmidt <[hidden email]> wrote:
When I first encountered croquet I envisioned a space where I could meet my role-playing buddies and play table-top role-playing games in the virtual world. I envisioned a table with a grid (a 3D grid would be awesome) and miniatures (characters, monsters, tables, chairs, trees, etc...). I also envisioned a container ("battle" chest) each avatar would use to keep his personal items ( other characters, etc). The game master could have access to a container where he could create replicas of monsters and other utilities that would prove useful. The miniature for my character can give me access to the character's character sheet and provide a number of visualizations to determine possible movement paths, line-of-sight for aimed effects, areas of effect, etc. I can ask the character to give me the dice I need to roll for a specific action (we still want the avatar to roll the dice since we are emulating table-top role-playing). Users would need to have a way to distinguish between out-of-character and in-character communication but simply having text and/or voice chat would be a good first start. It would also be nice to have the ability to distinguish between active participants and spectators... I think it would be fun and educational to see how others role-play. Of course, I'd like to be able to create multiple such spaces. Mostly likely, you'd only need one space per "gaming group" as you should be able to "pack up" once set of objects for a particular game for storage and pull out a second set for a second game. Anyway, I hope to build something like that. I'm in learn mode right now though and waiting for Croquet to mature a little more... perhaps it's time to find others who might find such a project fun... -- Edwin G. Castro |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Peter Moore-5
It doesn't seem like my Jabber idea has caught fire. Does it seem too inelegant? Too much work? Jabber provides a couple of things that Cobalt currently doesn't: presence and a "buddy list". You can see which members of the Cobalt community are online. You can join the meeting "room" to discuss issues. If you prefer to meet in a 3D space instead somebody simply has to launch Cobalt and send an invite to the Jabber "room". It really is that easy. The only part missing is a mime-type to associate the XML postcard you receive in your Jabber client with Cobalt. That way you could launch Cobalt and join the space from within your chat client (or your web browser). If we tried this today you'd have to copy and paste some XML from your chat client into a Cobalt window, but it does work. The real power of Cobalt/Croquet is that *anyone* can create a space that other people can join, but only if people know where to go. That is what Jabber provides. I think it was David Smith who called IM the "dial-tone of Croquet". If we want a persistent meeting space who is going to host it? Who is going to maintain it? I think the Croquet Collaborative was a good example of how difficult this can be. -Peter On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Peter Moore wrote:
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Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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On Mar 5, 2008, at 4:28 PM, Peter Moore wrote:
> It doesn't seem like my Jabber idea has caught fire. Does it seem > too inelegant? Too much work? > another good thing about leveraging Jabber IM is that it points toward a federated model of identity and legacy IM support. A jabber ID can provide a low-level of assurance identity which is available from multiple providers. Each one of those gmail accounts google is trying to cover the earth with is also a jabber-capable user. Higher Ed institutions are also running jabber servers, so this starts us toward the best of both worlds where the universities can use their existing jabber servers for buddies to locate either other online (across institional boundaries), and people without an affiliation can still play the game via google (and other) jabber servers/identities. And its all based on an open-source standards- based technology. Again - as Peter points out - we can encode a Croquet/Cobalt server location into an XML payload that can be sent over Jabber. So its easy to arrange ad-hoc meet ups and advertise presence while leveraging the existing jabber infrastructure. What's not like? :-) > Jabber provides a couple of things that Cobalt currently doesn't: > presence and a "buddy list". You can see which members of the > Cobalt community are online. You can join the meeting "room" to > discuss issues. If you prefer to meet in a 3D space instead > somebody simply has to launch Cobalt and send an invite to the > Jabber "room". It really is that easy. The only part missing is a > mime-type to associate the XML postcard you receive in your Jabber > client with Cobalt. That way you could launch Cobalt and join the > space from within your chat client (or your web browser). If we > tried this today you'd have to copy and paste some XML from your > chat client into a Cobalt window, but it does work. > > The real power of Cobalt/Croquet is that *anyone* can create a > space that other people can join, but only if people know where to > go. That is what Jabber provides. I think it was David Smith who > called IM the "dial-tone of Croquet". If we want a persistent > meeting space who is going to host it? Who is going to maintain it? > I think the Croquet Collaborative was a good example of how > difficult this can be. > > -Peter > > On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Peter Moore wrote: > >> Using Cobalt to create a persistent meeting space poses some >> technical and logistical problems that I don't think will be >> resolved soon enough. >> >> I propose that we use Jabber (XMPP) as our main communication >> channel. The advantage to using Jabber vs. IRC is that there is >> already some support for Jabber in Cobalt. It's currently possible >> for someone running Adium or Pidgin (eventually gmail's chat) to >> communicate with people inside of any space. So rather than having >> a single persistent space we can create ad-hoc meeting spaces >> using Jabber to send Croquet "postcards" as invitations. >> >> -Peter >> >> On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Matthew Schmidt wrote: >> >>> I think the idea of using the Cobalt browser as a space for >>> getting support and building community is valid. However, my take >>> is that the current build needs to be built out of (at least) >>> alpha before we can consider this a viable idea. Hence the need >>> for immediate tools for getting support. >>> >>> Case in point, I've been getting personal e-mails about how folks >>> can't get their image running asking me for help. They can't open >>> a Cobalt browser, let alone use it to seek support. So what can >>> we do RIGHT NOW to help these people out? A list-serv and an IRC >>> channel is great and all, but there are additional tools that >>> afford different kinds of interactivity and which are superior at >>> supporting a community. >>> >>> In an effort to provide some moderation, here are the ongoing >>> issues for this discussion thread: >>> >>> Nobody's dissed the ideas of a wiki and a forum, so I'm taking >>> that as validation that those ideas are not bad. Please continue >>> this discussion. >>> >>> Rich's idea about incorporating social networking needs to be >>> discussed more. >>> >>> Using the current build of Cobalt for providing support needs to >>> be discussed more. >> > |
Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Peter Moore-5
On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:28 PM, Peter Moore wrote:
I like Jabber much more now that I realize that iChat lets me log into and AOL account and a Jabber account at the same time (it disallows multiple AOL logins)
The first is NAT. Yes, solutions exist, but aren't yet integrated into Cobalt. The second is upstream bandwidth. I won't be able to invite too many friends into the space before my home DSL connection is saturated. Josh
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Re: How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?
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In reply to this post by Matthew Schmidt-2
I have quite a few thoughts on this, but since I am only doing a
small portion of the work I am afraid of coming off as pushy. The basic idea is that in order to suceed we need a large group. One man can have a vision, but you need a team to realize it. You get a team by holding up a vision of what could be, and showing people how they can help it become reality. I feel that a lot of people like me exist, that are enthusiastic but without the required coding skills. I can acquire those skills in time (I am an old school procedural language programmer) but many of these people can perform useful volunteer work without coding. These people are a huge resource if we can get them over the learning curve and get them making avatars, art, buildings, 3D meshes and other work. This should be going on in parallel with the coding. That is the point I keep pushing. Coding is vitally important, but getting the basic tutorials made to allow people to build worlds in parallel with coding is essential, so both tasks can continue at the same time. This requires a web site with documentation on downloading croquet images, getting started and connecting to a real world. This is largely done, but the world referenced in the getting started docs is no longer reachable. It also requires a place to go to find other people to interact with. IRC works, jabber works and a stable reference world could work. And finally it needs sample code and sample worlds for people to see what could be done. I had a lot of trouble finding examples worlds beyond "I am a rabbit being driven over a field" I was very sad to learn the arts metaverse folks made an entire ancient city, but there is no way to connect to it, or use the data sets they created. I do not want to sound negative. What has already been down exceeds my wildest expectations from a mere 20 years ago. But the open source paradigm, that people will contribute just for the joy of it, boggles the mind with what could become reality if we only make the tools to engage a fraction of the people willing to help. 9 billion hours of solitaire were played last year. If we can get the tools and tutorials to the small percentage of people eager to help, worlds will get built beyond our ability to imagine. I have not been active on the list, but I have been working on getting a server up and running and getting some of my friends involved in using it. If something comes of it, I'll post the results. Thanks to everyone who have worked to make what we have available. Cheers, Janet On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Matthew Schmidt <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Janet & others, > > > > PS It seems a lot of people are building large worlds for various > > grants, but I cannot seem to get access to those spaces or datasets. > > Is anyone making there worlds open for others to copy? > > > > I can't answer your specific question, but taking a different perspective > around the issue of creating a more coherent community around Cobalt, I > anticipate that if people would make customized, larger worlds available, > we'd see more interest in the project. I think that's Julian and Mark's > vision with the current world that's available in the Cobalt build... but it > is rather vanilla and more attractive to computer techy folks than to end > users. > > We have input into Cobalt as part of its open source community, so what > would you like to see in the Cobalt world? It might be productive not to > think of this in terms of "I need VNC and a sweet web browser" but rather in > terms of "I need spaces to play, spaces to work, and spaces to socialize... > and here's what those spaces should look like and here's how those spaces > should behave... And here's how my avatar should look and behave." > > Thoughts? > |
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