mtl3p

This is an email that I sent to the World Summit Free Information Infrastructure mailing list. If you care about any of the stuff that I write about that is not personal - please read this. It’s something I’ve been thinking (and worrying) about for years. Recently I picked up the idea because of the WSFII conference, a post by Joi which set me off, and some important conversations over the last 2 years with Boris - who is the one that proposed that we call this the immersive web.

I would love to get feedback from some of you on this.

(The Rob and Matt mentioned below are Rob Flickenger and Matt Westervelt - two of the people who started the whole community wifi movement).
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subject: We’re forgetting 3d

I’ve been putting off sending an email here for a week now. Instead of waiting for the time to write an essay, I’ll just fire off a few points. This is not something I feel 100% sure about because I haven’t discussed it enough, but I thought that you would be the right people to tell get feedback from.

A) I tried to talk to a lot of people during the conference and I don’t know if anyone there could really comfortable articulate what free information infrastructures are. That’s a problem - not least of which because it makes it difficult to attract allies. But also it’s a problem because it means we don’t really know what we’re working towards.

Why are projects like: Munich adopting open source, theyworkforyou, mesh networks, ipod linux, google mashups, and creative commons similar? I can *feel* the answer, but I have a lot of trouble articulating it. I think the organizers were geniuses in their vision of bringing these people together, but they failed to supply a political argument for the overlap of players that they assembled.

B) Because of that absence of a political vision/argument, we haven’t really identified what we’re working towards (and against). Until we know more precisely what we’re trying to do, we’re going to make mistakes because we can’t see the situation clearly.

C) Mistake: we forgot about open-source 3d-environments (gaming). We are having lots of success currently on the web know in terms of open-source development, open (and mostly adhered to) standards, a powerful sense of “web-ecology”, creative commons of content, etc. This leads us to be hopeful and optimistic for the future. But what (IMHO) we’re forgetting is that there is a very large chance that the future of the web/internet comes from gaming, and not from the current web/internet.

Even if most of us aren’t gamers, if we’re serious about this Free Information Infrastructures stuff, we can’t ignore the success of stuff like WoW and particularly Second Life. Not their financial success, but the success of their uptake. And the success of their tools (they work really well from the point of view of user satisfaction).

The other reason that we may have ignored this paticular battle (that’s what I think it is) is that we don’t know how we can compete with this. After all, these games take hundreds of people several years to complete, and running them is hugely expensive.

But we’ve showed that we are getting better and better at collaborating across huge projects. From developping artistic content, to writing code, to doing evangelization/marketing - we’re getting better day-by-day.

I think if we had realized the political importance of what we are attempting to do (and already succeeding at in many ways) that we would have seen projects like Rob and Matt’s online course in Second Life with an enormous sense of alarm.

Read what Rob said about his project (an an interactive training course *in* Second Life that covers networking and wireless issues):

. . . “I know, I know, this looks like a complete and utter waste of time, money, and bandwidth. Don’t let all that talk of video games fool you. SL only a video game in the same way that the web is a video game… Think of it as a communications platform and hosting service. Think of it as what VRML should have been and what Metaverse might someday become.”

He’s right. But it’s educational material that’s being created in someone else’s proprietary world. And even if he did have legal ownership rights to that content, it’s not like he can take it and host it somewhere else.

Where is our movement towards an free/open alternative?

It doesn’t matter if the whole world is a beautiful mesh network if we all have to log into Blizzard or Ubisoft every morning to work.

We need a open-standard, open-source immersive environment alternative. It has to be federated or P2P to deal with resource needs (as well as to prevent undue centralization). And it has to have an upgrade path that doesn’t mean starting from scratch every 2 years.This is an almost overwhelming task, but 1) we’re getting really good at those (ex: linux, wikipedia), and 2) it might be our only option. Because if we don’t take it on, then we’re going to just have to hope that market-wise it shakes out that the big guys agree on open-standards between themselves instead of each of them going for the whole pie, and that’s definitely far from being a sure thing. That would be hoping for market fragmentation and there are certain forces like social networks and proprietary content which - combined with huge startup costs and a corresponding inability to “roll your own” - could prevent that from happening - or at least delay it’s occurence.

And I apologize if it seems like I’m trying to sensationalize this issue. I’ve been thinking and worrying about it since the conference (and about the importance of open-source MMORPG’s for years before this).

I would really appreciate any comments/thoughts any of you might have on this. As I said, I’m not 100% convinced that I’m right about this - but you all are probably some of the best people in world to ask.

Sincerely,
Michael Lenczner

Relevent links:
Rob’s blog post
http://nocat.net/~rob/secondlife/cabling.html

Joi Ito’s had a few posts around this:
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/10/10/web_x0.html

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/02/04/croquet_the_os_of_the_future.html

If any of you are interested in this - we’ve just started to tag relevant stuff as “immweb” (immersiveweb)
http://del.icio.us/tag/immweb

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 5:22 pm and is filed under but seriously. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.