NPSL: Nonprofits in Second Life

Tonight Frank gave a group of us a turorial on how to manage the land in our little community. Having never thought about what goes into managing a sim before, I was impressed by how well thought out the system actually is. I'll probably start out by using WESTAF as a guinea pig to reset the name and so forth, but once I've got it under my belt let me know if you, a tenant, needs help. I'm happy to see what I can do for you.

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Offices are being allocated to the tenants and it looks like we might start furnishing very soon. If you are interested in who is being housed where, check out the Flickr page below and mouse over the image.

NPSL (Thanks Missouri Humanities Council!)

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I often get asked "How do you find out what non-profits are active in Second Life?" There is an enormous variety of non-profit, socially conscious, humanitarian and activist actions going on every day, but they are not always easy to find. Given the wide range of activities, there is not one definitive list of non-profits available as far as I know. That's how big Second Life is.

Here are some suggestions of where to start though:

Greg left a note mentioning the free monitoring service, Monastic. It doesn't have as much functionality as SiteUpTime.com, but you can monitor 100 sites. If all you are doing is trying to track when your site(s) are down then it seems like this might be a better solution than SiteUpTime. So, as an experiment I have both monitoring systems monitoring the Tech Soup in Second Life site. If I have any revelations, I'll share.

Recently I had an Skype message from Susan, our "nonprofit administrator herder" for the Nonprofits in Second Life project. I have to assume that she was posting to the site, or perhaps reading some recent content. In any case, she IMed me because the site was down. I'm acting as the Web master, so this made good sense. I probed a little bit and came to the conclusion that the server was completely unresponsive.

Today we were introduced to the nonprofit commons and the offices associated with them. As I've written before, Tech Soup, part of CompuMentor, is helping organize an amazing conglomerate, on Second Life, of nonprofits. The land donor, anshe chung studios, has done an amazing job creating a truly breath taking space.

The donation of the land is significant, but add the amount of programming hours that have gone into the sim and then the $200 or so it costs to maintain per month...well it is an amazing gift.

The commons has an amphitheatre for meetings, events and so forth. As you can see, the space is vast and the environment is pretty amazing.

The office spaces are huge. I'm not sure how we are going to furnish ours without the furniture becoming lost.

I think that the final product will truly rock and will generate lots of attention.

So, stay tuned and be ready to take a step inworld. I think it will be worth it.

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We are a group of nonprofit employees and volunteer friends of nonprofits who believe that there is merit and much potential in collaboarating and working in Second Life. Our group lauched in May of 2006, under the leadership of TechSoup.org, the technology website for nonprofits.

Since our inception, we have held weekly meetings, every Friday from 8:30am-9:30am. We now hold these meetings in the Nonprofit Commons, our sim dedicated entirely to providing free space to nonprofit organizations.