Thank you, Jupiter, for sharing the call for volunteers at the Virtual Worlds Museum. We need the community to volunteer and help shape the future.

As a champion of virtual worlds, here are my thoughts on the VW Museum's team.

Tom Boellstorff is on the Virtual Worlds Museum team. He has written several books on the importance of virtual worlds in our lives. He attends OSCC, conducts research, teaches at Stanford, and presents at VWBPE.org. He is an anthropologist and sensitive to what makes virtual worlds vibrant.

Here is Tom's famous documentary about how empowering virtual worlds are when our bodies make it hard for us to follow our dreams.

Our Digital Selves: My Avatar is Me: http://www.ourdigitalselves.com/documentary/

Boellstorff and Donna Davis conducted a 3-year study with 13 persons with disabilities whose lives are empowered and transformed by the virtual world, whether they are in Second Life or OpenSimulator.

The participants included members of Opensim and Kitely, and one attends the Core Developer meetings.

Champions alone cannot make the difference. We need everyone to volunteer and support this effort.

We can only do so much as champions of this amazing world that we love. We need each of you to help make a difference and spread the word.

Please volunteer and support the Virtual Worlds Museum and other projects that strengthen our world.

My best guesses as to why they may not know much about OpenSim are two.

One, OpenSim is too obscure. It doesn't try hard enough to make itself known.

Look at all those several metaverse initiatives and whatnot. OpenSim doesn't have a representative there. OpenSim is completely absent from there. OpenSim is completely unknown there. People are planning an open and decentralised metaverse, and they're bound to repeat mistakes that OpenSim has already made because absolutely nobody there has ever heard of OpenSim.

Also, look at those various metaverse/virtual world news outlets. There's only one that ever talks about OpenSim, and that's Hypergrid Business which was made to talk about OpenSim in the first place and which largely specialises in OpenSim. All the others, even those few that occasionally talk about Second Life, never have any OpenSim news. The reason for that isn't because OpenSim has no news. Instead, at least one doesn't know where to get OpenSim news. The others, plain and simply, don't know that OpenSim exists.

Two, OpenSim is too fractured.

Everywhere else, you get everything from one hand. Everywhere else, you have the same entity behind the development of the server backend, behind the development of what users install on their devices to enter that particular virtual world (or the Web interface if it's browser-based) and behind the actual operation of the virtual world. Even in Vircadia and Overte, both of which are decentralised, too. And the people behind all this are also spokespeople whom you can interview, whom you can ask questions about everything because they are behind everything.

Oh, and they'll gladly advertise their product.

Now look at OpenSim. The server backend has about five spare-time, hobbyist devs. Only one of them is an actual coder because he doesn't allow anyone else's code in anymore. The others are mostly testers.

None of them does anything else, though. None of them is a spokesperson for OpenSim. None of them does any kind of public relation or advertising, not beyond the OSCC anyway, and the OSCC happens entirely within the OpenSim bubble. Wanna talk to them? Go find the OpenSim developers' IRC channel, join it and hope you're noticed.

Even if you do manage to get into contact with them, you can't talk with them about the whole OpenSim ecosystem and about the worlds themselves. None of that is any of their business. They don't run worlds. They don't even develop any kind of end-user frontend. All they do is develop the server backend, and that's all.

The grids are run by entirely different people. And there are over 3,000 grids, all with their own admins, fully independent from one another and sometimes actually directly competing. Nothing and nobody rules over all of them. And there is no "official" grid. So you don't have any one specific officially appointed person to talk to when it comes to all the grids as opposed to each grid for itself.

The closest thing there is to an official grid is OSgrid. It was the first public grid. It's the oldest grid. And it used to be the biggest grid with the most users. For many newbies who didn't know that OpenSim is decentralised, OSgrid was OpenSim. On top of all that, OSgrid is the last big grid that, as far as I know, runs vanilla OpenSim (if it runs). All the other major grids run forks, or they have their own proprietary, closed-source patches that they'd only share with official OpenSim development if it accepted patches in the first place.

But OSgrid is terrible in outward communication. The current crisis has shown this. OSgrid seems to mostly rely on Discord which requires an account to even read anything. The forums are dead. The blog is slow, if things happen there at all, and it isn't advertised anywhere. And so I'd be very surprised if OSgrid had a viable contact for interviews or the like.

In general, even if someone did get to talk to a representative of a grid which in most cases will be an admin, that representative wouldn't talk about all of OpenSim fairly and objectively. Rather, they'd advertise their own grid first and foremost. Especially for big commercial grids, this is likely, but also for non-commercial grids that have power-tripping admins, that are entangled in some kind of inter-grid feud, that try to sell themselves as stand-alone walled garden worlds rather than part of the Hypergrid, or simply that use that talk as an advantage in the competition against other grids.

Expect not exactly few of them to intentionally badmouth other grids or even lie about them. It's too easy to get away with it if your interviewer knows zilch about the OpenSim community and takes every last one of your words at face value.

It looks like we've only got few people who are not only sufficiently neutral, but who know enough other people, who know and have been to enough other places and who have been around for long enough to really know their way around OpenSim and the Hypergrid and have stories to tell. But they're far from being the faces of OpenSim. They aren't part of the OpenSim development team, and they aren't at the top of a huge grid that everyone knows either. Basically, only people who are really deep into OpenSim have even ever heard of them, and not even nearly all of these have. To everyone else, they're completely unknown.

To be honest - I would say if it doesn't know about Open Simulator then it hasn't really done its research. It's not hard to find out about Opensim and I would expect something like this to look to see what is "out there".

Opensim has its issues (mainly regarding politics of each grid in my opinion) but it's not a secret or hidden.

You know, that sort of says something significant about OpenSim if a "virtual world museum" doesn't have it on it's radar screen. Makes me wonder what criteria OpenSim failed to fulfill.

What an interesting thing to do!

Never heard of it..

Go us! - Let me know if we can help.