On Saturday May 31st, the Overte Foundation and Avacon have announced the Second Annual OpenSimulator Community Conference, with a press release on the announcement being circulated via e-mail on Tuesday June 3rd.

The conference will take place on the OpenSimulator Conference Centre grid on November 8th and 9th, 2014. It will be a celebration of the platform and the large and varied community using it. As such, it will feature two days of talks and presentations across four tracks, keynote speakers, panels and social events.

Anyone who is interested in the OpenSimulator software and the future of the metaverse is invited to attend, as well as OpenSimulator developers, grid administrators, and members of the community who participate on OpenSimulator grids.

The four presentation tracks will comprise:

Business & Enterprise: sessions will cover a broad range of topics on doing business in and with OpenSimulator. These include grid hosting, third-party development, private entrepreneurs, in-world and enterprise businesses, and also corporations and organizations using the platform for marketing, fundraising, product research, focus groups, etc

Content & Community: this track will examine different aspects of content (e.g. large scale immersive art installations, ballet, theatre, performance art, machinima, literary arts, clothing designs, virtual fashions, architecture, music performances and other cultural expressions) and community (e,g, role-playing groups, science fiction communities, virtual towns and interest groups, historical explorations, religious and spiritual communities, book clubs, etc.), within OpenSimulator

Developers & Open Source: will encompassing the technical aspects of OpenSimulator, and seeks presentations related to servers, viewers, external components, grid architecture, development, administration, and anything necessary to the installation, operation and use of an OpenSimulator system

Research & Education: seeks presentations regarding the use of OpenSimulator in research applications in computer science, engineering, data visualization, ethnography, psychology, and economics. It will additionally feature sessions that cover a broad range of uses related to teaching and learning in and with OpenSimulator

In addition, the conference will feature a new Learning Lab area. which will be available for hackerspaces, speed builds, and workshops for hands-on learning experiences guided by experts in the OpenSimulator community.

The Call for Proposals for all four tracks and the Learning Lab is now open, and all proposals should be submitted by July 1st, 2014.

Commenting on the event in the announcement, conference chair and organiser Chris Collins (Feep Tuque in OpenSim) said:

Last year’s conference was a terrific success with over 350 attendees from 45 unique grids and over 1000+ commits to the core code, which made OpenSimulator a much more stable and scalable platform.

This year we hope to build on that success by offering more opportunities for the community to be involved and doing more outreach to attract new users. With all the hype surrounding the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality technologies, we think this is the perfect time to let the VR community know that OpenSimulator is a great platform for building the open metaverse.

Further information on the conference will be made available in due course – including details of keynote speakers, volunteer registrations, etc. Registrations will open on September 15th, 2014.

Sponsorship and Crowdfunding Campaign

While the conference is being held in virtual space, it does incur some expenses (such as the professionally managed set-up and operation of the conference grid and the streaming and other web services). As such, the organisers are seeking sponsorship from businesses, entrepreneurs, and community members alike to help support the conference through a range of sponsorship opportunities, which have this year been updated and revised to better meet the needs of sponsors.

In addition, the conference is running a Crowdfunder Campaign to allow those wishing to make smaller donations to do so. Some unique rewards are on offer to those participating in the campaign, the full details of which can be found on the Crowdfunder Campaign page.

About the Organisers

The Overte Foundation is a non-profit organization that manages contribution agreements for the OpenSimulator project. In the future, it will also act to promote and support both OpenSimulator and the wider open-source 3D virtual environment ecosystem.

AvaCon, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth, enhancement, and development of the metaverse, virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3D immersive and virtual spaces. We hold conventions and meetings to promote educational and scientific inquiry into these spaces, and to support organized fan activities, including performances, lectures, art, music, machinima, and much more. Our primary goal is to connect and support the diverse communities and practitioners involved in co-creating and using virtual worlds, and to educate the public and our constituents about the emerging ecosystem of technologies broadly known as the metaverse.

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Gource visualisation posted by nebadon2025 charting the growth of the OpenSimulator project by code commits from core developers up until the time of the 2013 conference