This weekend at Stanford a lot of interesting people will show up at Stanford to think about the metaverse. Some are scheduled to speak some are not. I would like to be this conversation as wide as possible and give a lot of members of our community at Stanford and beyond a chance to speak up as well. Imagine how cool it would be if a bunch of us spoke about how we see the metaverse right here right now and made a kind of time capsule out of this?

By a strange twist of fate the AMGEN tour takes place around Stanford this coming weekend alongside Metaverse U. This means that there will be a lot of people in the area and some roads will be closed. We have been working with our campus Parking and Transportation department to figure out the best solution. Please visit the Driving Directions page to see how to best get there and make sure you set some extra time aside for transport. This is also as good as an excuse an any to carpool so I have setup a section for this in our new wiki.

This coming weekend really is a perfect storm of metaverse events. Friday the 15th we are hosting an invite only Metaverse Roadmap event and over the next two days Metaverse U will be happening. Whether or not you are signed up for any of these events you are hereby formally invited to join a bunch of us for something nice and social this coming Friday (Febr. 15th). At 6 in the evening we will be at the British Bankers Club in Menlo Park for some food and drink. If you want to give a heads up about being there then go to Upcoming. Questions and comments should be aimed at the good mister Jerry Paffendorf - jerrypaffendorf@accelerating.org

On the web we have seen how easy to use tools have empowered the communities who collaborate around them. When I look at blogs and wikis I really see social content machines and have often wondered what the metaverse equivalents might look like. Jon Brouchoud and Ryan Schultz have set out to explore this question through a series of experiments, using Second Life as a platform for real life architectural collaboration. Under the banner Wikitecture they want to harness the power of mass collaboration and collective intelligence to improve the quality of architecture and city planning. 

Check this out! Saturday at 5:15 after our regular conference program we will be screening Douglas Gayeton's documentary, "Molotov Alva and his Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey." This groundbreaking piece of machinima was recently acquired by HBO. I am very pleased that they have been good enough to let us a show a special 30 minute cut of this yet unreleased film. As a substantial bonus we will have Douglas on site for a Q&A after the screening so go check out the trailer and start thinking about what you want to ask him. (Please note that only people at the actualy meatspace conference will be able to see the film due to external restrictions).

I am very happy to announce that live video from every session at our conference will be streamed into Second Life for free. There are many members of our community who for whatever reason cannot make it to Stanford on February 16th and 17th. We wanted to give them the chance to take part in Metaverse U. After the hump I will explain some of our thinking behind this and let you know where to go to attend. 

With the final confirmations just rolling in our scheduled program for Metaverse U is now live. I am looking at two pretty full days with a lot of hope for an interesting event. Our list of speakers have turned out pretty well I think and I am looking forward to the thoughts they will provoke. Not one has been asked to present a paper or even give a title of their talk. I have often found that conferences put forward a theme and then people will try and squeeze their own agenda into this. In trying to embrace this fact I have asked them to speak about something they felt passionate about. As with a lot of aspects of Metaverse U this is an attempt to rethink how we can make conferences interesting in a connected world. Watch this space for some more announcements along these lines over the coming weeks!

At Metaverse U we plan to have 4 “key” conversations. The idea is to put people with different perspectives on a given topic together and also let them pick up on themes that have come up during the conference. I am very excited to announce that in one of these will feature a conversation between Howard Rheingold, Cory Ondrejka and Raph Koster. I am really curious about what it really means when we get the ability form these virtual communities and had the amazing luck of having the top 3 names on my list agree to come have the conversation about this.

Last week I had a phone conversation with Cisco's Christian Renaud about participation in Metaverse U. He asked the natural question about what we were trying to accomplish with the conference. I went about explaining this to him in my own long winded fashion. Christian politely sat through this and by the end of it he said: "At Cisco we have two kinds of meetings: First we have Reporting Meetings where we share experiences from the work we have done but we also have Working Meetings where conversation and exchanges of ideas actually occur. It sounds like you are trying to do a Working Conference."

It has now been almost a month since we announced Metaverse U and February 16th and 17th is now about a month away, so I thought I give a super quick update on things:

• Our agenda is coming together nicely so watch this space for some announcements very soon.
• The registrations are rolling in a nice steady stream which feels really good.
• We have also been able to sign on some new sponsors which should ensure that are our admin people can get their beauty sleep.
• I have setup a Metaverse U Facebook Event page. This is a good place to tell the world you are coming and see who you can get to meet at the conference.