Day 50

Day 50 06/12/10 -

Dear All,

Day 50 already; we are half way now in our 100-day count-down/count-up
to the Nova Scotia retreat.

Being just in between the San Francisco retreat and the Nova Scotia
retreat, it is a nice time to reflect on all the vibrant developments
we have seen over the last few months.

Most importantly, our wiki is now safe and sound in its new location,
thanks to Fael and Calvino and others who have done a lot of work in
preparing the ground and then carrying over the whole wiki, with all
the thousands of pages in there, with almost no glitch. Frankly, I
had expected much more disruption, and I'm very pleased that everything
went so smoothly. And the move was terribly important: we had heard
that the free hosting site where we were was going to shut down its
services this year, and it could have happened at any time. Such a
relief to have everything now on our very own server, so that we are
no longer dependent on any other party (apart from the company from
which we rent server time; but that is a general commodity, and moving
our own software set up from the current server to a different server
will be trivial compared to the move we did on June 4).

Also very important and stimulating are the many new initiatives,
such as Blue's Art of Being, and most recently Being in/as Time
exhibits. Then there are the workshops that Liza organized, the
dream circle that spontaneously formed around Lucinda and others,
the voice events that Yaku introduced, as well as other activities.

On the organizational front, I'm really grateful for all the work
that the Working Group is putting in now, with Eliza as the chair,
soon to be replaced by Eos, and in addition Storm, Bleu, Calvino,
and SophiaSharon, who is also taking care of the PaB Chronicles.
I know how much work is involved, and I'm glad to have a break now
from it all myself, allowing me to focus more on my astrophysics
research than I have been able to do for a few years. In addition,
while I'm on sabbatical this fall in Japan, I hope to write more
about PaB, in the form of a book manuscript.

And then there is the other infrastructure work, without which
things wouldn't be able to run: all the work that Storm is putting
in, literally creating everything in sight, most recently the
Village Square; and all the work that Wol continues to do on the
PaB listener, without which logging would be such a chore. Which
brings me to the (almost) 28 guardians who each take care of a
weekly slot, as well as numerous scribes, most recently Adams adn
Agatha jumping in, and others helping out in various ways.

Thank you all so very much for keeping PaB so lively!
I don't know the precise statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised
if Play as Being is the single organization in SL with the
largest number of weekly meetings -- might be fun some day to
check, and then to claim that `title' :-)

Cheers,
Pema