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A powerful experience in love, friendship, betrayal in a feat of dancing, music, story that will take you into deep places challenging how you live.

FOX is sensational on so many levels:-

- the brilliant Monkey Baa Thetre production team of Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge & Tim McGarry

- Siren Theatre’s Director Kate Gaul who brings power and raw emotion onto the stage

- the music by gifted composer Daryl Wallis creating an opera of our time 

- young powerful actors who give all in a play of exquisite movement and story

 - David Buckley DOG

- Jay Gallagher FOX

- Jane Phegan Magpie

-Sarah Jones Spirit and opera singer

As one of the three patrons of Monkey Baa Theatre – Morris Gleitzman, Jackie French and myself – I feel honoured to be associated with this outstanding theatre company. Congratulations to ARTS NSW, ARTS on Tour NSW, NSW Communities Arts NSW and Australia Council for being key sponsors and the Minister for the Arts Virginia Judge for speaking so supportively at the World Premiere.

FOX is at the Seymour this week, before it begins its 5 month tour around Australia from Darwin to Hobart to Perth. Have an experience that you will remember and see it: www.monkeybaa.com.au

Susanne getting ready for launch

What a special day with the extraordinary MonkeyBaa Theatre. The talent of the creative directors of MonkeyBaa  Tim McGarry, Eva di Cesare and Sandie Eldridge and the talents of the Australian theatre community took my breath away at the Premiere of Thursday’s Child at the Seymour Theatre Sydney.

Morris Glietzman, Jackie French and I accepted with pleasure the role of Patrons of MonkeyBaa Theatre on 15th May at the premiere. The theatre was packed, the energy high and everyone seemed to be there from actors, Australia Council, the NSW Arts bodies, directors, critics, theatre lovers, writers and creators. Launched by the Rt Hon Virigina Judge a Minister for the Arts NSW Government.  Loved it all.

For information on MonkeyBaa - www.monkeybaa.com.au

Morris Glietzman, Jackie French. Tim McGarry, Kerry Comerford

Premiere of MonkeyBaa’s adaptation of Sony Hartnett’s Thursday’s Child

Jackie French and Eva di Cesare

Another hot link to writing advice you should read. Today's link is to a wonderful article by Jackie French, one of Australia's finest writers for children. Her article How to get Your First Novel Published explains brilliantly the need to write and rewrite, target your submission and much more. You can read this excellent advice here.

I’ve added ten new reviews to Aussiereviews. Three of the ten cover themes and content focussing on Australia’s experiences in the two world wars and/or the celebration of ANZAC Day, which is very timely given that ANZAC Day is coming up later in the month. It was interesting to read two books for young adults – one (A Rose for the ANZAC Boys, by Jackie French) which tells the tale of a sixteen

Martin Wattenberg - ManyEyes
http://www.many-eyes.com/
part of the goal was to democratize visualization
saw a lot of political usage
saw citizen activism
also saw play
eg, tag cloud of Shakespeare’s favorite words was used to highlight specific words to create poetic phrases
blogs as a social “petri dish”
maybe the goal is connectivity, placed on blog where conversation can be pushed
there’s some competitive uploading now that is political
have a very conservative person on the site right now who is challenging them with what could be considered a rant in a different format about how you interact with data

you are a blogger - Anil Dash
we don’t get far outside of our world, and as a result, we don’t create tools outside of it
blogging is hip-hop
hip hop is currently driving our culture
links are beats
the core of the behavior we have is sampling; is still considered subversive
both are still seen as not being a legitimate art form
Apple - rip | mix | burn
turntables outsell guitars
we’re also not buying printing presses a lot
the reaction when hip hop came out is “that’s not music”
we had the same reaction to blogs - it’s not media
what we can learn is that we can see where the threats are going to come from

we link to content that eventually gets pulled down
the companies frown on the fact that you are the vehicle of distribution
they will railroad us if we let them
hip hop is more than just rap - it’s freestyling
graffiti is OpenID
the ability to be entrepreneurial
outsiders don’t get it - we have to pay attention
violence and misogyny are what rappers were knwon for
we’re seen as medium, not manners, by outsiders
have to think about the implications of tools
“conscious” is a genre

Justin Kan - Justin.tv
started out as a 24/7 broadcast of his life to the internet
at first, walked around trying to entertain people 24/7
was like a roller coaster ride to internet fame
first lesson he learned is that there are a lot of assholes on the internet when they had the police bust in on him at home
building a platform to let anyone do this online - almost ready to open it up to anyone to live broadcast
thinks we’ll see a huge number of video broadcasts that will violate copyright

Teen Second Life at a Glance (Don’t touch mah bukkit) - Lane Lawley
showed his house in TSL
reason #1 he can’t live on the ground in TSL
1 - public school; thinks schools should provide better technological education; he still hasn’t been taught Powerpoint in school yet, maybe it will happen when he’s 18
2 - lack of advertisements; HTML is making a comeback in his world because of MySpace

communities in TSL
- scripting; very few good scripters in TSL
- building; slightly larger community because easier to learn; get a sense of creation without having to learn as much
- social: on TSL to do things they do in RL (shop, be with friends, etc.)
- educational: usually owned by adults; teens in social communities have no interest in the educational one

interaction
- scripting + building

judgment day - the day Teen Second Life residents turn 18, and are transferred to main SL
the system is supposed to do it, but it doesn’t happen “overnight”
teens look forward to getting on the main grid because it’s so much larger

Liz: her big frustration is that she can’t play SL with her son; no socialization into the bigger world
“it takes a guild to raise a child” - how important it is that her son can learn from adults, mentors, peers in one place
so she doesn’t play in SL because she can’t be in either world with her son

Ben Gross - How Many

How many?
- email addresses do you have?
- IM networks are you on?
- phone numbers do you have?
- logins to websites do you have?

why do people have multiple identifiers?
it’s commonplace and mundane to have all of these things now
separation of personal and professional, separating out social groups
a category of “that’s my spam account,” which is really trusted and known versus not trusted or not known
focusing attention or limiting interruption for your work
permanence and continuity - your college account is likely to outlive any ISP account

“the odds”
“I got my name”
people are more likely to remember their passwords because they use the same one on each service, whereas they’re unlikely to remember their usernames/logins because they’re different on each one

implications
- usability
- workarounds
- side effects
- security implications

Elizabeth Churchill
interested in cultures of privacy and how we come to know what we’re allowed to share and what we’re not
me putting up my friend’s picture is different than her putting it up
how people manage what they share with others
did some interviews with people asking if they understand privacy settings in Flickr
chart of Flickr sharing by age
60% of the people didn’t change the defaults at all (which means 40% do)
1 in 12 doesn’t share pictures at all
younger people share more
chart of photo sharing by connectedness - the more you put in your profile, the more you tend to share your pictures
map visualizing sharing across the world
interested in volatility - what makes you take something down
can you retract things?
how do our literacies develop around privacy, sharing, etc.

Flickr is about:
- documenting (personal and collective memory)
- competition (status)
- affiliation (group membership)
- learning (emulating)
- curiosity/voyeurism
- awareness (near and far)

Looking for Group - Kevin Slavin
if we spend time in the worlds of these games, what happens when we extract these types of dynamics we’re used to in these worlds into the real world?
people who share space should share experiences
it’s one of the powerful things the software we have should do
it’s about changing the conditions we’re in when we’re together

he lives in a co-op in Brooklyn, lived there for 4 years before a crisis came up
before the crisis, he thought of the people who lived in the building as neighbors; now as shareholders
he set up a Yahoo group for them to help them all communicate
“I broke my building”
termites appeared in one apartment - whose problem is it?
painting the walls - “this is where you see democracy fall to bits”
showed email messages to the Yahoo Group
residents started writing graffiti on the walls because the Yahoo group wasn’t anonymous
there was no in-fighting until the Yahoo group
these types of groups let you tweak your identity
email is how we work all day, so thinks they became their work identities at home because now they were using email to communicate
took those identities out of the office and into everyday life
the end of rolelessness - they were just neighbors until this, had no roles
email has rules that are different than the rules of everyday life
there are rules of proximity that are fundamentally different than how we express ourselves in email
the online rules broke the real world
what was removed was a sense of civility - what did that?
the tone changed when it became one-to-many, rather than one-to-one; the communication went public
they weren’t anonymous, but they became their email selves, which has more to do with how they spend their day
Kevin suggested shutting down the list pretty quickly, but the others asked him not to (they felt like they were winning, etc.)
things only changed six months ago when a common event caused suffering for everyone and it wasn’t any one person’s fault - that’s when they became civil again

Anything but Routine: Games and the Post-Bureaucratic Institution - Thomas Malaby
what happens when an organization tries to run itself like a game
bureaucracy
every moment will fit into a category

what we mean by rules (sources of constraint)
- laws (contracts)
- architecture
- social convention
- the market

games also use these forms of control, too
they are supposed to generate indeterminate outcomes; no one knows ahead of time

Second Life
Linden Labs is in an unusual position on this control because they don’t know where it will end up
“let emergent effects reign”

a dilemma follows from this, though - still have to run the company by the same ideals
- it’s ethical commitment to open-ended creation runs counter to the classically bureaucratic approach; also can’t go the charismatic leader route
- by extension, this mut also ideally govern how Linden Lab operates - it too must be anti-bureaucratic
- the result? a crisis of legitimate decision-making

so they turned to Arpad Elo, a mathmetician, who gave them a way to rank players
they ended up putting every task in Jira software (because the head of the company said they would do this); employees picked a winner from the tasks, which generated a ranking of what they would work on
turned to game techniques to make decisions

“ludic bureaucracy” - lingering questions
- is this the new institution for the Digital Age?
- how legitimate are the outcomes/decisions reached by game techniques?

they exited the system after less than a month

Rules - Kathy Sierra

Timeline:
1. blog comments
2. ‘mean kids’ site
3. email exchanges
4. ‘mean kids’ comes down
5. unclebobism appears
6. police
7. I blog it
7.5. retaliation
8. media nightmare
9. offline

why did it become such a big story?
direct result of her visibility?

she tried to analyze it, including what people called the whole thing

internet “rules”
1. don’t feed the trolls (but it escalated because they were trying to get a reaction
2. if it’s on the net, it’s not a REAL threat (this is what people told her)
3. you own your own words (and nobody else’s); question: are you responsible for comments others make on your blog?
4. civility = censorship
5. “if you want to be on the internet, grow a pair”
6. online friends are “real” friends… and can be trusted (site owners involved didn’t know who was posting)

psychological “rules”
the brain has a mind of its own
1. anonymity - “the greater internet fuckwad theory”
part of the problem is the brain’s “illusion of invulnerability”
people who survive horrific scenarios have less of this illusion of invulnerability
2. anyone can be seduced by situational forces and group dynamics
“the lucifer effect” - The Stanford Prison Experiment & The Stanley Milgram Obedience Studies
it can happen almost instantly

the persuasive power of social proof - it’s why advertising works
“if he’s doing it, it must be okay to do”

Doc Searls took down his blogroll because it put him one degree away from someone behind the mean sites

we can use the power of social proof
1. code of conduct - not even explicit; eg, Javaranch registration terms of service, which consist of “be nice.” “no dumb questions” and “no dumb answers;” moderators keep the tone
2. who we recommend - remember that our readers perceive links as endorsements, even if we don’t mean them to be
be aware of what can appear to be acceptance, tacit approval, or even celebration
most importantly, be mindful of your brain’s deceptions

a good rule: less bark, more wag

Joi Ito
We Know/We No Forums for his WoW guild
used to work as a DJ in a club and sees many of the same issues in online forums
in the past, if you could do it in the game, it was okay - finding the hack was okay; designers worked to keep out the hacks
now, though, Blizzard’s terms of service states that just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you can - they will still ban you
issue of buying gold outside of the game to use in-game
Blizzard uses the terms subjectively when they want to
so the guild had to create a long set of rules for how to handle gold
best metaphors are the nightclub and church ones - it can become unfun and unravel very quickly
Joi is a dictator about the metaphors only in terms of running the forums
corporate metaphor completely fails (because what you do isn’t based on your job)

Law & Virtual Worlds - Greg Lastowka
low stakes in virtual worlds right now, but may change
Four parties involved: two players, the owner of the platform, and the state
player investments = time and money
owners investment = time and money and technological control
state = generally not invested

looked at 5 different possible scenarios of problems and whether the state intervenes or not
fifth scenario involves a fifth party and stolen copyright/trademark

2 big questions
1 - legally, what is a virtual world? (what is it like?)
2- how do the optimal rules for virtual worlds differ?

we need a more sophisticated framework for applying law to virtual worlds

virtual worlds as communities, games, fictions
not really special if they’re just online communities
state defers more to community self-ordering (game rules), but may intervene in the case of games
for fiction, the state has substantial deference to all aspects of virtual worllds - owners are privileged speakers (eg, theater); possible defense to keeping the state out of virtual worlds

what is an “optimal” policy for ludic ordering? (game, contract, state)
regulation by state - classic legal rule, generally “uniform”
customizable as contracts, though (EULAs, private agreements)
so the question is are games somehow special?
game rules - efficient, arbitrary, state’s role if they are arbitrary? who decides?