Lunarez

the metaverse space agency

First core team meeting

Attended: Melanie, Pablo, Giulio, the 3 Davids and Soph for a few minutes. Giulio gave a PPT presentation with ideas and question marks and there was a lively brainstorming on project definition and fine-tuning, technologies, organizational structure, community, PR and of course fundraising. Some conclusions:

The two parts of the project: the actual lunar mission and the associated edutainment and advocacy activities, should be integrated but must be considered as two separate and parallel tracks.

Using collaboration oriented, participatory 2.0 technologies not only for VR meetings and software development but also for the actual design and rapid prototyping of mission hardware concepts (Mindstorms and fabbing) is a defining feature of this project that can make it very attractive to 2.0-oriented potential collaborators and supporters. Much and perhaps even all mission hardware, software and strategies should be open-sourced.

The project is, of course, going to cost a lot of money, so fundraising at all levels (members, sponsors, public funding for educational activities, investors) is of paramount importance. For investors, it will be necessary to develop a clear business model and plan.

An important questions was raised: what credibility can a group of “avatars who want to go to the moon” have. I think there are two possible and different answers. One is that many team members are _also_ avatars, but mainly technology and business professionals with (too) many years of relevant and applicable experience. Another is, “so what? Why the hell shouldn’t avatars go to the Moon”? I can remember the early press about Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Open Office, Blender, Open Croquet… where they talked of “those geeks who want to compete with Microsoft”, and of course the geeks created much better products than Microsoft with much less money. I am sure open source, participatory hardware and system development “by the people”, enabled by suitable technologies can be very successful.

Next meetings will be on Jan 11 and 15 at the same time (10am PST, 1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm EU).

Posted by G.P. on 12/29/07
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