Wow…I go to sleep a few hours and the world changed from quite quiet to one full of interesting conversation. Exciting. Thanks all for joining the thread. I’m originally from Los Angeles, but have been living in Goa (West Coast of India) for a long time. Wondering where in the world everyone else is?
@bphelp @mcpeanut @rosyteddy: I really appreciate your ideas, challenging comments and questions. Sorry, I haven’t been clear about what we are doing. Let me elucidate so you can understand I’m not some crazy person sitting in the basement of my parents’ house dreaming. The project is called Planet Earthlings and is based on an animation/live-action TV pilot we created a few years back with a team of over 120 people in seven countries. The TV series was done in 3D and told the story of four animated aliens who come to Earth and meet four live action children. They play and learn in a magical animated world.
What we are doing now is a space theme 2D Virtual World (probably to be built in Unity with Smart Fox Server on the backend). The world will combine cooperative gaming, collaborative apps and tools for youngsters to learn and make friends all over the globe…hence the subtitle “One People, One Planet.” The dream is that if you bring kids together for cooperative and collaborative educational fun they’ll make friends with people all over the planet making it difficult…hopefully impossible…for governments to convince them people in other countries are our enemies. Yes, it’s ambitious, but there are many people all over the world who are interested and already joining the process.
The “main” project will live at “www.planeteartlings.net.” Which will be overseen by the Planet Earthlings organization, but we will be creating a Open Source front end so that people, companies or organizations who want to create a planet in our universe which is compatible with the overall philosophy of what we’re doing will be able to do it. We are also looking for open source games and apps that can be used in world.
Initially, (as in right now) we are testing WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform for the development team at “www.planetearthlings.org.” That may become something bigger, but for now it is simply to bring together kids, parents, different advisers and our core team to discuss and share ideas on HOW to build something truly unique and powerful for youngsters. The children will be “Kidvisers” and will get rewards for taking part and even reporting on other worlds, games and apps telling us what they like and don’t like. Others will take part because they want to be part of an exciting project for kids and are interested in being part of the change.
This is part of the process leading up to a CrowdFunding campaign we hope to start in June. After that we will decide on what will be included in Phase One development. We do NOT know how the development process will proceed as we’re still investigating the various options which include forming a core team locally, gathering an international team to collaborate remotely, partnering with an established Virtual World development company or even forming something elsewhere. When we move into that stage there will be funding and decisions will have to be made about how to proceed.
I have investigated several social network options and tested a few, but decided on BuddyPress because the “open source” philosophy behind it (and WordPress) are a big part of what we are creating. I am concerned about the scaling potential, but have been assured during my research that the platform will scale to thousands of users if it is hosted and setup properly. ***NOTE: This is one of the main concerns at the moment.
We aren’t looking for full-time BuddyPress developers right now and I wouldn’t expect anyone to work full-time unpaid. We’re simply looking for a few hours of advice and possible implementation from people who are intrigued by what we are trying to do. Would love to have input/suggestions about what functionality we should include in the initial version of the site and with the look. Examples of what we need now would be design suggestions in terms of look, including help with the site typography and possible suggestions about functionality…for example what would be the best way of integrating galleries of both images and video.
@mcpeanut I understand your view that most people want to get paid. We all need to eat, but there are plenty of people who want to be involved in something with lofty goals. I personally have worked almost five years unpaid on different parts of this project. Right now the project is setup with a “company” mostly because we’re not in a position to understand and deal with it differently. It may be something that becomes profitable, but we may set it up as a non-profit. That is one of the questions we will be discussing on the development platform.
@bphelp I hope you will continue with the discussion and pose as many difficult questions as you can come up with. I like difficult questions because they make me think, and often about things I haven’t yet considered. I don’t have all the answers even though I have hard drives with about five terabytes of data for this project, thousands of images, video and hundreds of thousands of files. I may be a dreamer, but I’m also an experienced IT Project Management consultant, a feature film director, novelist and entrepreneur, among other hats I sometimes wear.
There is much more about the project to discuss, but I leave it at this for now. Hope you don’t mind the length of the post, but I feel confident there are many people out there in the WordPress/BuddyPress world who are interested in this kind of work. Some will join us as volunteers and others in paid positions when the time is right.
Thanks all! If you want to learn a little more about the earlier project including lots of press and even a national magazine cover you can check that at http://www.palaflicks.com. Cheers!
