This week at Duke we have a very special visitor, Carl Skelton.  Here's the description of his terrifically interesting project:

ISIS Tech and New Media Tuesdays with Carl Skelton
December 1, 2009, 12:00-1:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Center 240

"Betaville: a Massively Collaborative Mirror World Editor for Public Art and Urban Planning Applications"

Betaville is a prosocial MMO, built by prosocial means: a mod of of an open-source game engine, under development by an international consortium in the USA and Europe, led by the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) at NYU's Polytechnic Institute and the Media2Culture Institut fr angewandte Medienforschung at the Hochschule Bremen.

Betaville is being developed for local deployments for cultural and civic applications: players navigate a "base model" representation of the district or city in which they actually live, and are invited to propose new public art, urban design, and development/redevelopment ideas as RFC's. The game supports chat, timelines, and multiple schemes for the same location.

In essence, Betaville is designed as a platform for full participation in re-imagining real urban environments, based on open-source software development practices: anyone can put out an idea, and anyone can propose or offer changes, within an informal but effective etiquette...

In New York, they are working with the Municipal Art Society to develop Betaville as a platform for new initiatives in participatory urban planning; elsewhere, it's being interpreted as a platform for e-governance to a tool for facilities pre-design, or a work of contemporary meta-art.

Skelton will discuss the current status of the project, near-term development strategy, and some of the interesting possibilities for new uses and research in underlying technologies.

Carl Skelton is the founding director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and its bachelor and Master of Science programs in Integrated Digital Media. His background combines experience as public artist, community organizer, and multimedia practitioner. Current interdisciplinary research collaborators include computer scientists, civil engineers, architects, artists, HCI experts, and 3D graphics technical artists. Awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation grant in 2010 (for Betaville).
http://isis.duke.edu/events/upcoming.html