Crystal Craft

 Craft Grid is celebrating its Crystal Anniversary - fifteen years of community, international friendship, big art, lovely residences, educational projects, and a warm sociability that has kept its residents amused and absorbed all these years. It's a tightly knit community, with people from all over the world, though it's fair to say, a nice slice of Italians who will make you feel welcome in the grid's general Chat group whenever you log in. 

It's a grid that has always been generous - for example, for many years, Licu Rau, the owner of Craft, donated the regions for the Hypergrid International Expo. Licu has also invited the HG Safari group more than once to celebrate Cornflakes Week with him - here he is, dressed for the event, back in 2016. 

I asked Licu  what is planned for this birthday party on Monday 27 January starting at 12:30pm SLT on Jubilee sim.

Licu Rau: We will have a musical evening in an environment inspired by crystals. Being a moment of transition in which various technical changes and specific needs overlapped, we were not able to organize special events as done on some other occasions.

Thirza Ember:  What kind of changes? Tell us more.

Licu Rau: I am referring to the changes to OpenSim, which has now moved to the dotnet platform, to the changes to the viewer (PBR, reflections, etc.), and to the big problem of moving assets still in planning (the server we rely on now is now getting a little elderly) . Since Craft is a very structured platform based on its own code, these steps are happening gradually over the course of several months and are not yet completed. 

Thirza Ember:  What other work are you doing?

Licu Rau: Additionally, we are trying to refine tools to defend against specific attacks on grid servers that require different strategies than servers that only host websites. For the future, there are many ideas, without going into specifics, these are projects aimed at having greater independence from external services, greater security and greater ease of access to the platform.

Velazquez Bonetto's striking theater for Comment Song

Among the celebratory events, will be Comment Song, an artistic performance by Velazquez Bonetto on Thursday Jan 30th at 12.30pm SLT on sim Jubilee where you can check out the vast expo building, like an indoor market, and stroll back through the years to see the staying power of so many Craft residents.  

The grid's Museum charts its history from the first days - you'll remember the grid was founded with four members, all of different nationalities, living in different countries, making Craft an international grid from day one.

Licu Rau:  Craft came into being almost by chance. I discovered Second Life in 2007. I liked its creative potential, but not the the high costs and uncertainties of creating something new. After a year's break, in 2009, I rediscovered the platform, and I discovered OpenSimulator. With some experience in Linux server administration, I created a region called Opera on OSGrid, which I soon moved to Cyberlandia, an Italian grid with a lively and creative community.

Licu Rau:  There I met people who inspired and supported my journey, like Tao Quan, a creative traveler of virtual worlds. On January 27, 2010, within an experimental Cyberland formed by a federation of standalones, I put my regions into an autonomous grid: Craft. When the founder of Cyberlandia decided to close I acted as a life raft for that extraordinary community, giving shelter to Cyberlandia users with the idea of ​​creating an inclusive space open to all.

The piazza on sim Jubilee with the entrance to the Expo and the Museum 

Licu Rau:  Over time the community has changed, the real challenge was to keep it alive with ever-changing subjects and to give space to artistic and educational projects, with affordable rates that allowed you to experiment without the prohibitive costs of Second Life. Thanks to the creativity of users, Craft has grown to now hosts nearly 250 simulators. I believe my merit lies in having never interfered with the activities of the users, the true creators who made Craft what it is today.

Thirza Ember:  Craft has a long and important relationship with training and teaching institutions of all kinds. 

Licu Rau: Wwe have studied a system that allows teachers to bring minor (underage) students inworld. These are school regions, a particular type of region to which only teachers, students and assistants can access, and minor students cannot access regions outside the school regions. The accounts that minor students use have limited powers and are created by teachers through a special panel dedicated to them and entrusted to the students. No personal data leading back to the real identity of the students is processed by the system.

Thirza Ember:  In your experience, why do you think educators like this platform?

Licu Rau: The SecondLife/OpenSim environment is particularly interesting for teaching. The internal editor based on prims and the possibility of scripting them without leaving the platform makes it a creative environment for students. They're not just passive, the students are an active part of the teaching process. One of its greatest strengths is that it builds collaborations between classes of children from different and distant schools. They get to interact and create things together at any time and not only when they meet in the reality. It builds a spirit of teamwork, to get the job done.

Edu3D

Inside the Expo building there is just so much to see! Ed3D has long used the platform of Craft in their teaching program, with cutting edge ideas about education. 

This is the Edu3D room - they're just one of several very effective and successful school groups using Craft - noiLab, Lucania, and UnAcademy are here too. 

Lucania, NoiLab and more inside the Expo

There's an intriguing build by Tosha Tyran, 'A Hopi Legend'  to explore, and Ana 57's expo space tells the story of her region Paris through photos, posters and memorabilia the sheer quantity make one stop and think about how much this grid has meant to so many on a human level as a point of contact, entertainment, company and joy over the years.

Ana's Paris

There are many many more rooms to discover, you should definitely visit - this one struck a chord,  the Museo del Metaverso is represented - this piece just says it all.

MdM exhibit

So, happy birthday Craft, and to all the residents past present and future, may you have many more memorable times on this lovely Grid. A final question for Licu, looking back of er a decade and a half of successful gridmanship, does he have a secret sauce, a strategy that has kept the grid coing all this time?

Licu Rau: That is an unanswerable question, there is no recipe, over a long time what you have planned then evolves in ways you cannot predict. If we really have to give the ingredients I would say: vision, luck and hard head (tenacity).

HG Address:  hop://craft-world.org:8002/Jubilee/153/116/24