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jcarlhenders · 6 years ago

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Freebies

One thing that Caledon Oxbridge has always lacked compared to other Second Life Community Gateways (new user help areas), is a first-class collection of freebies for new residents. While did have some nice items, the bulk of the collection was very, very old. As barely touched over the last eight years.

I blame me; at the time I was getting Oxbridge up and running I'd just finished putting a lot of effort into upgraded freebies for NCI, and I just could not face doing that all over again. So I took a very lazy way out. I told people who had generously contacted me about donating freebies to put them out in the gazebo by the shore, so long as they were G-rated. The subsequent chancellor, Martini Discovolante, took a big step forward in building a Train Station for the Caledon Rail stop at Oxbridge, and devoting part of the interior to a place for people to put freebies out. If it had not been for Martini’s work, there would have been nothing for me to start with. But pressures of time and real life, never gave her or any of the subsequent Oxbridge chancellors or their staff any real ability to focus on the freebie collection.

So when I came back to SL and Caledon after an absence of several years, I looked around Oxbridge for places I could help, and not step on the toes of anyone currently doing some very difficult jobs there. The first thing I did—with the permission and support of Wordsmith Jarvinen (current Oxbridge Chancellor) and Phrynne (current Oxbridge Dean of Commons)—was an update of all four of the “Explore” posters at the start and end of the Tutorial. Then I did a similar update to the “Web Resources for New Second Life Users” posters.

That took a few weeks, but I decided I was ready to tackle a major upgrade, overhaul, and expansion of the freebie collection; to finally finish something I’d left undone when I co-created Oxbridge (with Desmond Shang) more than ten years ago. Again with buy in from Wordsmith and Phrynne, I began the big project. And after months of work a few hours at a time in the evenings, I’m starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Behold, the remodeled Oxbridge freebie area...

I’ve done my best to preserve as much of the old freebie collection as possible, while expanding it with other stuff I’ve found over my years in Second Life. A few items are missing but I have promises that they will be returning when people return to Second Life. I’ve still got a lot of work to so, especially in the Avatars, Clothing, & Accessories freebies (and I’m working on that), but help me welcome in the new collection.

It is only going to get bigger and better from here.

What Oxbridge needs are:

If you are a creator of anything, but clothing or avatar related accessories, and are interested in donating some freebies to Oxbridge (perhaps some retired items), please contact me either in-world via Notecared (Carl Metropolitan) or at my RL email of [email protected]. Please note that I cannot reliably receive IMs when I am not online. Please contact me via email [email protected] or notecard. My IMs ALWAYS cap due to error message spam from items old free maps I created residing on the Beta Grid. (Yes, it makes no sense to me, either.)

1) Items that you created. Such items can include licensed scripts, textures, mesh components, so long as the license allows for redistribution as freebies.

1.a) Items that would be especially useful would be mesh clothing, shoes, hair, and skins for old style system avatars. (Most new residents start out with SL system avatar.) Low to medium land impact houses and furniture are also very nice (especially mesh), as are creator tools.

1.b) I'm working on a separate process for evaluating existing freebies to ensure that they were intended to be redistributed and are not stolen content. If you have something that you think would be a good fit for the Oxbridge collection, please drop me a notecard or email. I welcome such donations, but the more information you can give me about the provenance of such freebies, the easier it is for me to confirm they are okay to redistribute.

What we prefer is:

2) We prefer items that are full perm, but recognize that many creators are reluctant to do that. We can take items that are "No Transfer" and/or "No Modify" so long as we can move and repackage them. Which means that the creator will need to give Mod rights to the OxbridgeFreebieManager account. Contact me via email for instructions on how to do that.

2.a) Keep in mind that you can give us freebies with Transfer rights, and we can then set those to only be given out "No Transfer". Just make it clear in the folder name for the item and/or other accompanying info that is what you want us to do. We can't protect Transfer rights if we don't know you want to preserve them.

2.b) One reason we would really like Transfer rights is that eventually we would like to have the option of moving Oxbridge's freebies collection onto a server-based system for reasons of future proofing, expandability, and Land Impact conservation.

2.c) OxbridgeFreebieManager is a new role account at Oxbridge. Currently, the only people with access to him are Wordsmith Jarvinen (Oxbridge Chancellor), Phrynne (Oxbridge Dean of Commons), and myself (Carl Metropolitan). Access to this alt will be restricted to high level staff only.

If you are a creator who has something they would be willing to contribute, please email me at [email protected] or drop me a notecard.

You can also drop freebie items directly on the OxbridgeFreebieManager account. Please include instructions (License, No Transfer requests, etc.) in that case.

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