The time has come for OMI to leave the incubator AngellXR. Since it's formation in 2021, OMI has been hosted by AngellXR, who has provided server space, infrastructure and financial resources to grow OMI. We will always be most grateful for that, and hope to maintain a friendship for ever. At two years old now, and preparing to pro-actively grow the membership, it's time for OMI to spread its wings. This also means OMI is moving to its own Discord server, and while this is understandably disruptive, it is also a good time to review our communication, clean up and update our websites, coordinate groups better and revisit what we stand for and what we do. What does OMI stand for? Apart from the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which is literally what OMI stands for, OMI also stands for grassroots participation. A social connection between different metaverse groups. What does OMI do? In a way, whatever you want. There are a few more formal working groups, but anyone is welcome to create a working group in the #omi-experiments channel on our Discord. OMI is designed for participation from everyday people - or "normies", university groups, students, hobbyists, anyone. While we do prefer open source, we are more concerned about building an open ecosystem.

The logo having "nothing inside" and "holes" is actually a good thing to me. This is what we're doing by creating standards. We outline a template for software to use, drawing out a shape, which implementers can then cast their content into like a mold. Our standards are like dotted lines, anything can go inside of them, but having agreed upon lines provides a standardized shape for other puzzle pieces to connect.

The Open Metaverse Interoperability group is a support group for people building components of the Metaverse. Everyone is welcome, and expected to comply to the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. We do not strictly adhere to an explicit definition of the Metaverse. We do make the distinction that virtual worlds are not equal, but are sub-parts of the Metaverse. Having said that, we will refrain from correcting others who conflate the two concepts, except where it is necessary to the conversation to make the distinction. We consider both web-based and native OS based virtual worlds. We have members involved in both, and we believe both web-based and game-engine applications have relevance to the Metaverse. We support Metaverse development wider than virtual worlds, including but not limited to interoperability specifications, physical world data integrators, AI, social engagement through music, online participation and governance, etc. Our focus groups are organically formed, and ebb and flow based on interest from our members. We have various members working on various projects that may even look contradictory, as we believe that considering components of the Metaverse from different perspectives is valuable, especially this early in Metaverse development.

MediaWiki https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki This is the software behind Wikipedia and is a popular, open-source wiki software. It's highly customizable and has a large community of users and developers. SVL: PHP might be needed Confluence https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence Offered by Atlassian, Confluence is a professional wiki and team collaboration tool. It integrates well with Jira and other Atlassian products and is suited for both small teams and large enterprises. Wikidot

:::info TODO: Add some pictures! Table of contents? (look at the bottom right section of the view area, there is a ToC button.) Add more people/projects from the "why are you here discussion" ::: These are some of the projects our members are involved in. While we cannot endorse these or guarantee that they align to our values, we would like to shine a light on them. They are listed in no particular order. If you would like to be included here, please ping us at #omi-general on discord with 1) the project name, 2) a link to more info, 3) a short description and 4) who to contact. Optionally, you can also add 5) your ask - what do you need help with?

The Open Metaverse Interoperability (OMI) group recently elected new chairs. Jesse Alton, aka mrmetaverse, one of the founders of OMI was re-elected, and Bernelle Verster, aka indiebio was elected as a new chair. OMI was started in 2021 as a grassroots group interested in all the components that make the metaverse a reality. The group is home to a diverse group of people passionate about interoperability, accessibility, systems of systems integration, useful AI agents, music in the metaverse, fashion in the metaverse, virtual worlds and curating the history of these in the virtual worlds museum, avatar builders, extending game engine usability for metaverse applications, through example extending glTF specs and V-Sekai, and more. https://github.com/omigroup/omigroup/discussions/423 indiebio joins with a focus on physical world interactivity with game worlds, including geospatial, topography, urban resource flows and digital community governance. Being a member of OMI has already created collaborations with other members with complementing skillsets and experience. Jesse is passionate about open interoperability, and extended reality. His interest is in helping founders incorporate open protocols for interoperability in their products and business models. He is the co-founder of MagickML which is an agent creation tool. In parallel, he runs AngellXR to support and grow the wider community to make the open metaverse happen. OMI actively collaborates with other groups relevant in the area. OMI is a research body of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), there they are called the Metaverse Interoperability Community Group (link). OMI also actively collaborates with M3, OMF and other groups, and has a voting role in MSF (expand all the acronyms). OMI membership of the MSF in particular offers a way for individuals to have a say in a corporate membership institution.

Agenda Status update Who are the players Show and Tell Open campfire Event schedule for demo days: TODO: decide on an order of events, TODO: schedule for last Friday of the month, 14:00 EST?

Date: October 2024 Location: Azores (likely University of Azores, Ponta Delgada, Ilha de São Miguel) This conference is intended to facilitate conversation between sociologists and software developers. This means the language used has to be accessible to non-experts in the respective fields, to the extent that it is understandable by everyday people. The talks are required to be an overview of the field with a summary of intended actions that would improve the online participation, similar to policy briefs. This is a grass-roots initiative. If there are similar events in existence, please let us know. Introduction This conference addresses the question, how can everyday people impact government? How can an increasingly virtual world positively affect our real world?

Please read this if you are a physics, engineering, game building, or movie CGI related student interested in modelling realistic physics and want your assets to be interoperable between platforms. Or if this topic sounds interesting to you, of course. The glTF working group of the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, OMI, are currently working on standards for glTF physics. We are looking for people to help work on the specs. We are also welcoming comments on open github issues. TODO: What else is out there? Microsoft as the MSF spec. The MSF is more focused on corporate approaches which sacrifices flexibility and innovation for reliability. Developing the OMI specs demonstrates how a different approach can work and is more suited to the open source approach, which is well suited to academic work for example. Having multiple specs gives wider coverage for experimenting. We've seen fast adoption of the OMI spec with more frequent feedback and discussions happening within OMI.

TODO: Describe what we want, make a webpage for it on the OMI website (?) so we can point poeple to something to generate excitement and conversation. Make a rough monthly schedule of events, to build the float and parade scenery step by step. E,g. one month, build the vehicle, one month build avatars, one month build textures, one month build scenery, one month have workshop about how to make content.... Inspired by Baltimore bikeparties, Ciclovia, other monthly real life recurring community initiatives. So figure out what is a good sequence of steps. Community Celebration The main goal of this event is to celebrate with the global community of artists, tinkerers, hackers, players and professionals. While there is a large event in October 2024, this initiative is designed to be built together with monthly gettogethers (link to schedule) to build our floats together. Assets, protocols and specification testing Another large goal is to build assets and test the protocols to ensure interoperability. glTF specs are a large focus of the current work in OMI, hence we decided to have floats to test vehicle protocols (more info link). Anyone wanting to contribute to the glTF specs are invited to join the working group (link to github and discord)

This ideation is intended as a playful approach to inspire pilot projects to energise the community. It considers use cases, called challenges, interlacing with different cultures. To generate excitement there can be periodic challenges that each tribe can compete in, with popular votes and prizes that are tongue-in-cheek and growing the community, like perhaps fun badges to display in a virtual hall of fame. These can be as simple as, submit a base class of meshes to test Dacti on, challenge deadline is in a month, to complex ongoing work like a big ongoing project that could potentially spin off into a funded thing. Each tribe has an entry lounge in the Virtual World (OMI website link) from which there can be portals to whichever worlds, websites or features the different tribes choose to use - in other words, apart from having the portal to access the site from the main virtual world, tribes are free to use whatever application(s) they choose. I think this organisation is fun in its own right, but it also provides things to showcase to the general public, provides visual interest in onboarding new people, and gives an idea of who "your people" are when joining, to make it more welcoming and diverse.