Second Life’s Ninth Birthday Celebration is Coming!

It might be the worst kept secret on the grid but – do you know what? We don’t care!

Second Life’s Ninth Birthday is going to be celebrated with a centralised event running from June 18th – June 24th, organised by residents for residents – and is looking for people to join in!

The theme is community – as specified by Linden Lab – and the resident team who are taking this forward are hoping to see a wide selection of the communities that make up Second Life coming together in this huge event.  Dream Seeker Estates have generously  donated ten sims, and teams are already at work planning and developing ideas so that they will be ready to house the exhibits and the entertainment that all of us will create!

The website is at http://sl9b.wordpress.com/, where you will find all the details you need (and a translation tool!).  You can use one of the forms to sign up as an exhibitor, as a performer, to book the auditorium – or to help out as a volunteer. This last one is very important – with only a month to go, SL9B needs the community to come together and help as much as they can to make this a success!  So please, think about how you could help as a volunteer.

And also think – and start working on – what you would like to exhibit at the Birthday celebration!

Many of the old favourites will be back.  There will be a cake and a time capsule. There will be a main stage, and other stage venues. There will be gifts to take away – which may well include a (non-Linden) souvenir bear.  There will be an auditorium for talks (and also for TV broadcasts – Designing Worlds will be filming there, and The First Question is already planning a show!).

This year there will be a new innovation: one day of the Birthday celebration will be dedicated to charity. The theme is AIDS awareness, and there will be fundraising for the  Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids charity, which is supported (with a month-long programme of events) by Dreamseeker Estates, as well as an opportunity for people working with AIDS to give presentations and information.

If you check out the Event policies, you will see that they are much the same as in previous years: the centralised event with be “G” or General rated, which allows everyone on the grid to attend. Exhibitors may provide landmarks to Adult regions, provided they are properly marked as Adult.  And if residents decide to have a special Adult celebration on dedicated sims, a link can be provided to that too.  The full guidelines for Exhibitors are set out here.

This is very much a last minute event – we only discovered a few days ago that definitely, definitively and finally that Linden Lab would not be supplying land for a centralised Birthday celebration.  That being so, this is still a project in development … and you may be seeing a few changes over the coming days (such as real photos in the Flickr group, and a proper icon on the Twitter feed!).