How apt ReneeIlene SpiritWeaver’s (real life: Lisa Cohn) name is!  Our Volunteer of the Month for June 2010 is a free spirit – certainly in Second Life, and one suspects in real life as well.

Re, as she likes to be known (pronounced ‘Ray’), became involved in Second Life when she took a seminar about Second Life and Libraries.  The students were asked to log in to SL and create their avatars; she began to explore.  She found the Star Trek Museum immediately (she’s a Trekker), and also the AVL.  She fell in love with Imagination Island and Rachelville.  As she says, by the time the seminar actually happened, she was already hooked.

As did this author, Re found some Star Trek sims, but says that she didn’t care for them; “they seemed so serious.”  So she became involved in volunteering, particularly in Rachelville.  She has been designing displays.  At the present time (June 2010), she has a Dr. Seuss tribute in the Rachelville Plaza, and a display about shapeshifting on the Rachelville Space Station.  The latter display contains information about shapeshifters in fiction, and how to be a shapeshifter in SL.

She finds shapeshifting in SL to be tremendous fun.  As she says, she has bought out all the animal avs in Grendels, and a few of the others.  She’s fond of the neko av, though, and hopes that will curtail her spending on other avs!

In addition to learning how to build, Re is trying her hand at scripting.  For this task, she is a natural.  She is the webmaster for her library (the Bloomfield, NJ, Public Library), as well as the volunteer webmaster for her synagogue.  She has been hired to create web sites for other libraries and also a corporate organization.

As she says, “The exciting part of SL is that it is so like holodeck technology in Star Trek.  If you look at how many movies are being made in 3D, you can see where we are heading.  It’s like getting in on the ground floor of an exciting future.”

Re finds SL to be great fun, and loves making friends here.