Back in August, when I started investigating it for the first time, I
wrote about Second Life, the (for now) runaway winner in an emerging niche of online 3-D virtual worlds that are not (according to their publishers) games. It's high time for an update on what I've discovered in the six months since.

Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium... The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly.... Therefore, I think it is destined to become an important new platform for online organizing / community building / social networking.

Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup. Therefore a niche group-- let's say "Doctors for Tax Justice" can achieve critical mass to "meet" and form an action-oriented community for readily than if they needed 40 Doctors For Tax Justice in San Francisco. In this vein, we run RootsCamp in Second Life every week.

Think of a conference like YearlyKos in Chicago this summer, in which ~1000 people will attend in person, but which we expect to sell out early... People who can't afford the time or the money to attend in Chicago, or who miss getting registered before we hit capacity, will be able to attend a concurrent "mixed-reality" YearlyKos conference that we will be running in Second Life, complete with Second-Life-only panels that we have insufficient space for in Chicago, streaming of the Chicago panels and keynotes, etc.

Think of a political campaign with staff around the country who need to trust each other and work closely together every day-- Cisco, IBM and many other Fortune 500 companies have already found that Second Life meeting environments can help their distributed teams work together-- and in some cases work directly with their clients-- more effectively than a combination of email, telephone, video conferencing, and airplanes for face to face meetings. That's why these companies are investing millions of dollars in researching and testing virtual worlds. We recently brought NASA into Second Life for the same reason.

Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure... ~200 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual capital hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views... The cost of creating it was $0.

Clearly Second Life is not a panacea for online organizing, and there is a great deal of hype... User base growth statistics of 30% per month and >$1 Million transacted between Second Life users every day are somewhat misleading, though the growth rate is torrid nonetheless. To hear Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus and the Chairman of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) tell it, Second Life "promises to be disruptive… comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. Ultimately, Second Life will displace both desktop computing and other two-dimensional user interfaces. As a hothouse of innovation and experiment, Second Life may even accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”

Hype or not (and I'm actually not at all certain that it is- Mitch is smarter than I am), I do think we're seeing the early stages of a massive trend towards extensive use of immersive 3-D online environments as a primary medium for online social and professional online interaction with each other and with data that can be represented visually. There is already great utility for me and communities I am helping to build in the context of RootsCamp, NASA, and YearlyKos in Second Life, and I think it likely that the utility I experience today will prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, as Second Life's technology improves and as its user base grows.

I like the New Organizing Institute. They're bringing much needed coherence to technology training for the political Left by running a series of technology trainings for future staffers for Democratic political campaigns I expect better tool choices, more effective use of said tools, and greater collaboration between Democratic campaigns to result.

However, NOI initially also received some mixed reviews on their trainings, particularly from those of us outside the Beltway. The complaints that reached the ear of this author might be characterized as "too many heads talking about traditional techniques, not enough focus on the bleeding edge of online organizing techniques, and not enough opportunity for dialogue." A lot of Net, but perhaps not enough authentic NetRoots.

While I haven't attended an NOI training and thus can't pass judgment, I was thrilled to hear recently about their embrace of one of the leading-edge training methodologies to emerge from the Web 2.0 world over the past 18 months-- the "open space unconference" approach to collaborative learning, and, specifically one of its leading lights, BarCamp.

Enter "RootsCamp."

THE GOAL: Bring together smart and accomplished progressive campaigners to draw lessons from the 2006 elections -- everyone from precinct captains to national message consultants. In other words, a true, no-holds-barred, post-election debrief from the people who Just Did It, and a jump-start on Doing It Better for 2008.

In the weeks immediately following November 7th, RootsCamps will be held in cities across the country. In the spirit of BarCamp, they will be open to anyone. Simply sign up on the wiki.

I view this as a critical next step in the maturation of the Netroots towards being one of the most powerful campaign constituencies any Democrat could hope to engage. In the words of the RootsCamp wiki itself:

"...just as the transparency of the blogosphere has forced the mainstream media to acknowledge new realities, we're hoping that RootsCamp will have the same effect upon the world of electoral campaigning."

The value of NOI's stock just exploded in my book.

Technorati Profile

Second Life, the apparent runaway winner in the emerging niche of online virtual worlds that are not (according to their publishers) games, passed a major milestone last week with a successful second annual developer and user conference. Much of this conference focused on how consultants and companies are leveraging the commercial and intellectual property regimes of Second Life to build successful businesses around Second Life as a platform.

Major companies such as Major League Baseball, and institutions such as The University of Southern California, have already turned to Second Life to host virtual events synched with live real-world events. Organizations such as the New Media Consortium are using Second Life to convene meetings and conferences. Wells Fargo is teaching kids about finance in an engaging manner through Second Life. Clothing designers are using the community to prototype their designs and get community feedback and build buzz before they have to manufacture.

Next up: full-fledged web communities augmenting their online experience with a virtual world. A white paper by Linden Labs distributed at the conference (not posted online yet unfortunately) lays out some early ideas about how this might occur. While the value proposition and methodology for doing this still feels to me as though it is in an early experimental phase, I think it has immense potential.

Imagine a wiki-based web community now being able to collaboratively design detailed 3-dimensional objects, complete with nuanced permissions, instead of just text documents. Imagine the 699,000 of 700,000 DailyKos political blogging community members who will NOT make it to next year's YearlyKos conference in Chicago being able to "attend" online side by side with other virtual attendees, complete with live streaming video of speakers and somewhat analogous social interaction opportunities to those at the conference, all without having to spend any money or travel time to get to the conference...

Imagine a dark horse political candidate with a virtual campaign headquarters in which campaign volunteers can collaborate regardless of geographic location and be trained personally by the avatars of real campaign staff, and where the candidate can conduct a virtual whistlestop tour to test new stump speeches and conversations with highly educated, affluent, and socially networked focus groups (the average age of a Second Life "resident" is 32)...

I've long been a skeptic of the utility of virtual worlds beyond the realm of MMORPGS, but buzz about Second Life is exploding, and after digging into the possibilities a bit myself, I'm a convert. In the political space in particular, where flash animations, podcasting, and YouTube are still all the rage, I think we could see virtual worlds emerge as a "next big thing."

Next step: someone please demonstrate an effective mashup of Second Life with a successful Drupal, Joomla, or Mediawiki web community. Then get a darkhorse political campaign to invest in its use. See what happens. THAT would certainly make the unofficial list of Second Life's lists of "firsts". It might just help the campaign too.

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UPDATE: Governor Mark Warner gave a press conference in Second Life on August 30th! Read all about it.

In the business world, the Wisdom of Crowds has been mashed up with Web 2.0 to create Crowdsourcing, and generally a more dynamic two-way relationship between corporations and their customers (see "Five Techniques for Using Web 2.0 to Reinvent the Customer Relationship").

Similarly, online tools and communities have long (by our standards) held the promise of creating a more level playing field for our politics. A major milestone in the achievement of this level-playing field promise was attained in June at the seminal offline event of the Netroots, the inaugural Yearly Kos conference in Las Vegas.

More on Yearly Kos shortly, but first, a bit of diatribe on why the playing field of US politics has historically had such a steep incline… Of course, our democratic elections have always inherently been predicated on this Wisdom of Crowds— predicated on the feel-good idea that we all deserve to weigh in equally and independently to collectively determine who represents us, a few skeptical Founding Fathers and pesky Electoral College electors notwithstanding... The dirty little secret, of course (once we handled the dirty big secret and achieved one homo sapien – one vote with the 15th and 19th Ammendments and the 1965 Voting Rights Act), is that mass media plays a decisive role in shaping perceptions of political prospects, whether in the form of journalism, op-editorial, paid advertisement, or Foxaganda. And as a society in which consumption of mass media largely supplants more traditional and egalitarian forms of communication among citizens (e.g.: storytelling, sociopolitical socializing, etc.), mass media has an absurdly large impact on the outcome of our national elections in the USA.

Mass media is antithetical to the Wisdom of Crowds in, well, its massiveness, its unidirectional nature, and the fact that a small number of wealthy citizens and corporations (actually there is little legal difference in the US) have a disproportionately large impact on what mass media publishes… Only so many voices can be represented in aggregate and with only so much nuance, and thus the vast majority of the voices in our Crowd are never heard through Mass Media.

This phenomenon becomes self-reinforcing—the less opportunity we as members of the Crowd have to be heard or to make any impact on the views of those around us, the less likely we are to strive to speak, and the more likely we are to resign ourselves to being consumers of mass media. Rinse lather repeat. Not voting, for the ~50% of the country that does not, is merely the natural experiential evolution of this communal vocal impotence.

A potent "Netroots" community of active political bloggers and online activists would seem to hold one of they keys to reuniting the reality with the potential of our democratic politics. Having a voice begets speaking. As long as Net Neutrality is upheld, and increasingly with the inexorably growing penetration of inexpensive fixed and mobile Internet access devices and broadband connectivity, an individual’s vocal potential through the Netroots is generally gated only by the quality and authenticity of your voice. While the same mass media dynamics of celebrity cults of personality and a limited number of players with large scale influence persist in the Netroots to some degree, the playing field in the game of becoming influential is far more level and iterative online than in mass mediums, and money is rarely the decisive factor in attaining critical mass of influence. An intelligent and passionate voice can still create its own mass market audience of political consumers without regard for funding or pre-existing reputation, and once this audience level is attained, it is likely to fade if that audience is not engaged ongoingly as a peer in the political discourse. In fact, the most powerful online voices in the Netroots are actually many voices cohered as online communities of a distinct character. The voice in this Crowd is actually the collective and iterative pulse of that of 100,000s of individuals. Case in point is the DailyKos community, whose namesake actually creates little of the content that is written and read there by 100,000s every day.

The Netroots have flourished and matured since the 2004 election from whence they were born, and are currently passing major milestones in their evolution that portend their ability to finally meaningfully democratize politics in the most brass tacks realm of the ballot box / touchscreen (ok ok-- well maybe only at the ballot box, depending who owns and services the touchscreen). The Netroots are now being mashed up with traditional offline organizing techniques and organizers to create a vibrant community of practice whose impact has now transcended the "blogosphere" and become an important force in the more traditional realms of offline grassroots organizing and meet and greet politicing.

And mainstream media, and mainstream politicians has noticed. Exhibit A was the YearlyKos conference earlier this month. Billed as an “unconference” “uniting the Netroots”, more than 1000 active contributors to the preeminent Progressive blog community-- DailyKos-- convened a star-studded very face-to-face conference in Las Vegas. What was notable and remarkable about Yearly Kos, beyond the fact that it was organized entirely by volunteers who did all their own fundraising, was the tangible sense there of everyone being in it TOGETHER, as creators and participants, presenters and listeners.... Where the Beltway-based Take Back America conference was star-driven and worried about having security lock-out Code Pink members protesting Hillary Clinton, YearlyKos felt like an intimate family united in the flesh for the first time, seasoned veterans of online organizing all, and all galvanized for action. The passion, energy, authenticity, and commitment on display throughout were born of the rich secret sauce that so many 21st Century politicians yearn to understand and to tap.

Mainstream media, and mainstream politicians have noticed. YearlyKos garnered traditional political star-power in abundance. Governor Warner wooed the crowd with a $60,000 party at the Stratosphere complete with free amusement park rides for all and a chocolate fountain. The press credential list—New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, C-Span, etc.-- read like a White House Correspondents dinner guest list rather than a gathering of some lunatic fringe. However, the likes Governor Warner, Governor Richardson, General Clark, Ambassador Joe Wilson, Senator Reid, Joe Trippi, Robert Greenwald, and the rest were as much participants in the conference as they were the stars. Exhibit A: General Clark-- former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and Presidential candidate who raised more than $20 million online in 2004-- not only didn’t have a keynote, but was relegated to being a co-panelist in one morning session along with household names like “DarkSyde” (as the science blogger is known in the Daily Kos community). And best of all, far from being surly about what many celebrity politicians would have deemed a slight, Clark started early, pitched into the panel with passion, wit, and intelligence, stayed late, and by all accounts had a fantastic time. That performance and attitude spells credibility in this Crowd, and he knows it. Many celebrities stuck around for the entire four day conference, wandering the halls chatting with would be constituents as peers. Nary a limo in sight.

Where have we seen this before, and where will it go? The best clues may come from the folks that built the very open-source software architecture that now powers the servers that empower the Netroots… Consider this quote from software business guru Tim O’Reilly:

“It was the critical mass that was brought about by the global network… It allowed for free association by developers on a massive scale. In the 80's… only companies had the resources to build critical mass around a technology. But on the internet, freely redistributable software could find adherents worldwide, and those adherents could freely associate, work together, and build something that none of them could have done alone. Still, physical proximity is useful to add to the mix once the community self-organizes on the net. I still remember the enormous buzz at the first Perl Conference I put together in 1997. All these people who'd worked together for years were meeting for the first time. "So you're Larry!" I heard more than one person say. The mind at the other end of the teletype suddenly given flesh and voice. And if they were meeting Larry Wall for the first time, how much more were they meeting each other… Open source communities can form in cyberspace, but getting together in the flesh can really help them to reach the next level of critical mass. (full article at OReillyNet.Com)

Online networks yielding critical mass. Individuals freely associating and building works at a scale that only large organizations heretofore could. Legitimate celebrities also co-existing as just one of the contributors… Conferences as an important milestone and catalyst to attain meaningful scale and impact… No wonder the other operative buzzphrase in the Netroots is “Open Source Politics.” Political Parties as we know them ought to have cold feet now more than ever.

It’s 1997 all over again.

A vast minority of citizens in this nation are wholly dissatisfied with the status quo of our government and our political parties. And, by any global measuring stick, they're wealthy, educated, creative, entrepreneurial, connected and passionate. A revolution is nigh. What form it takes depends heavily not just on the outcome of the 2006 and 2008 elections, but also on how those elections are conducted by our major political parties, the candidates, our government, and our news media. Their enduring relevance depends on how they perform.

Two years ago at the innaugural Personal Democracy Forum, Congressman Anthony Weiner stated on the opening panel that politicians wouldn't care unless and until blogging caused mainstream media coverage that in turn affected mainstream consciousness. Meanwhile an IRC room set up for people in the audience scrolled flame on a giant projection screen behind him. The audience in the student auditorium at the New School in New York numbered less than 200.

This June, by contrast, more than 1000 people will gather for YearlyKos at The Riviera in Las Vegas, the innaugural national bloggers convention for the Daily Kos community. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and all of the major 2008 Democratic Presidential hopefuls will address the crowd-- just to try to impress and be one with the bloggers. The political technophile conference circuit has come a long long way in two years.

We're currently in the midst of a intense season of political technology conferences, and it's a small enough community that many of us who are active in the sector would be liable to get a bit tired of seeing each other so often if we didn't feel that what we were doing was so darn important... Most of these conferences are populated by a healthy mixture of vendors, programmers, staff of political organizations, media, and advertisers, and all-- at least the ones that pervade my consciousness-- have audiences that skew heavily towards the Progressive side of the aisle, but each conference has its own unique vibe and agenda. Here's a brief rundown of what's come and gone and what's yet to come: