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.
June 1, 2006
Posted by Marnie Webb
IWhew! Nothing like a little conference planning to keep you from posting to a blog. Now that I have some spare cycles in my brain and day, I've started digging around a little to find college and university programs that focus on civic engagement. I'll be putting together a more complete list but, in the meantime, the the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at the University of Washington looks promising and might be worth digging around in some more.
What's interesting to me isn't so much the program as the tone -- and the connection to traditional forms of media. Frankly, it seems a little distant to me. Distant from the real voice of engagement. What do others think?
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March 31, 2006
Posted by Alexandra Samuel
I just registered for a community seder at Ahavat Olam, a synagogue here in Vancouver, and noticed a neat feature on the registration form: a mechanism for inviting friends to register with you. Powered by GiftTool, the form asks for the names and e-mail addresses of any friends you'd like to invite along, and offers a text area for adding a personal message. Later in the registration process, you're even given the opportunity to request seating near these (or other) friends.
This is a terrifically easy and smart way to boost attendance at any community event. Since most people feel more comfortable attending events with friends, making it easy for them to invite their friends along encourages attendance and helps spread the word at the same time. I'll be sure to include an "invite a friend" feature in any future event registration forms -- and would be curious to hear about other services that make this as easy as GiftTool.
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