Second Life Future Salon

Virtual Worlds play a part in Knowledge workspace

As reported on Community Mobilization, a recent Forester Research report states that virtual worlds and spaces a re a key component of the knowledge workspace. The report identifies several Web 2.0 technologies that companies should adopt for stronger information connections: RSS, blogs, rich Internet applications (RIAs), tagging, wikis, and virtual worlds. The article goes forward and suggests that to get these current technologies integrated companies should look inward before they turn to consultant. Virtual Worlds Weekly catalogs the Seven Tenets of the Knowledge Workplace as:

The seven tenets are that:
1. Work should be contextual: Forrester envisions RSS feeds pushing information to workers in their portals instead of forcing them to go to multiple applications to catch up on work. Forrester sees virtual worlds as a bonus here, where workers can interact in a 3D environment and access files in the same way they would in the real world.

2. Portals should be individualized, allowing users to customize their space in a wiki, RSS, or virtual world.

3. Work should be seamless. Virtual worlds aren't mentioned specifically here, but the idea is that instead of clicking between applications or folders, information should be tagged in one location. A virtual space makes for an interesting way to browse. See, for example, projects the intelligence community is working on for a virtual work space.

4. Information should be presented visually, which seems like a pretty clear tie-in to the previous tenet for virtual worlds.

5. Technology should be multi-modal. I.e., it should allow for mashups.

6. Information should be social. Again, this has been one of the major arguments for a 3D virtual work environment that allows users to collaboratively access and edit information in real time.

7. Information should be quick. Instead of working with local software, businesses should focus on Service-Oriented Architecture.

The seven tenets are that:
1. Work should be contextual: Forrester envisions RSS feeds pushing information to workers in their portals instead of forcing them to go to multiple applications to catch up on work. Forrester sees virtual worlds as a bonus here, where workers can interact in a 3D environment and access files in the same way they would in the real world.

2. Portals should be individualized, allowing users to customize their space in a wiki, RSS, or virtual world.

3. Work should be seamless. Virtual worlds aren't mentioned specifically here, but the idea is that instead of clicking between applications or folders, information should be tagged in one location. A virtual space makes for an interesting way to browse. See, for example, projects the intelligence community is working on for a virtual work space.

4. Information should be presented visually, which seems like a pretty clear tie-in to the previous tenet for virtual worlds.

5. Technology should be multi-modal. I.e., it should allow for mashups.

6. Information should be social. Again, this has been one of the major arguments for a 3D virtual work environment that allows users to collaboratively access and edit information in real time.

7. Information should be quick. Instead of working with local software, businesses should focus on Service-Oriented Architecture.

ACS Office News

I wanted to make a few announcements here about the ACS Second Life Office. We have decided to add a few volunteer positions to help us manage all of the activity that is going on. I am very pleased to announce that Fayandria Foley will continue as our Relay For Life Chair, and Poppy Zebelin will continue as our Survivorship Chair. As of this week we now are so lucky to have Xandi Mars as our Office Manager and Synergy Devonshire as our new Marking Strides Against Breast Cancer Chair.

As we continue to extend the resources offered to the SL community we are lucky to have dedicated volunteers willing to put in the time and the effort to bring our vision to a reality. These women have dedicated so much of themselves and they are truly represent the best of volunteer and community leadership.

Stanley Milgram experiment comes to a Virtual World

The electric-shock obedience experiment sent Stanley Milgram into infamy. It also was the catalyst for American Psychological Association to adopt ethical considerations when performing psychological experiments on people. Plus One reports that a group in London re-ran the same experiment in a virtual world and the results were eerily similar. The participants showed comparable stress and anxiety levels. Their conclusions?

Our results show that in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioral and physiological levels as if it were real. This result reopens the door to direct empirical studies of obedience and related extreme social situations, an area of research that is otherwise not open to experimental study for ethical reasons, through the employment of virtual environments

My conclusion?  I am not all that concerned with the world of obedience studies but what I am concerned with is the empirical proof that a virtual world can have a comparable emotional impact on is residents as real world activities. This being said it lends additional support to engaging in psycho-significant research and therapeutic activities in the medium. For the human service sector it provides further credence to the Asperger's therapy work that is currently experiencing success in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

SL Future Salon on ARGs *Tonight* Friday, Nov. 27th at 4 PM PST

Aaaaaaaarg, it's the future salon on ARGs. Theater with your software and stories gone wild:

Come to the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep island (<--SLURL) at 4 PM PST *tonight* 11/27 for the Second Life Future Salon meeting and podcast on alternate reality games (ARGs). Tonight's guests are:

*Tony Walsh, Clickable Culture

*Elan Lee, 42 Entertainment

*Dan Hon, Mind Candy

*hosted by Jerry Paffendorf, The Electric Sheep Company

If we fill the sim (likely since we often do and this one got picked up on Boing Boing), overflow access will kindly be provided on the web by DestroyTV.com -- the hardest working avatar in show business -- where you'll see and hear streaming video and audio of the salon, and can even chat with everyone from the comfort of your browser.

For those new to the salon meetings you can subscribe to this blog for future updates (please let me know if you're interested in helping on some light, credited design work on the SLFS blog--we've been between looks for a while), join the "SL Future Salon" group in SL for inworld announcements, and the Yahoo! group for emails. Last month we began posting SLFS podcasts to metaversesessions.com, so you can check there for audio archives.

For some background and scope of what's fair game at the salon, here are some links ranging from ARGs to just plain AR that influenced my prep:

ReGenesis (one of Tony's ARGs, via Clickable Culture)

I Love Bees (one of Elan's ARGs, via Wikipedia)

Perplex City (one of Dan's ARGs, via Wikipedia)

ARGNet

"Lisa the Skeptic" episode of The Simpsons

ARG influence on the Lost TV series (via Clickable Culture)

lonelygirl15.com (I really liked this month's Wired cover article, but there's no link yet)
Borat

Infocult on ARGs in Second Life

Gary Hayes on ARGs in SL and virtual spaces

Andy Havens questions for the salon (in a comment on this blog)

Chris Carella/Satchmo Prototype on Software Theater

Nick Yee on The Blurring of Work and Play

The Yes Men

Ze Frank

Incident at Loch Ness by Werner Herzog

The Idiots by Lars von Trier

Four Eyed Monsters

Cory Edo's response (and follow-up here and here) to the SLLA's bounty for attacks on Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, and Rivers Run Red

Who Killed Miss Norway?

Zombo.com

As you can see from the links, I'm drawing this pretty widely, not minding dropping the G in ARG, like SL drops the G in MOG. I'm really interested in exploring the possibilities of all imagined stories and characters that mix with reality as usual (are purported to be true or real -- or in the case of events in a virtual world, are technically very true and real with the caveat that they take place in cyberspace); alternate/reality generated content (like Sasha Cohen interacting with people that don't know Borat is a character, and recording the encounters -- which has it's ethical and legal issues); co-created storylines that take on a life of their own; community and culture that grows up around ARG stories and challenges and how widespread and sustainable it can be (I think of the characters in The Idiots, as a kind of obscure example for anyone who's seen that, who try to take their idiot behavior home to their families as a test of how committed they are and find themselves completely shunned); ARGs as a more efficient platform for celebrity for their participants (so the best contributors to the stories are more fully recognized for their talents and further incented to participate); ARG business models and how they can reward their participants; real work and ARGs (ARGsourcing, ha -- couple of wild ideas here), and anything that a big fat, unfolding interactive story that spreads across many kinds of media would just make more interesting. Which is pretty much everything, and a lot more things in virtual worlds like Second Life.

As the poet Muriel Rukeyser put it, from the human side: "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone how the future of unchained interactive stories might meet with the future of work and production of media. Lots to noodle on, and hopefully some very cool creative ideas for people to run with. Definitely some theater with your software, or your new media. Send me any questions for tonght. It's all fair game.

SL Future Salon on Alternate Reality Games, Monday, November 27th at 4 PM PST

Update: More posted here. The SL Future Salon on ARGs will meet in the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower (<--SLURL) at 4 PM PST, Monday, November 27th (if all goes well the tower will be talking to us ;)). Destroy Television will be present so you can watch, listen, and chat from the web, and the audio URL will be made available for overflow. IM SNOOPYbrown Zamboni/Jerry Paffendorf with any questions. And heya, Boing Boing readers, come on inworld.

Thanks to those on the SL Future Salon Yahoo! group who chipped in with thoughts on this one: On Monday, November 27th from 4-5 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet on the topic of alternate reality games or ARGs with Clickable Culturist and ARG designer man Tony Walsh; I Love Bees-making 42 Entertaiment creative Elan Lee; Adrian Hon and/or Dan Hon from Mind Candy, the creators of Purplex City, and me on the 1s and 2s. Please send any ideas for questions or topics for these guys to jerry[at]electricsheepcompany[dot]com, and I’ll post an outline and location later this week.

From Wikipedia:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is a type of game that overlaps the game world with reality, by utilizing real world media, in order to deliver an interactive narrative experience to the players — a kind of surrealism.

ARGs are typified by involving the players with the story and its characters, by encouraging them to explore the story, solve plot based challenges, and interact with game characters. ARGs can be delivered via websites, email, telephones, or any other means of communication which is readily available to the players.

ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (collectable puzzle cards in the case of Perplex City) or because they support or promote an existing product (Halo 2 in the case of I Love Bees).

Tony points me to some thoughts by Bryan Alexander that popped up on the Infocult blog yesterday, who’s riffing with Andy Havens (probably my favorite commentor on Terra Nova) about ARGs in virtual worlds like Second Life. Since Destroy TV came on the scene (she’s now streaming video after the big move to Chris and Becky’s place) I’ve thought about ARGs and involving people in co-creating massive stories quite a lot (how can something like DTV take on a life of its own?), and the recent Wired cover article on lonelygirl15 and how it came about completely pushed me over the edge. I’m completely hooked on ideas for stories that are platforms for people’s creativity and involvement. More on that later in the week as we approach the salon, and of course nothing but that stuff at the salon. I’m psyched.

Virtual Laguna Beach Field Trip Rescheduled Again

Ack, sorry to have to reschedule on such short notice and for a second time, but we're going to have to postpone the field trip to Virtual Laguna Beach for another week. I'd planned for guests from MTV, There.com, and Electric Sheep to join us on Skype tonight, but last week a virtual event wth the band Open Air Stereo came up for tonight that conflicted and required the guests attention. I was thinking we might still hop in and have a look at the event and the new episode of Laguna Beach which is airing in VLB tonight a day before it goes on TV, but I've decided it's better to postpone the official future salon meeting until we can get some people on the podcast. Apologies. We shall persevere!

For everyone raring to go, at 6 PM PST you can watch the new episode of Laguna Beach in VLB, directly followed by an appearance from Open Air Stereo.

Change Is Afoot!

The SL Future Salon now has its own podcast channel on MetaverseSessions.com compliments of John Swords AKA Johnny Ming. Our first podcast on the network--a conversation about transparency and lifelogging with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett--is up for listening. Some other cool updates to the SL Future Salon blog, group, and meetings coming soon.

Read-Ahead for Tuesday's SL Future Salon

This Tuesday at 6 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett on the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep Island [<--SLURL, click to launch Second Life]. More details here. The meeting will be conducted in voice over Skype and made available as a podcast thanks to Johnny Ming of Secondcast and Metaverse Sessions.

The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information. As prep reading, viewing, and listening, here are a few timely links on the topics of transparency and privacy on the web:

•Justin Hall's short video about passively multi-player online gaming (PMOGs)

•Onlife, a program Justin Hall mentions in this MP3 of his keynote at the Mobile Games Conference:

Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.

•Mark Barrett inverviewed on Secondcast, responding to criticism over SLStats.com originally being opt-out, not opt-in for avatar tracking, as in the Second Life Herald article Is Big Brother Watch-ing?-- that, I might add, starts by calling out my avatar, SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, for not having any SLStats friends, ha!

•Podcast of futurist Jamais Cascio on Personal Memory Assitants and the Participatory Panopticon from Accelerating Change 2005. From the abstract:

The value of mobile camera phones as a means to capture events in one’s life will only be further enhanced as these devices become more powerful, their cameras improve, their capabilities increase, and the speed of connectivity continues to grow. There will be an opportunity to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a 'Big Brother' way.

•danah Boyd writes about backlash within the Facebook community over news feeds that let you easilly follow every little change your friends make to their pages: Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. She lists her main takeaways:

• Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
• The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
• We've experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot.  When are we going to learn?
• Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
• Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
• Facebook lost its innocence this week.

• MoBuzz YouTube video on the Facebook feeds. I like this analysis.

• A New York Times article on a woman identified by piecing together her AOL search queries that were made public along with thousands of others: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. From the article:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

•Links to David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, on privacy and surveillance

Join the SL Future Salon group in Second Life  for inworld announcements and reminders and I hope to see you on Tuesday!

Next SL Future Salon Tuesday, September 26th with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett

The Second Life Future Salon continues on Tuesday, September 26th at 6 PM PST with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett. We'll be talking on Skype and streaming live into the Sheep Tower 5th floor conference room [<--SLURL] on Sheep Island. The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information.

Justin Hall has been working on a framework for what he calls passively multi-player online gaming or PMOGing. See his short video presentation here for a succinct introduction, and an MP3 of his inspired keynote at the Mobile Games Conference for more. PMOGing asks that you make your online activity transparent to others in order to turn the web itself into an MMO of sorts, one that we play simply by behaving and performing for the networked public eye. From PassivelyMultiplayer.com:

Description

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers.

Summary:

A system for using user data and device-use history to generate avatars and/or game moves in an online multiuser environment.

Mark Barrett came on the Second Life scene relatively recently and made waves with his site SLStats.com which tracks how much time you've spent inworld, where, and with who. After initial controversy over people's SL information being posted to the web without their explicitly opting into the SLStats system, Mark quickly modified to the service to only track those who've signed up themselves. Mark is also the creator of SLBuzz and SLTags. From SLStats.com:

Second Life Stats allows you to see how much time you spend playing Second Life, and can even keep statistics on other interesting things, such as tracking your whereabouts. It does this using a small attachment that your avatar can wear.

SLStats is completely passive, and doesn't require you to do anything besides wearing the SLStats attachment. You can browse statistics of other Second Life residents using SLStats, rate them, and also write blog entries straight from within Second Life.

I also find myself now working on an SL side project that juggles opt-in etiquette, transparency and privacy. What is it? Well, I kid you not, it's a kind of mix between the old SLTV, Subservient Chicken, and "Someone keeps stealing my letters..." (a kind of massively multi-player alphabet sandbox). More on that soon, and at the salon.

And so the three of us will discuss our projects and visions, issues and expectations around privacy and transparency, and work with saloners on defining some groundrules for lifelogging etiquette on the web and in virtual worlds. There's been a lot about this in the news recently. More background posts coming soon.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes to the SL Future Salon

Hi everybody,

As you've seen, things have been quiet with the Second Life Future Salon for a couple of months. I'm working on changing that. Please never mind the site holes as we update.

The situation is pretty classic, though this was my first time going through it: A community forms, momentum builds, it takes a lot of effort, way goes on to way, some entropy sets in, it's tricky to clean up, other sirens call, updates seem daunting, attention goes elsewhere, things go on the back-burner. But I've got a solution that seems to fit.

For me, most of the dauntingness grew out of SL Future Salon's early hybrid role as a multi-gadget SL and virtual worlds site, trying to do a lot of different things and developing a lot of blogly "spaghetti code" while doing them. We started the blog and monthly meetings back in April 2005, which for those following Second Life's growth is an absolute eternity ago. Now there are so many great SL voices and news sources out there that we don't have to sweat that hybrid role and can clean things up, pair things down, get  fun and sustainable again, and focus entirely on the monthly inworld audio conversations and podcasts with invited guests about the future of virtual worlds.

Look out for some updates on the blog soon and an announcement about a meeting in September. Here is what I'd like to see SL Future Salon become:

A very simple, clean, and clear blog that:

*Announces a new meeting with invited guests at the start of each month
*Pushes a few posts with links and ideas directly relevant to the meeting, with background on the guests and related issues
*Hosts pics, podcasts and transcripts of the salons

And that's it!

We could still use some help, so please let me know if you're interested in assisting in:

*Site design
*Basic podcast editing
*Suggesting/inviting guests
*Event wrangling (teleporting people in, taking and prioritizing questions for Q&A)

For those who aren't familiar with the SL Future Salons they are monthly gatherings inside Second Life where up to 50 people get together with invited guests to listen to (in audio) and discuss ideas relevant to virtual worlds in all their forms, not just SL. I started them while I was working as a community director with the Acceleration Studies Foundation as a node in their Future Salons Network of monthly meetups in real world cities. In December 2005 I joined The Electric Sheep Company as their futurist in residence and haven't had a lot of time to do house-cleaning on former projects.

Examples of guests we've had over the last year include Babbage Linden (Linden Lab/Second Life), Richard Bartle (co-creator of the first MUD), Thomas Barnett (author of the NY Times best-selling The Pentagon's New Map), Amanda Congdon (formerly of Rocketboom), Peter Ludlow (founder of the Second Life Herald), Paul Marino (machinima.org), Howard Rheingold (smart mobber), and a bunch of other interesting folks.

Stay tuned and drop me an IM inworld or an email at jerry[at]electricsheepcompany[dot]com if you're interested in participating, learning more, or passing on ideas. We also have a Yahoo group with over 100 people and a group in SL called SL Future Salon. Join those and subscribe to the blog to stay in the loop on meetings.

Thanks for the patience and support and see you again real soon!

Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni