We have a lot of meetings. It’s what companies do. They are required and there are always ways to make them more productive. However I noticed something in a Second Life meeting a few days ago that really made for an engaging reason to use avatars and presence in a multi user environment as part of a meeting.
How many conference calls, phone, video, chat varieties have you had the meeting, the call ends, then directly on to the next one. Sometimes someone running a call may ask someone else to hang on to chat about another topic. If you are not that person it feels rude to hang around, and equally you may feel excluded. In real life you tend to have to leave the meeting room with people, even if you are going to a new meeting. During those last few minutes human bonding interactions happen. People take off their meeting face and tend to be themselves, even if only their work persona. Idle chit chat, or off topic conversations spring up.
Hanging up a phone does not let you experience this bonding. So it could be we are losing something productive and effective when it comes to organizations and people?
In a recent eightbar and ‘friends of eightbar’ meeting in Second Life you can clearly see from the positions of everyone in the pictures below who is presenting and who is listening. We did this as both a telephone and Second Life chat meeting to mix things up a little.

When the meeting finsihed we quite naturally stood up and assembled into familar groups to chat. Not to waste time, but to exchange hello’s with people we knew, or wanted to know. Those few moments talking, openly in a room but ‘near’ our friends avatars meant the meeting completed properly. I could see the social groups around me, old collegues meeting again, people from Wimbledon past and present etc. There was a little buzz of chat and then we all went our seperate ways.

This seems an obvious thing? However like all good obvious things its not until its staring you in the face that you really know its right.

So many people at that meeting have commented on how it ‘felt’ better. That must make it more effective?

You can find a very good article here from Jeff on Hugo’s Second Life Amazon shop and his plans for a toolkit.

It never ceases to amaze the whirls and loops that things like Second Life seem to do around me and the rest of Eightbar. I was only today talking to someone from text 100 as PR agency who are lining up some interviews about Second Life and what we have been up to as IBMers when I come across this on the as usual, and very prompt 3dpoint.com.
Text 100, rated 9 in the top 50 PR firms has opened a presence, or an office in Second Life. I look forward to my next call as, as well as evangelizing, I can point them to their own island.
Yes I do have PR representation, albeit not my own personal one (yet).

Duran Duran are hitting Second Life!
Given the age profile, many of us are going to have fond memories of Duran Duran from our school days. Well they have bought an island and are coming to join us all in Second Life. Wild Boys….. I can see a windmill and a Le bon dunking 🙂

This follows closely on the news of channel 4 entering as mainstream media

The massive increase in mainstream media paying attention to Second Life continued today with Second Lives
Whilst there is a microsite on the tradtional web, the launch event was help in Second Life. I could not be there for various reasons, but Hammy Takakura from eightbar, and later yossarian seattle attended. It was hammy’s first event as he has been busy building.
Hammy said the event was well attended as Channel 4 and Rivers Run Red showed the opening films, also lots of Lindens where in attendance.

Pictures by Hammy Takakura of eightbar

Over at New World Notes is a full report of the first major recoding artist, Suzanne Vega, to do a live concert in Second Life. Yes I missed it, but the great thing is that Wagner James Au always gets to these events and does such great reports from them. So check him out.
I will go back to playing with Yossarian Seatle’s updated language translator and hope to write a suitable article detailing a proper foreign language conversation that we are doing some experiments with. i.e. set up some non Second Lifers and see what happens when they just start chatting to people.

Yossarian Seattle of eightbar popped by this afternoon to show me his new language translator. A hud attachment with a lot of potential.

So I asked in english and got an answer in french, how much is that costume.

Update Pictures:

Well last night was another late one. Having been out of electronic communication standing in on a completely unrelated bid meeting I had to compress my quick 5 minute daily patches blogging, SL and metaverse thinking etc into a much longer block at night.
Not least becuase of feeling the need to help some collegues understand some of the extra benefits that metaverse approaches such as Second Life brings.
Anyway, I realized something beneficial in the area of ‘protecting the innocent’ . A social object appears to be that people can and do hide behind their avatars. Consequently they may mis represent and not be nice people. I apprecaite the problem people have, but something occured to me on an internal discussion.
This is by no means water tight but its something to bear in mind. Second Life et al are generally public spaces. People tend to start to meet in public areas. Even if you are not in a meeting you can see others in one, and that is a benefit. In normal chat rooms people pose as other people to try and attract people away. Very often the rest of the chat room is not that bothered. In SL if we see someone approaching someone in an unsual way, or are aware of a certain reputation we are able to intervene. Now the counterpoint is that its much easier to pretend to be someone else, but there is an element, just as with the co-location of land generating traffic to your site based on where it is not what its called, that must play into the ability to protect the innocent.
Obvioulsy if someone is very devious and nasty they will get aronud any of this, but getting to know people by their actions as well as their words may highlight the nasties more? Either way its social responsibilty and education that lets us ‘protect the innocent’
As it was late I decided to repay a visit to the space centre, and very good it is looking too.
I had somehow missed the planetarium last visit. Also Davee Commerce’s NPL stand looks to be showing a lot more now too. My visit cheered me up and restored my faith in our digital personas.

As an ageing resident of Second Life I am happy to see this stat “The median age is about 33. The older you are, the more likely you are to continue using SL.” written by Giff of Electric Sheep via Corey at Linden
“In any 7-day period, about 15% of residents write code. The monthly total is equivalent to the amount of code in MS Office.”

This CBS article is crisp and captures some of the main points. It also features Philip Rosedale getting to say “Yes we just call the FBI” when asked about the hackers and griefers in Second Life.
I now have a little sarcastic saying everytime we see some mainstream media refering to all things metaverse. “Yeah but there’s probably nothing in it”. The SL part with the anchor man was created by the electric sheep company.