I agree with Bryan’s comments that this year’s BB wasn’t as good as last year. Why? Well I felt like I wasn’t hearing anything new. Everything was a continuation of last year. Although the resounding message seemed to be ‘we are still figuring it out’ I guess in the last 8 months, we all didn’t get very far. Where are all those ground breaking projects that are leveraging the promises of participatory media? Where is the cell phone in all of this? Its a huge player as an alternate medium. Beyond broadcast is by no means limited to the web. The only person who spoke about this was Tad Hirsch.
Obeying to the WITNESS policy of dividing and conquering (Bryan and I are not allowed to attend the same sessions/dinners) I chose to check out the Virtual Worlds working group. After sitting around and chatting for 20 minutes, the group was somewhat astounded when it was announced that the entire working session would take place in Second Life (and our group leader had already started the session with the SL-ers) A small mutiny occured when half of the ‘first lifers’ did not have a computer to access SL. And it was somewhat ridiculous when half of us did not have a computer (what? how can it be that not everyone has a laptop?) So us ‘first lifers’ had to hold our own session albeit without the ability to fly or don rainbow colored hair. I mentioned Habbo Hotel (which no-one seemed to recognize ) and very quickly realized that SL is Virtual Worlds. We didn’t get a chance to compare and contrast MMORPG or any other types of virtual communites and worlds. I felt like I was sitting in a pitch room with many people offering to build WITNESS a space in SL.
My thoughts about SL? Is it a viable space? Yes, I think it is, depending on what you want to achieve. As John Lester from Linden Lab puts it. “Your SL space should be an extension of your org’s mission, culture and message” He also warns against simply ‘building’ a building/space that links out to the web, comparing it to the early days of the web when a site was an online brouchure. I think ultimately SL provides a community space with more context than just a chat room or bbs. For better or worse, it does allow users to interact with each other and with the space/functionality you create. I am still struggling with why WITNESS would want to be in SL and if we do…what exactly would we ‘build’ One thing I have to say, SL-ers are very passionate!! If we can get them half as passionate about WITNESS issues as they are with SL,we might have someting there. Check out this story on an anti- war protest in SL as food for thought.
My BOF dinner included Raul Ramirez, Exec Director, News & Affairs, KQED San Francisco, Chad Lupkes, Campaigns.Wikia and Greg Gibson, social media technologist. We discussed the building of online communities. Each had our own angle. Chad has built numerous petition tools. His problem? No-one is using them. Greg is building a community annotation tool. His first project…will be the bible. (hmm, built in passionate community) We’ll have to keep and eye on his project once it launches. Check out this SL anti-war protest as food for thought…
Other cool things of note:
- 100$ laptop! Yes its green. Also there has been a call for game producers to develop educational games around the MDGs that can run on the laptop. Which is causing quite a stir in the serious games community. See Rik’s blog
- Drew Clark of the Centre for Public Integrity showed their site that enables you to map local media by ZIP (us postal code) and includes maps of broadband supply.
Unanswered questions still lingering in my mind:
- Why was the guy from Four Eyed Monsters drinking out of a wineglass at what would be 10am his time?
- Participatory democracy- is this just another one of those buzzwords? Yes we may have more online participation, discussions, etc…but aren’t we leaving out a whole lot of people? No one really addressed or even acknowledged the digital divide. (well the audience tried to ask the question….)