[Air-L] online conferences in Second Life

[James Howison]

When we were studying a face to face meeting of otherwise completely virtual teams, Apachecon (Crowston et al, 2007) and the participants thought it was funny that we had hypothesized that they would do different things face to face (high uncertainty, leadership elections etc).  And in fact, as near as we could tell, they really didn't do things much differently (to the extent of sitting around a conference table on IRC).

Rather they focused on the conference as a really great way to have most of their group carve out three days to devote to the project.

So I've always felt that the sheer physicality of going somewhere biases participants towards focus (ok, so laptops and wireless biases the other way!) and commitment to the event and that would be missing in these type of conferences.  Crucially this bias is inter-subjective (I know that you know that I know you'll be around).

But what are people's experiences with that in long-running online conferences?

Cheers,
James

Crowston, K., Howison, J., Eseryel, U. Y., & Masango, C. (2007). The role of face-to-face meetings in technology-supported self-organizing distributed teams. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, 50(3).

On Apr 19, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Janet Salmons, Ph.D. wrote:

> Hello AIR folks,
> 
> Jim Parker asked about conferences in Second Life.... yes, I've
> participated and presented at in-world meetings and conferences. I even had
> a "vendor" booth where I could chat about my books with passers by... and
> I've been found laughing out loud at my computer at the dancing avatars at
> a Second Life conference happy hour, complete with DJ and disco ball.
> 
> Some conferences do a blended approach-- with events in Second Life
> complemented by other Adobe Connect/WebEx types of talks or forums for
> discussion.
> 
> In one example, for a conference on "fit"-- about how people, jobs and
> organizations fit-- I did a lively presentation in-world. I wanted to
> compare ways organizations recruited people in the "real" world for jobs in
> Second Life with ways organizations recruited people in Second Life for
> jobs  in the "real" world. I did a little tour, so we could look at some
> examples. It was pretty interesting and just a little challenging
> teleporting the participants from site to site. (I didn't lose
> anyone...) All to say, there are experiential opportunities in world unlike
> what can be done in other kinds of online conferences.
> 
> I think it would be particularly interesting for the Communication
> Association to be able to reflect on the visual nature of communication in
> world, and the significance of "non-verbal" communications with avatars.
> 
> Here is a link to a recording of a recent presentation: “Studying the
> (Virtual) World of (Virtual) Work” http://bit.ly/GG7Rqk, fyi.
> 
> The real issue is: are your association members open to this kind of event?
> Do they have avatars and are they willing to go into a virtual world? Would
> they be willing to participate in a pre-conference orientation? Also, do
> you have a space where you can convene a conference in world?
> 
> I'd be happy to communicate with you off list if you want to chat...
> 
> Best,
> Janet aka Soleil Lemondrop
> 
>> 
>> *Janet Salmons Ph.D.*
> *Capella University School of Business and Technology and Vision2Lead, Inc.
> *Site- http://www.vision2lead.com
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