Using Communication Tools for Meetings and Conversations in SL

[Widget Whiteberry]

Between voice, chat, IM, streams, parcels and graphics, SL offers many tools for individual, small group and large group interaction. The challenge for all of us is to learn which practices lend themselves to productive conversations. This thread is to share our stories of what works and what does not.

[Eos Amaterasu]

I think that building a few tools/objects to improve the World Café experience in Second Life could go a long way: my (admittedly limited) experience so far is that doing Café in SL doesn't quite measure up to Café in 1L. One major reason for this is that it's hard to limit conversation to just one table. There are hacks, such as assigning an IM channel to each table, or moving the tables beyond the chat-audible distance of each other, etc, but these are just that - kludges. I actually think that the SL Café experience has the potential to be superior to that in 1L, especially when you start thinking of the process of taking notes or recording conversations, people moving from one table to another, the remaining person at a table summarizing the previous conversation for newly-arrived people, harvesting results, etc.

Regarding restricting audibility to a table, there are several possible approaches that come to mind, including building an object that toggles conversation to just the table it's sitting on, building a HUD to display table-only conversation, applying a restrict-to-my-table-participants filter to the existing chat HUD, etc.

I am new to SL, but have lots of experience programming and scripting, and am interested in the intersection of group process and leadership with web and virtual tools. If this has not already been done, I might make for a highly useful project.

[Amy Lenzo]

Eos!

I'd love your help! There doesn't seem to be so much of an issue with small group table conversation - there are a lot of reasons why written chat is the format of choice, and it's easy to group IM a selected bunch of friends - but the visual graphic recording piece is more of a challenge. Do you have any thoughts on how to make that piece work?

Just curious - when did you participate in a SL World Café? Was it the Rockridge event?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Amy

[Eos Amaterasu]

Hi Amy!

December 9th was the 40th anniversary of the Mother of all Demos, at which Douglas Englebart introduced the mouse, graphic screens with networked interaction, and many of the pieces that are now part of the virtual landscape. There was a real life Program for the Future conference in the Bay Area, and, following tweets at hashtag #pftf, I learned there was also an SL conf. A world café took place both in 1L and SL. It was a great event, my first dual-world experience.

There were half-a-dozen or so tables, but when it came time to have individual table conversations, it was pretty chaotic, since you could see the texts of all the speakers at all the tables. So the group IM process you describe was not used. How streamlined and easy is that? Do you manually set up each table's IM group?

For visual graphic recording... I suppose what's wanted is a live writable graphics surface, streaming from the scribe's computer to the SL venue. Actually there was a wall with such a graphic at the event, but it was static.

Cheers, Eos

[Eos Amaterasu]

The wall image I refer to is the Co-Evolution of Human Systems and Tool Systems mural, addressing Englebart's question "How can we increase the capability of people to deal with complex global problems?"

[Widget Whiteberry]

Eos, I'm so glad to see you join this conversation; both for your contribution and your mention of DE. I was pleased to meet DE a number of years ago and your mention of him brought the encounter to mind.

Using group IM for a small group is easy. The table host creates a conference IM for the designated event recorder and the 4-5 people at the specific table. The table host may need to add people at their table to their contact/friends list. The event recorder and the table host (for back up) have pre-set preferences to save chat and IM logs.

At one World Cafe discussion, I recorded content rich chat logs for 4-5 tables. Immediately following the event, I posted the lightly edited logs to a wiki page and made them available to all participants.

[Doon Bury]

Widget, How many contacts/friends can one have in a list of Friends?

[Doon Bury]

I found this fascinating EOS! Engelbart must have been a true visionary...thanks.

Doon

[Amy Lenzo]

Dear Eos,

Thanks for writing, and sorry for taking so long to respond - I was doing a lot of traveling this month and have had very limited online access.

But Wow! This DE event sounds like something I would have loved to be part of!

Who hosted the World Cafe, do you know? I'd be interested in connecting with anyone else hosting World Cafés in-world.

Your assessment of what's needed for the graphic recording is right on! How could we set something like that up? It sounds pretty difficult to access...

Blessings,

Lucida (Skytower)

[Amy Lenzo]

Beautiful!

[Amy Lenzo]

Mary Pat,

I don't know if there is a limit on SL friends. I certainly haven't reached it yet! :-)

Amy

[Lincoln Builds]

I prefer communicating with a technology that leaves a trail so you can go back and pick up where you left off easily.

Lincoln B
Insurance medical

[Geni Figaro]

Text chat has one particular advantage over voice - that it is possible to conduct the discussion with people using more than one language. While translators are far from perfect with a bit of intelligent guess work they allow dialogue between groups and cultures that traditionally dont mingle much in SL (or RL come to think of it)

Until we take the step of a agreeing a world language (or simplifying some of the main languages in use round the world) SL offers a significant tool not available in RL.

There needs to be some more work to develop protocols about who uses which translators to avoid the screen becoming full of multiple translations of the same thought.

On keeping a record - I often keep the headlines of Rings Discussion chats. I find it easier to grab these during the discusion than attempt to read and digest text chat or to do the job of editing afterwards.

And yes Drax - video records are great and especially when supplemented with links to fuller text versions of information referred to.

Geni