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.

[Amy Lenzo]

Thanks Widget, for putting this up and starting the ball rolling. The idea started during a conversation at the World Café garden in SL last Thursday between Widget, myself (Lucida Sktower aka Pipi Tinlegs) and Doon Bury (aka Mary Pat). We were discussing the various options for communications in-world, the variable pros and cons of each one, and how valuable it is to have others to share this kind of information with.

So that prompted community-minded wizard Widget to think about a space where we could aggregate this knowledge, and form a sort of community of practice around how to use technology, particularly communications technology, in SL to enhance our interactivity and conversational capabilities.

This question of what technology works best for communications in different circumstance is a great one, and seems to come up in every first-time gathering on SL. That and managing the different levels of technological comfort (i.e. the ability to sit, walk, talk and transport, etc.) within the group.

Beyond the choice of what modality to use when, one of the things we also touched on in our conversation was graphic recording. Graphic recording is a big piece of the 1L World Café conversational experience; it serves to reflect the collective wisdom of the group back to itself, making it both visible and conscious. In fact, integrating that graphic element is probably the biggest challenge I've faced in creating the World Café experience in-world.

So that's one thing I would ask others who might know more than I about whether it is possible to integrate some kind of whiteboard whereby someone could reflect a conversation graphically and have it show up in real time in-world. And whether there are graphic recorders in-world who'd be interested in working with us.

I'm also curious about the choices different people have made around using text or voice chat. I tend to prefer text for meaningful interaction since it slows down the inquiry and gives an easily accessible "log" of the interaction, while I know others much prefer voice for the personal quality and additional information it offers about the speaker. In fact, I've heard that many people in RP situations prefer text because it better protects the imaginal sphere.

So, I suspect that's more than enough to start! :-)

Lucida

[Amy Lenzo]

Wow! This is amazing - the war memorial project itself AND the beauty of the machinima that captures it. There were several things that really stood out for me in terms of our thread. First, the artistry of the film-making itself - about which I have many questions. Did you make it? Would you be willing to share how you did it? It's a particularly great example...

You mentioned a text to voice tool - do you know more about this?

I was also intrigued by the stated need for conversation with and among veterans and people concerned about the wars since Vietnam. Has there been any follow up to this?

Thanks so much for posting this film Draxtor!

~ Lucida

[Amy Lenzo]

You're an angel! Thank you Thank you Thank you. Are there times that are better or worse for you to meet up?

[Amy Lenzo]

:-) k

[Widget Whiteberry]

In the past year, I've produced or helped to produce four interactive events. In each case, we used different combinations of the available tools, with varying levels of success. I'll post about each of those here.

For a January '08 production of Virtually Speaking, George Lakoff, Glenn W. Smith and Eric Haas were the guests of Jay Ackroyd (Jimbo Hoyer in SL). In the first hour, the principals spoke to each other over a conference call line which was streamed inworld. The principals were linked in private IM with the tech support crew.

Voice was turned OFF in the general amphitheater area. Comments in chat - there were more than 60 people in the amphitheater at any one time - were monitored and (some) passed to the principals through their private IM group, which they used to cover general chat (at times a huge* distraction). Several of them reviewed chat later. The hour was recorded and posted by In-World Studios.

Four minute clip here: http://inworldstudios.com/vs/010308_george_lakoff_1.html

In the second hour, participants and principals adjourned to a nearby area where 25 of them sat in a circle and continued in both chat and voice.

[Geni Figaro]

Beautifully made report. Its so important to keep the visual element. Piles of notecards or chat records just don't work in SL for so many people.

[Doon Bury]

Thanks so much for this, Draxtor. I remember when I happened to find the Vietnam Wall in SL on the first day it opened and was drawn down into its embrace. I have not been to the RL Wall, but this was a very powerful experience for me and one that I have used to explain to others that I don't find SL abstract or divorced from "reality." Your Veterans' Day report brought me right back to that experience. What a great tool Machinima is and how well you use it! Thanks.

[Doon Bury]

Thanks for the invitation to Commonwealth Island, Amy. And, Widget, thanks for starting the thread.

I've been thinking about the graphics. I was wondering if a graphics artist could listen to the large group conversation in the Cafe and draw as usual on paper, and then scan it and post on the white board from time to time as the coversation and drawing evolve. Then we might have color and something closer to the RL integration of WC artistry.

Doon Bury

[Doon Bury]

Yesterday I received email from the Obama transition team about "Change is Coming" house conversations they are encouraging on next weekend to give feedback and organize local activities in support of the Obama agenda. You sign up for a house (or other space) meeting or you create your own meeting on the website at a physical location near your zip code. I decided to try to create a virtual meeting for people who are in Second Life and used whatever combination of info from SL and RL that would work, e.g used Doon name, local zipcode. No takers yet, but maybe they will think about doing something like this in the participation structure they are setting up.

Doon Bury

[Amy Lenzo]

Hi Doon! Yes, that's a great variation on one of the ideas we were putting forward during our conversation. We'd need a tech savvy graphic artist, of course, but Nancy White did an excellent job of transferring her RL drawing onto Flickr & then posting a for us all to see it in local chat during the World Cafe we hosted for Rockridge last year.

[Widget Whiteberry]

I think this is a marvelous idea. On a similar note, a friend in SL is talking with the folks at Laughing Liberally about establishing a presence on Commonwealth. LL brings people together face-to-face (F2F) in large cities around the country to socialize and build relationships. The idea would be to create a virtual option for people who live in places too small or two spread out to make that kind of F2F gathering feasible. If this works, CW will host - via stream - live comedy performances that can be enjoyed and discussed by anyone with the bandwidth. Laugh together, talk together, organize! I like it.

[Amy Lenzo]

Fabulous ideas, both of them! Let me know about them as they develop, I'd be interested in participating, particularly in the Obama program.

[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
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