METANOMICS IN THE NEWS - ENTERPRISE 2.0 CONFERENCE NOVEMBER 4, 2009 ANNOUNCER : Metanomics is brought to you by Remedy Communications and Dusan Writer’s Metaverse. ROBERT BLOOMFIELD : Hi. I’m Robert Bloomfield, professor at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. Today we continue exploring Virtual Worlds in the larger sphere of social media, culture, enterprise and policy. Naturally, our discussion about Virtual Worlds takes place in a Virtual World. So join us. This is Metanomics. ANNOUNCER : Metanomics is filmed today in front of a live audience at our studios in Second Life. We are pleased to broadcast weekly to our event partners and to welcome discussion. We use ChatBridge technology to allow viewers to comment during the show. Metanomics is sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and Immersive Workspaces. Welcome. This is Metanomics. 1
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METANOMICS IN THE NEWS - ENTERPRISE 2.0 CONFERENCE
NOVEMBER 4, 2009
ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is brought to you by Remedy Communications
and Dusan Writer’s Metaverse.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I’m Robert Bloomfield, professor at
Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. Today
we continue exploring Virtual Worlds in the larger sphere of
social media, culture, enterprise and policy. Naturally, our
discussion about Virtual Worlds takes place in a Virtual World.
So join us. This is Metanomics.
ANNOUNCER: Metanomics is filmed today in front of a live
audience at our studios in Second Life. We are pleased to
broadcast weekly to our event partners and to welcome discussion.
We use ChatBridge technology to allow viewers to comment during
the show. Metanomics is sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School
of Management at Cornell University and Immersive Workspaces.
Welcome. This is Metanomics.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome to Metanomics! Today we have a very
special mixed-reality show. Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon will be
at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, announcing
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Linden Lab’s new enterprise solution, named Second Life
Enterprise. Mark will be joined in San Francisco by
Douglas Maxwell, Program Technology Lead for the US Navy’s Naval
Undersea Warfare Center. Douglas’s colleague Steven Aguiar will
be speaking from Second Life, as will Neil Katz, who has been
responsible for IBM’s technical strategy for immersive Virtual
Worlds. The session will be hosted by Doug Thompson, CEO of
Remedy Limited, a communications firm that also happens to own
Metanomics.
For those of us who have been focused on serious uses of Virtual
Worlds, this has the potential to be a watershed moment. I can’t
help but think back to the very first episodes of Metanomics in
September of 2007, 2 years and about 85 episodes ago. I kicked
off the series with an episode called Metanomics 101, in which I
defined Metanomics as the economics of the Metaverse, a term for
Virtual Worlds popularized in the science fiction novel Snow
Crash by Neal Stephenson.
I think of those early days because they show just how far Second
Life has come in two years. Back then, Second Life didn’t have
voice so we had to use Skype to patch in sound. Linden Lab would
take the grid down for maintenance just about every Wednesday and
any other time they needed to so, more than once, that was during
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Metanomics. Guests, and entire regions even, would crash without
notice. Second Life was pretty clearly not ready for prime time
enterprise use, and that was reflected in the topics that we
covered on Metanomics. We devoted most of our sessions to
business and policy matters that affected the resident community.
Second Life was filled with entrepreneurs, banks, stock markets,
designers, and these people came on to Metanomics to talk about
the challenges they faced in running a virtual business in a
world of anonymity and complete dependence on the platform
developer, Linden Lab. We also brought in legal scholars to
examine challenges of governing virtual communities, identifying
the right legal analogies. We had a senior staff member from the
Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress talk about the
regulation and even the taxation of resident businesses.
But when we covered enterprise in our first year, it was
primarily through covering other platforms, like Forterra and
There.com. A year later, it was a different story. Second Life
had become much more reliable and had introduced voice
technology. While not every resident was a fan of voice, which
made it hard to be anonymous, it was a boon to enterprise users.
In November of 2008, Victoria Coleman, of Samsung, provided one
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of my favorite descriptions of the value of Virtual Worlds for
enterprise. Victoria was leading a team of engineers in the U.S.
and Korea, and conference calls were simply not cutting it for
them. A big problem was the language barrier. The Korean
participants were simply not confident enough about their
language skills to interrupt and say their piece in a conference
call. So they couldn’t accomplish the most basic task of a
collaborative group, which is to communicate their ideas. Let me
quote a bit of what Victoria said on the show about how things
changed when they moved from the conference calls to Second Life.
She says, “The same Korean people, who were really reluctant to
get on the phone and were very shy and wouldn’t say anything,
would show up in the Virtual World environment, decked out in
completely fantastic outfits. They would be very sociable, very
talkative. It was really like talking to a completely different
set of people. So the fact that Second Life created this medium
that let them connect with us, but in a way that amplified their
skills versus made the lack of English into a central point, all
of a sudden became a truly empowering experience for them.” That
was Victoria Coleman talking about her experience at Samsung.
Samsung isn’t the only group that saw the promise of Virtual
Worlds for enterprise, and, since summer of 2008, about half of
our shows have covered the enterprise-oriented projects of just
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about every type of organization you can think of, from
nonprofits like American Cancer Society to tech giants like
Microsoft to a variety of federal agencies.
Today, Linden Lab makes a big leap forward with Second Life
Enterprise. As I understand it, Second Life Enterprise allows
firms to run Second Life servers behind their own firewalls. Not
only does this allow security, but firms will have control over
user accounts, data transfers, and key server decisions. No more
worries that Linden Lab will restart your servers in the middle
of a big presentation to your boss or a key client. One of the
most unusual features distinguishing Second Life Enterprise from
other Virtual World enterprise solutions is, well, Second Life
itself. Second Life proper still boasts a large and extremely
energized and creative resident community, and I do mean
creative, as you can see by all of the different content that we
have featured on Metanomics. Owners of Second Life Enterprise can
tap into this community, and transfer assets between Second Life
and their own instance of Second Life Enterprise.
Now no doubt many of you are thinking that there is a great deal
of content in Second Life that isn’t actually intended for
enterprise use. That’s true. But Victoria Coleman’s experience
with Samsung conveys an important message. The rather whimsical
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nature of Second Life content can be very effective in fostering
traditional corporate goals of teamwork, collaboration and
brainstorming. Corporations go on hiking retreats and play
softball; why not have the occasional meeting led by a gorilla,
for example, as I once hosted a Metanomics episode?
Residents of Second Life should also be aware that enterprises
that adopt Second Life Enterprise are potentially creating a new
group of Second Life residents. After all, a key barrier to entry
in Second Life is simply getting to know its interface and tools.
Once people have come into Second Life Enterprise for work in the
day, at night, why not go to Muse Isle’s new Midwest snowscape
for a little ice skating?
I’ve got one last thought. Widespread adoption of Second Life
Enterprise may well change the nature of enterprise overall, in
ways we can’t yet imagine. In summer of 2009, Margaret Regan, of
the FutureWork Institute, talked about, well, the future of work
on Metanomics. Margaret has a vision of enterprises being
structured more like Hollywood productions: a team assembles for
a task, they make the film, and they disband once they complete
it. This is a very different labor market, and it’s a very
different and much more decentralized way of managing a large
enterprise.
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This model, if it’s going to be possible, will require a very
strong platform for virtual collaboration. Second Life Enterprise
might be that platform if it can do what Professor Mitzi Montoya,
of North Carolina State University, spoke about during her
Metanomics appearance. A good collaborative platform needs to
allow people to engage with one another, engage with the subject
matter at hand and engage with the environment in which they are
collaborating. The level of engagement Second Life already
provides its resident community tells me that Second Life
Enterprise has promise.
Of course, the devil is in the details. So let’s turn now to the
live panel in San Francisco to hear those details. I’m
Robert Bloomfield turning the reins over to Doug Thompson, who
will be introducing the speakers and moderating the discussion.
We’ll have a short break as we switch over to the live feed, but
I’ll see you in there in the text chat.
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION
DOUG THOMPSON: Thanks for your patience, everybody, and welcome.
It’s good to see a full room here, and we have a full room online
as well. As I mentioned before the session started, we are
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broadcasting live to Second Life and to the web. Today we’re
going to be talking about the future of work. That was the title
of the session, but this whole conference really is about the
future of work. We’ve been hearing a lot about how technology can
help us to collaborate better, connect more effectively and share
knowledge and experience.
There was a great quote yesterday, by Andrew McAfee, of MIT, and
he was talking about how, with Enterprise 2.0 technology, we are
looking for ways to narrate our work. I love that phrase “narrate
our work.” Because today we are going to explore this idea a
little bit more by looking at immersive media or Virtual Worlds.
We’re joined by two panelists here: Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden
Lab, and Doug Maxwell, of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. And
we’ll be joined shortly by two other guests who will be
conferenced in. So to kick things off, I’m going to pass it over
to Mark Kingdon to talk about some work that Linden Lab has done.
And, I’ll pass it over to you, Mark.
MARK KINGDON: Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Dusan, and
thank you to our folks in-world as well for attending the
conference this morning and joining us here as we talk about the
future of work. To get us started, I thought I’d do a pop quiz.
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You expected probably something a little bit different, but I
thought we’d do a pop quiz. And, most of you, if not all of you,
should have gotten a laser pen. Do you have one? It’s in a small
box on the table, if you don’t. Get it out because it’s part of
the pop quiz. Read the warning label if you’d like. The print’s a
little bit small for me, but it says, “Use this carefully because
it could probably blind you and burn you.” So we’re going to try
to use it safely today, and it’s part of the pop quiz. So get it
out.
The first thing I’m going to have you do is point it at the
ceiling, which is not hard to do. And then, if you push this bar,
you’ll get a light on the ceilings. It looks like a little
firefly. Okay. Most of you are doing it. Yes, don’t blind any
friends. Now we’re going to test a little bit and see how your
aim is so follow me over here. Okay. Yeah. Pretty good. Hand-eye
coordination is about I’d say B-minus, but we’ll try it some
more. Towards the middle here. Yeah, okay. Great. And then behind
me. All right. Good enough for the quiz, I think. All right.
So let’s test by pointing at the screen. Don’t blind anyone in
the front of the room. All right. You’re pretty good. Let’s go to
the right-hand bullet. You’re there. Good enough for the quiz.
All right. So the first question is:
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Do you have teams in your companies that work remotely? Yes
or no. Yes. Good news.
Are you currently using web or video conferencing more
frequently today than in the past? Yes. Wouldn’t be here if you
didn’t.
How satisfied are you with your web and video conferencing
technologies? Yeah. Exactly. I don’t see many fives or fours,
that’s for sure, and I think you all probably fall within the two
to four range.
How important is security in your work collaboration tools?
Again, all over the board but leaning towards the high end, which
you would expect in most companies or enterprises.
Have you ever attended a meeting or an event in a Virtual
World? Okay. So we’re slightly more than probably half. Yes.
Have you ever been in Second Life? Okay. Pretty evenly
split. Well, good. This helps us know a little bit about you as
we talk about the power of Virtual Worlds today.
You can put your laser pens away now. I’m glad to see that no one
was hurt, and, if you didn’t get a pen, there are more at our
booth out in the booth area. We have quite a stack out there, and
the team’s happy to share one with you.
So we’re going to talk a little bit today about virtual work and
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how work in the enterprise is changing as workforces change and
needs change.
There are two sets of opposing trends that are driving what we
see is the adoption of virtual work technologies. The first set
of opposing trends is the fact that workforces today are more
globally organized than ever before. Even in our small company of
300 people, moving soon to 400, 30 percent of our staff work
remotely, and they work from countries around the world. Travel
has become prohibitively expensive, in terms of cash and carbon.
When you put the facts together, you have a globally organized
workforce and the need to connect, what does that mean? It means
it’s hard do so, which draws people into the Virtual World
because it’s a wonderful facsimile for the kinds of connection
you can get in the Real World.
Another set of opposing trends is bringing people into the
Virtual World. One is that, in order to rapidly innovate, you
need to be together to create. I was at a presentation recently
that John Chambers gave, and he talked about what he saw as the
next wave of productivity in business. He said it would come, not
from supply-chain management, as it had in the past, or even
refined investment in information technology. He said it would
come from increased productivity through collaboration. We
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believe very much the same thing, which is that collaboration
brings people together and allows people to innovate more
rapidly.
The challenge out there today, and I think this is what brings
people into the Virtual World, is that collaboration tools
generally are weak, two dimensional, don’t allow you to have a
presence, can often be asynchronous. And, when they’re
synchronous, there’s a technology barrier that keeps people
apart. So these are the opposing factors that we think are
driving people into the Virtual World. Gartner published a study
recently that looked at adoption of Virtual Worlds and believes
that, by 2012, more than 70 percent of organizations, enterprises
will use private Virtual Worlds to support collaboration and
interaction in their business.
We think that Virtual Worlds are an incredible compliment to
traditional collaboration tools. Not a substitute for, but a
great compliment to. They offer persistence and presence. You can
represent yourself in the form of an avatar. You can work in an
environment that persists after you leave. It also offers layered
communication opportunities, through text, spatial voice and
audio. And you can interact with your environment in ways that
you can’t, say, in a video conference. So it adds another layer
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of richness to the collaborative experience.
Today when we look at Second Life, there are more than 1,300
enterprises or organizations in Second Life, moving towards
1,400, doing everything from events and meetings to training and
simulations, large companies with distributed workforces.
Businesses in Second Life are doing all kinds of things today.