New World Newsfeed: Barack Obama Appoints Two Second Life Innovators To His "Innovation Agenda" Group

I recently joked that Second Life's growth doldrums might only end if President Barack Obama himself set up an official headquarters in the metaverse.  That seemed quite unlikely just a few weeks ago, but increasingly, I'm not so sure.  Last month I noted that two academics well-versed in Second Life (and one of them, World of Warcraft) were on his FCC transition team.  Now I should note a Washington Post report that Obama has named a team to create an "Innovation Agenda" which will draft "a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country's most pressing problems," among other noble goals. 

On that team is New York Law School professor Beth Noveck and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a Chairman Emeritus of IBM.  Both of them are not just well-versed in SL, they're also crucial to its existence.   As vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, Wladawsky-Berger was instrumental in convincing IBM to devote tremendous resources and capital in 3D web technology, Second Life and OpenSim in particular; it's why the Fortune 500 company maintains one of the largest and most active sites in SL, and by extension, has conferred enormous legitimacy to Second Life as a technology worthy of serious corporate interest.  (That's him and his SL avatar, above, during a CNET interview.)

Beth Noveck has been closely involved in SL's development from the beginning, as the founder of New York Law School's State of Play, the ongoing conference series that's done so much to shape academia's understanding of virtual worlds as an important social phenomenon.  The first several State of Plays centered largely on Second Life: indeed, Philip Linden announced the IP rights policy for user-generated
content, at SoP 2003, and the first Second Life Community Convention was launched as a quasi-extension of SoP 2005.  Beth also put together NYLS's Democracy Island in SL, where she occasionally gave lectures as a Resident called Lawlita Fassbinder (top pic), and the world is featured as a case study in her seminal paper, "Democracy of Groups". (Unsurprisingly, Beth has a whole paragraph in the Acknowledgments of my Second Life book.)

What's all this mean to the government policy that Obama's Innovation Team eventually proposes? 

Hard to say now, and it may ultimately have no direct impact. However, if the Obama Administration puts forward policies regarding, say, the use of virtual worlds for democratic engagement, business and software development, and education, you'll know who to thank. 

In any case, consider this: virtual worlds have existed roughly since 1988 and Habitat, the Lucasarts MMO made by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar.  So they've been around through four US Presidential administrations.  To my knowledge, none of them have contained a single staffer evincing the slightest awareness of the medium, let alone detailed, first-hand experience.  Now, with the incoming Administration, at least four staffers do.

Hat tip: The eagle eye of Extropia leader Sophrosyne Stenvaag.

Image credits: Wladawsky-Berger photo from his blog; avatar pic from CNET.com.  Noveck avatar pic from the New York Law School blog.

Comments

[Sophrosyne Stenvaag]

This will be an interesting set of developments to watch. With Change.gov's transition this morning from "all rights reserved" to a Creative Commons license, good times might be ahead for digital free expression.

If you're interested in exploring these issues, please join us this Saturday at noon for Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon, where our guest Mitch Wagner of Information Week will discuss information technology and politics (along with a lot of other fun stuff).

(SLURL: Extropia Core)

[Matthew Perreault]

Couple that with having a president who--gasp--has a desktop computer, and we may in fact bring government into the 21st century. Or at least the late 20th.