The Future Of Work: An SL/RL Architect's Thoughts On Designing The Virtual World Office Space

If 2006 was the year of the virtual billboard, 2008 is the year of the virtual office park.  Real world marketing was the most highly touted practical application of Second Life just a couple years ago, but in recent months, enterprise use of SL has quickly become the thing on everyone's lips.  (Even former detractors.)  In retrospect this isn't surprising, for while  most prominent marketing campaigns in Second Life failed to return unambiguously potent results, major companies like IBM and Cisco have quietly continued to hold meetings, prototype content, and share data in-world.  Less glamorous or publicity-dependent, it's just taken a longer time for the mainstream media to recognize it.

But if we're going to conduct more of our business in-world, what should metaverse office spaces look like?  Keystone Bouchard (aka Jon Bouchard), an architect who designs buildings in both worlds, has spent a lot of time thinking about that.  In fact, it's become his specialty: he now earns "an equal or greater income" creating metaverse-based architecture as he would designing traditional, material buildings.  On his blog, he recently published a kind of three-part manifesto on "The Exodus to the Virtual Work Space", here, here, and here.  It's an overview based on what he's learned building business-oriented sites in Second Life, an argument for why they're so important for the future of work, and comes with fascinating suggestions on how to better leverage them. 

For example, what's a good asynchronous communication tool for geographically separate employees who share a virtual world office space?  (Other than, you know, e-mail?)  Keystone suggests personal totem pole system:

In a previous virtual workplace project I worked on, we employed a kind of ‘totem’ system whereby each employee had their own totem to rez wherever they wanted to suggest their interest or presence. The idea was that, if each project in a company had several employees working on it, they could each rez a totem nearby, so anyone could assess at a glance who was involved with which project . In workplaces that are more self-organizing, this can be an informal yet highly effective way for employees to suggest their interest in joining a particular team or working on a specific project. Taking it a step further, the totem can be programmed to communicate with a back-end database storing additional information pertinent to that employee’s status - such as on or offline, a list of projects they’re currently working on, their daily schedule, and more.

If I can take that another step: all the data associated with these totems could be aggregated together, so managers could track where their employees were devoting their time and energies, and figure out how to better allocate their resources. 

It's the kind of thing that makes me think enterprise applications and start-ups that create them are on the cusp of a boom time.  If so, Keystone's written a great starting resource for this sub-industry.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Can we get LL to stick totems out so we will know what they are working on and what they are not working on?

How about that new CEO? Is he working on anything? Will he begin delivering a semi annual State of the Grid Message containing:
what the challenges are
what is being done (in detail)
what is not being addressed and why
what the current 5 year plan is for LL and SL at the time of the message written in common English. I.e.; is LL planning to end the economy and turn SL into a big RL company shopping mall and say thanks for the fish to everyone that made SL what it is? (LL made the platform. The residents made SL. Not LL.)

etc etc.

Dead silence is a bad message.

[Dusan Writer]

The totem idea is wonderful and not unlike what IBM is doing with Bluegrass.

Bluegrass also uses an architecture analogy for work, although not nearly as elegantly as Keystone. In their case, huts represent individual's work spaces. Projects are aggregated around space as well, with visible RSS feeds. One of the things I like is their concept that outside a person's hut the grass represents the individual's level of commitment to projects - the longer the grass, the busier the person is.

@Ann...there's no question M should be making a State of the Union address here at some point. I've predicted some shake-ups, parsing his comment about vision that he's looking for staff who "voluntarily" buy into Linden's mission (one which I assume may evolve beyond the Tao and past 'Connecting All Humanity' to something a little more tangible like, well, being able to keep 100,000 users online at a time without crashing).

However, what often feels lost in our gazing at the Lab is the work that happens in spite crashes and clunky orientation experiences. I don't know about you, but my feeds have dozens of announcements, builds, projects, education events, and best practices a day, ALMOST out-stripping announcements about Web 2.0 widgets.

What amazes me is that in spite of grid performance issues, SL continues to be a platform of innovation. The sheer volume of research, hacks, improvements, experiments, environments and activities that happen on a daily basis in SL is cause for optimism - that, Linden can be totally ineffective and in spite of that people are still getting stuff done, and the Keystones of the world DO keep advancing the world one prim at a time.

[Peter Dunkley]

This is interesting stuff. SL is providing a good environment for businesses - it's low-cost, effective and hugely entertaining. It has two really significant advantages over video conferencing. Firstly, it's far better if your team are in multiple locations and, secondly, you can build relationships in SL - a really important factor as more of us work from home.

The totem thing is interesting - but I wouldn't want anyone to get hung up on the tools you need to do business in SL as really the most effective starting point is just meeting up.