• Shared online 3-D virtual environment (Web 3D)

• Get tools and rules, make up your own goals

• Products of your work belong to you

• Aspects of SL that make it popular as a game also make it conducive to social networking

• Used as a platform by universities, businesses, libraries, nonprofits…

What's Second Life?

• What are the opportunities for IA work in Web 3D environments like SL?

• How can IAs use SL as a platform for collaboration and education?

• Can we pull off a mixed reality panel discussion?

Questions for the Panel

• Stacy Surla (Stacy Narayan) IA Institute and others

• Lori Bell (Lorelei Junot) Director of Innovation at the Alliance Library System; founder and chief librarian at SL Library 2.0

• Sarah Dilling (Sally Linden) Web developer at Linden Lab

• Andrew Hinton (Banjo Quonset) Co-founder of IAI, IAI SL Initiative Leader, and Senior IA at Vanguard

• Beth Kanter (Beth Kavka) Trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits in effective use of technology

• Josh Knauer (Hayduke Ebisu) MAYA Design; Envirolink Network, GreenMarketplace.com, Commonwealth Island

Panelists

• Augmented the RL session with some SL

• Remote participants joined the meeting via SL

• Demonstrated SL and used IAI's SL space

The Mixed Reality Part

• Requirements:

• Hardware, connectivity in-room and remote• Skype in-room and remote• Webcam in-room

• Basically, used Skype as our streaming server

• It worked – awkwardly

Flex-track Session: Mixed Real Life / Second Life event with Skype

Panel Session: Mixed Real Life / Second Life event with Skype

• I like all the panels, except the Second Life one. (Really, that woman had her baby up there gurgling away while she talked?) –anonymous

• The highlight of the session was while sitting in the beautifully designed IA Summit Office (there's a Herman Miller rug there), a female avatar walked up and said hello.  It was Peter Morville!  -Beth Kanter

• Au récent IA Summit, qui s'est tenu à Vegas, une conférence a mis en lumière les défis qui se proposent aux architectes de l'information dans Second Life. "Tous les défis auxquels sont confrontés les architectes de l'information dans la création d'environnements d'information sont présents dans les univers virtuels 3D" -Benoît Drouillat

What People Said About The Panel

• The way the web evolved gave rise to the need for IAs.

• Web 3-D poses info org and social networking puzzles, and like the web will benefit from IA approaches and solutions.

• Several of the panelists actively and successfully use SL for community building

• Orgs are still figuring out how to use Second Life

• Linden Labs recognizes the need for IA, and is now hiring some

The Panel's Observations

• SL has many issues of particular interest to IAs.

• Visitors to SL locations often find them difficult to navigate.

• Organizing or discovering info about events and in-world content is a challenge.

• Object browsing lacks a good solution

Observations (cont)

• Explore SL, WoW, etc

• Visit "Info Architecture" island

• Attend the Summit Redux in SL (date TBA)

• Join the IAI SL initiative

What Can IAs Do to Learn More?

Presentation at Second Life Library (2006)

Info Architecture isleInfo Architecture isle

A lovely lady with, really, a very lovely baby

Stacy Merrill Surla | Information Architectstacy<at>greenfx(dot)net