US Government Gets Virtual

Spice up your next meeting: Wear wings By COURTNEY MABEUS February 25, 2008
On Tuesday afternoons, NASA holds a weekly meeting with contractors and space enthusiasts. For the uninitiated, it’s a pretty strange event.
The meetings are held in an online virtual world called Second Life. Avatars — animated characters that represent real people — do all the interacting. Flamboyantly dressed avatars, with bubbles above their heads to announce their names, sit on chairs positioned in a circle while a text box at the bottom of the computer screen tracks the conversation. At last week’s meeting, one avatar sported bright green wings, another wore a red princess gown, another donned a space suit complete with bubble helmet, and yet another smoked virtual cigarettes and wore a red beret while a lizard sat on his shoulder. This may be an early glimpse into the future of government meetings. “In so many ways, I don’t even think we’ve determined what the uses are,” said Eric Hackathorn, an information technology specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Just like the Web, the possibilities are endless for collaboration both internally and externally.” Today, at least four agencies are holding meetings or some sort of gathering in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, Activeworlds and Forterra. More are expected to join. The Defense Department’s National Defense University is creating a virtual space that will be strictly for federal users to conduct meetings, conferences and other informational exchanges. That space should be ready in time for Federal Virtual Worlds Expo, scheduled in late April. There are plenty of benefits to holding virtual meetings, experts say. They cut down on the cost and time required for travel, allow for large numbers of people to meet at once and spur the sort of creativity that you might not get from a conference call. But there are certainly drawbacks. Just getting “in world” and staying there can be a problem as the software frequently crashes. Communication can feel both frantic and disjointed, and it is hard to keep up. Avatars can be distracting in their dress and behavior, and there is the possibility that someone might not really be who he says he is. Advocates say they expect these problems will be ironed out over time. As the technology improves and more people view virtual worlds as a serious tool, users likely will evolve unwritten codes of behavior guidelines and establish protocols for how to interact. In addition, Paulette Robinson, assistant dean for teaching, learning and technology at the National Defense University, said some virtual worlds are working on ways to accredit avatars so their identities are verified. The NASA meetings in Second Life are a project of CoLab, a unit based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. CoLab started two years ago as an effort to develop more collaboration between NASA and industry software developers. Andrew Hoppin, a contractor who helped develop CoLab, said the project created an island in Second Life as a way to more conveniently bring NASA employees and software developers together. Some agencies are testing out other virtual worlds, such as Activeworlds and Forterra. But Second Life, which boasts nearly 12 million avatar residents, is the most popular so far. For a fee, users can create their own island and control who has access to it. One challenge NASA and others face is that virtual worlds are pretty lawless at the moment. And in these virtual Wild Wests, anything goes. About 12 users have been banned from NASA’s island in the past year because of disruptive behavior during the meetings, Hoppin said. On one occasion, an avatar lit a fireworks display.
A cautious approach
Until they learn how to tame these virtual worlds, agencies are being careful about how they use them. Mostly, their presence is aimed at promoting public outreach and education. And none appear to use them for meetings of great significance.
“The government is going to be pretty careful about how we proceed,” said Robinson of National Defense University. Robinson is head of the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds and she encourages agencies to use Second Life and other virtual venues to hold meetings, run conferences and support teleworking. “It breaks down the barrier of geography,” Robinson said. Bringing virtual worlds to federal employees has not been easy. In some cases, access has been a problem because of internal settings that have blocked ports. “As much as I’d love to have wide-scale participation from NOAA, it’s kind of piecemeal,” Hackathorn, who was the driving force behind establishing NOAA’s virtual presence in Second Life, said. NOAA was one of the first agencies to jump into the virtual world in 2006 when it opened its island. Avatar visitors to the island can experience what it’s like to fly through a virtual hurricane. In addition, Hackathorn is consulting with Environmental Protection Agency officials, both in real time and in Second Life, as that agency designs its own island.
Getting used to life in a virtual world comes with a learning curve. Avatars move by flying or being teleported through an invitation from other users. Distractions abound. At NASA’s meeting last week, avatars would occasionally stand, stretch or wave their arms. Sometimes they’d disappear — likely the result of someone’s computer crashing. Meetings in the virtual world can be challenging to keep up with. There are often multiple conversations underway and participants can communicate through either text or voice, depending on what equipment the participants have.
In larger meetings, such as NASA’s, text conversations make more sense to provide order, Hoppin said. Still, with users frantically typing away and the multiple conversations, the meeting can feel disjointed. And, often users chat privately through the program’s instant message system. On more than one occasion, users disappeared as they got booted from the system and then reappeared.
The security problem - That raises the question of security. A virtual world meeting even on a private island in Second Life won’t make sense for those agencies discussing sensitive issues because the data is kept on the servers of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based software firm that created Second Life. IBM developed its own virtual world, called the Interverse, by developing it first in Activeworlds and then moving it behind its own firewall as a way to keep company information about sensitive projects, such as internal software development efforts and occasional client meetings, under wraps, spokesman Steve Tomasco said. IBM, which has been a pioneer in corporate use of virtual words for meetings, has about 5,000 employees with Second Life avatars. The employees use their avatars to collaborate on projects with other employees or with clients, Tomasco said. Just as in the real world, the company expects its employees to present themselves in a businesslike manner in the virtual world and, as a result, has created a virtual world code of conduct, he said. “We prefer if our employees did not show up as an inanimate object,” Tomasco said. When or if the federal government will create something similar remains to be seen. For now, Robinson said, she hopes her project to create a new island dedicated for federal use will spur some agencies to greater action. “It’s really going to be a government center, so people in the government can use it for meetings if they want to. At the moment, there’s no real government center” for officials to meet, Robinson said. While Hoppin credited the meeting as aiding NASA collaboration with contractors and the public, Hackaford said there is often no advantage in holding a passive meeting in Second Life other than to hold conferences intended to reach large audiences.