Philip Rosedale: Bringing Second Life to Developing Nations

Second Life® may be a global phenomena, but its residents are still largely wealthy. At his breakfast address at Second Life Community Convention, Philip Rosedale expressed his interest in changing that, and in particular, getting Second Life into the hands of people in developing countries, so that they could integrate into the global economy as knowledge workers. Given my school’s interest in Sustainable Global Enterprise, I pursued the topic with him, and went to Tish Shute of ugotrade.com for some insights.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You mentioned the global nature of this, and, in the talk today, you talked about, well, I guess I think of it as at the bottom of the pyramid model. I don’t know if that’s where you were going with this, but that you want to

PHILIP ROSEDALE: Empowering people.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, and going intoI don’t know if you’re talking about Africa or what, but I don’t know if that’s something you’ve talked about before publicly.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I haven’t [talk publicly about this] a lot, and it’s something that I’m very early in my thinking about, but, look, if the future of human productivity is mostly in the creation of intellectual capital, that is to say, if, as human beings, we create value in a society – I mean we each as individuals create value in a society in some manner – historically that value has often been created by physical production of one type or another. Lifting. Mining. Local resources. We are definitely moving toward a future, in which we are in an age of creativity, in which the majority of production is intellectual work of some kind or another. Well, I’m just struck by the vast inequity between that imagined future and the fact that today there are so many people around the world, who have the ability to deliver that kind of intellectual production, but do not have the access to do it or are restricted by their local community or conditions in such a way that they can’t participate in that information economy. And I think that Second Life is a really compelling way to bridge that gap because all you’ve got to do – what we’ve already seen is that the value of Second Life to an individual who’s educating themselves, getting a job, is thousands and thousands of dollars – which is greatly in excess of the cost of a computer.

So what that means is that, if you can come up with the right bootstrap model. You should be able to get computers to people in developing environments where they didn’t have access to them, and then there should be a good profitable model where they’re easily able to kind of earn back and provide for themselves and buy those computers or whatever.

If you look at microfinance in general, which Dr. Yunus just won the Nobel Prize for – was something I was following and getting Second Life more closely – you see that these models where small investments in people, made in the right way, with the right trust model, do cause people to rapidly move forward. And I think that Second Life is just a phenomenal example of how you could take somebody, and you could put them on a level playing field, let them participate in what is today a milliondollaraday economy, and I believe that what we’ll see is that somebody from a developing nation performs absolutely no differently from somebody in a developed nation when it comes down many of the different kinds of jobs that you can do in Second Life.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: They just need a graphics card.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: They just need the computer, a graphics card and the broadband. And so I really believe that there’s got to be a bootstrap model, given that the computer, the graphics card and the broadband can be less than a thousand bucks. There’s got to be some sort of a bootstrap model where that starts to happen. I love the idea of trying to demonstrate that. I mentioned in the talk today that I kind of love the idea –
I have this vision of an individual, an entrepreneur in a developing country, who serves as a point of currency exchange and a point of facilitation. Maybe a teacher that teaches people in their local community how to use Second Life to educate themselves, make money, whatever, and then facilitates things like currency exchange, which are more complicated, and does that at a profit. So it’s really a perpetuating system.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I tell you, I think, from your perspective and like you said, you guys should look atI think this whole idea of getting people in other countries, that are not in your typical sort of technology environment into Second Life and making money, I tell you, if I had more time and more people, I’d say, “Go seek out the use cases.” I bet some of that stuff has already happened in a real interesting way, and it just needs to be amplified. [CROSSTALK]

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, there is Alanaugh Recreant who’s doing some stuff. I think that’s a nonprofit.

LYNN CULLENS: Absolutely. And I actually think the Virtual Worlds roadmap thing that they’re bringing back. They’re really starting to try to bring that back up, and I’m going, and they’re going to be focusing on new studies. And they’re really asking the communities across the metaverse, not just SL, but obviously they’ll be mostly from Second Life, to actually write those case studies and get them up and online. I think that the meshing of those, the fact that we not only have actual situations that you make the case for, but we’re asking for people to write those cases. That’s the mesh.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I just feel like we’re so close to a business model like Starbucks or something, where a company could be built, not ours, doesn’t need to be us, that is basically just building cafes or something. Those cafes are these learning and work centers for people, and people are coming and signing up, and they’re paying in the manner that Starbucks makes money. I mean they’re paying something for the time or whatever. And if you look at the PC bhangs in Korea, the big model there, which is what drove Korea into its place of highly connectedness. It was PC bhangs, which are these PC rooms that you pay a thousand Won an hour, which is about a dollar an hour, to use. And I just look at that, and I’m like, “Man! Somebody should just be doing that and just with Second Life, where they just say, ‘We’re going to immerse you in this environment, and it’s not a game. It’s not a bibliography. It’s a learning and work environment. You can go in here.’ I mean just think about like working retail in Second Life. How many retail jobs are there in Second Life? I think a lot now, right? I mean a lot, a lot, a lot.

LYNN CULLENS: That would be a cool project for The Tech’s in inworld presence too because they just did the UCan2 thing, and they’re doing all that kind of outreach as well, so that’d be interesting.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: That is so neat! Just so many weird things people ought to be able to do though to make money.

Click here to see what Tish Shute of ugotrade.com has to say.

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