Virtual citizenship as a weapon in the worldwide struggle for talent

Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts of Dancing Ink Productions were last Monday on Metanomics to discuss the roles virtual worlds can play in global diplomacy and business. Discussing cultures is never easy, especially when it involves talking about God, so Rita explained. However Dancing Ink Productions ventures into projects such as Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds. It seems that virtual worlds can bring us a degree of mental liberty which makes dialogue between cultures more easy.
In yet another example of discussion across borders volunteer Jane2 McMahon of Netroots Nation talked about what this progressive politics organization does in Second Life. Jane is Canadian, but this does not prevent her from participating in discussing US politics.
These discussions reminded me of the concept of virtual citizenship, which I discovered in a paper written by Cory Ondrejka, the former Chief Technological Officer of Linden Lab. Maybe at some time in the future it will not only be possible to run virtual corporations (incorporated in the state of Vermont), but also to become a real "virtual citizen"...

Cory Ondrejka published the paper Collapsing Geography: Second Life, Innovation, and the Future of National Power in 2007.
What fascinates me, is that this is not a story about the diminishing importance of nations, but about the increased competition between countries. Virtual environments can give countries a competitive advantage in the struggle for business and technological survival or dominance.
Even though the modern communication technology in all its dimensions reduces the communication costs dramatically, the competition between countries in order to obtain raw materials, energy, environmental assets and talent is heating up. China, Brazil, India and Russia are developing rapidly, the world is urbanizing rapidly, all this contributing to what can be called mildly "comptition" or less mildly "economic and technological warfare". In the meantime, the tendency of people to identify themselves with geographically defined nations is not diminishing, quite the contrary. Ondrejka:

Ironically, there has been a dramatic acceleration in geographically focused nation-states in the last 20 years, even as the explosion of the Internet and the Web has dramatically reduced communication costs. Driven by spectacular collapses of larger nations and the rise of geographic—often presented as ethnic—nationalism, the 1990’s alone saw the creation of over 30 nations.Unlike parallel business trends of the time, and contrary to economic alliances and soft power that was bringing many nations closer together, citizens were fighting for smaller, more geographically
identified nations.

In the analysis of Ondrejka, a nation's power will depend on the number of innovative and entrepreneurial people it harnesses. No nation-state will be able to compete counting only on the people within her borders.

The most successful 21st century nations will be those that redefine what it means to be a citizen and build the largest networks of innovators.

Of course, nations try to invite experts as advisors to give lectures and to meet people. This often are short term projects and the impact is not really dramatic, more like somewhat inspiring. Ondrejka proposes instead the notion of virtual citizenship. Such citizens are tied to a nation-state by mind share and time:

They meet and collaborate within virtual worlds, enabling them to ignore geographic limitations and focus instead on challenges and connections with other virtual citizens.

Instead of spending a few days a year in a particular nation-state, a virtual citizen could spend one hour per week or five hours per month. They could spend years building connections with the nation. They could create pools of entrepreneurs and innovators targeted to specific national goals and needs.

The virtual citizens become ambassadors, a diverse population scattered around the world who are focused on another nation, building the kind of cross cultural awareness critial to both innovation and collaboration.

In exchange, so Ondrejka suggests, a mild social safety net could provide great benefits for the risk taking entrepreneurs/virtual citizens at very manageable costs:

V-citizenship (RL: virtual citizenship) could easily become a national loyalty program that pays huge dividends to the nations choosing to leverage it. Consider again the benefits of g-citizenship (RL: geographical citizenship).While v-citizenship would be hard pressed to provide military protection, it could easily contribute to health care, retirement, or education costs. Especially for the kind of risk taking entrepreneur this program would hope to attract, even a mild social safety net could provide great benefits at very manageable costs. Moreover, by creating a community among the v-citizens and connecting them to g-citizens, v-citizenship would create the valuable knowledge collisions so prized by innovators. V-citizenship could
even lead to more face-to-face contacts by copying existing programs that grant economically important visitors easier passage through customs, upgrades on national carriers, and other perquisites.

Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions said last Monday that one should avoid in virtual worlds as elsewhere to reason in terms of "us" and "them" and instead focus on individuals and groups.

This seems to correspond to my own experiences in Second Life and with social media in general: these networks and worlds function because individuals gather into groups and recognize each other on the basis of what each individual actually does. If one invests a lot of time and effort, chances are that one gets back a lot in terms of ideas, inspiration and contacts. It is not the nationality of individuals which is important, but what they do.

This is not to say Ondrejka is wrong. It cannot be denied that even though Second Life offers equal opportunities to all companies, the big names which do experiment a lot with collaboration and work in virtual worlds are American companies: Manpower, Kelly Services, IBM, Cisco etc. Some virtual world companies are financed by the US security services. I think one can also say that living and working in Second Life gives a positive impression of American culture and society. So one can say that the development of virtual worlds has a positive impact on the United States, and I also have the impression that not only security services, but politicians at large in the US take notice.
The idea of a "mild social safety net" is very interesting of course. Just like companies try to retain their best employees by linking substantial benefits to loyalty, countries could do the same with virtual citizens (v-citizens). Now that protectionism makes it difficult in almost any rich country to allow in workers from other countries (even not from other rich countries), the concept of v-citizenship could be a clever way to reap the benefits of the international mobility of labor without running into domestic political trouble.