Engaging Virtual Communities

Metanomics, the web's premier program about the business and policy of virtual worlds, began an exciting second season on Monday, June 23rd at Noon PST. For the kick-off program Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield featured USC's Second Life and the Public Good Community Challenge, with guests Douglas Thomas (Doctor Ludovico in SL) Associate Professor, USC School of Communication, and Rik Panganiban (Rik Riel in SL) from Global Kids.


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USC's Network Culture Project invited "the residents of Second Life to imagine new ways that virtual worlds such as Second Life can be used to make a contribution to the public good." What is the public good? Second Life residents proposed projects that addressed many social needs, including conservation, human rights and international justice, global peace and security, reproductive health, digital media and learning, and juvenile justice.

The challenge is part of a series of projects devoted to the public good which are funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Up to three finalists will be selected by community vote. The finalists will be provided with a $100,000L per month building stipend (and land, if required) for three months to execute their proposal. The projects will be showcased in Second Life at the State of Play conference to be held in Chicago, October 2008.

In an early community meeting about the process, Thomas summarized the challenge as "an ongoing investigation of the ways in which communication and culture are being transformed by network technologies in areas such as learning, social interaction, play, and civic engagement. We are trying to understand, broadly, how decentralization of information and pull versus push technologies are impacting how we think, learn and interact." Panganiban took a more practical approach, expressing particular interest in those "projects that demonstrate the impact that virtual worlds can have on real world problems."

Thomas has long been interested in the social impact of new technologies. Author of the book Hacker Culture in 2002, and Cybercrime in 2000, he turned his attention toward the social justice and civil rights potential of new digital media in the last few years. His perspective on socialization of children in virtual environments was highlighted in a c/net News.com special feature on Digital Kids in late 2007.

Rik Panganiban came at the same issues from a non-academic setting. Currently working with Global Kids in Second Life, Panganiban previously worked for several non-governmental organizations at the United Nations, and helped to organize the NGO component of the United Nations World Summit on The Information Society. "Global Kids, says Panganiban, has designed a Dream It Do It initiative -- quite similar to the Public Good challenge -- that "supports young people to launch their own sustainable ventures either within or outside of Teen Second Life that create lasting benefit to their communities. D.I.D.I. provides seed funding (up to $1000 US) and the support teens need to launch their own social entrepreneurial project on issues that matter."

The five finalists announced for Second Life and the Public Good: Community Challenge are:

• The Ability Commons
• Interactive Accessible Home
• Mauerkrankheit/Wallsickness
• Native Lands Culture Outreach project Propasal
• The Texas Obesity Research Center in Second Life

Vote here by June 30th to participate in the Second Life community's selection of the three prize-winning projects.

Bloomfield's Followup Questions for Metanomics Guests

"We had a great show today with our guests, Rik Panganiban of Global Kids and Douglas Thomas of USC's Annenberg School of Communication. There were a few questions I didn't get a chance to ask. Here they are, in hopes that Rik and Doug will reply, either here or on their own sites.

The backstory for the first set of questions is that I quoted from Doug's testimony to Congress in 2002:

Hackers often have an antagonistic (and often times juvenile) response to authority, often producing behaviors that appear to post a troublesome threat.

I then asked whether we should add “antagonistic response to authority” as one of the elements of the gamer disposition? And is that a good thing? I then asked some questions about the association between hackers and griefers. Specifically, I asked:

It seems to me that griefing plays the role in games that hacking plays in Microsoft’s operating systems—people want to break the system for no reason other than…well, and antagonistic response to authority. So should I read Hacker Culture also as a defense of griefers?

Rik indicated in text chat that he thought hackers and griefers were quite different. Rik, care to elaborate?

I wanted to ask Doug another question about his testimony, but didn't get the chance. Doug, are you willing to comment on how you have updated your views since 2002 relative to the following quote from your testimony?

The media, moreover, tends to exaggerate threats, particularly by reasoning from false analogies such as the following: If a 16 year old could do this, then what could a well funded terrorist group do? The reality ios that there is very little that a well-funded terrorist group could do that a 16-year old hacker couldn’t. And neither of them threatens us in a way that can rightly be called ‘terrorism.’

Finally, I didn't get to ask Doug for more information about a course he just finished teaching:

PUBD510: Technologies and Public Diplomacy - Explores relationship between diplomacy and technological change. Emphasis on question of how new media may force us to rethink traditional frameworks of public diplomacy.

On the show, I would have asked Doug to summarize an entire semester into about 45 seconds. Now, he gets the similarly difficult task of squeezing it into a blog comment. But you could make a bunch of us happy by posting the syllabus online, if you are willing.

Thanks in advance, Rik and Doug."

Background Reading

• Best Practices for Non-Profits in Second Life Rik Panganiban, Fall 2007.
• Application: Second Life and the Public Good Community Challenge
• The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind, Douglas Thomas, Games and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 2, 149-172 (2007)
• Reviews of "Hacker Culture" by Douglas Thomas.
• Testimony before Congress Douglas Thomas.

Guest Biographies

Douglas Thomas

Douglas Thomas is Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California (USC), and Director of USC’s Institute for Network Culture. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Communication in 1992 and specializes in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies of Technology. Thomas focuses his research on multiplayer online games and virtual worlds and how those spaces may be used to promote cross-cultural cooperation. In 2005, Thomas created a competition to modify an existing MMO into a “vehicle for cross-cultural understanding.” Thomas collaborated with Sasha Barab to use the Quest Atlantis multi-user virtual platform to allow students to interact and participate in ethical decision making, in order to better understand the consequences of their actions while receiving instruction and guidance from teachers.

Thomas is also affiliated faculty at the Center for Robotic and Embedded Systems in the Viterbi School of Engineering and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. He is Vice-President of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). Thomas has testified before the U.S. Congress on issues of computer hacking, cyberterrorism, and critical infrastructure protection.

Douglas Thomas is founding editor of Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, a quarterly international journal that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media.

Rik Panganiban

Rik Panganiban is the Online Leadership Program Associate, Second Life Producer, for Global Kids.

Panganiban received his BA in Communications and Sociology from UCLA and his Masters in Politics from NYU. He has a long history using technology to facilitate civic action -- from Usenet, BBSs and Gopher in the 1990s to virtual worlds and machinima today. Most recently, he was the coordinator of an innovative program at the Social Science Research Council that connected media activists and media academics with funding and project support. Rik coordinated NGO participation at the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in 2005 and managed a human rights internship program for the European Commission in Geneva in 2003.

In Fall of 2007, Panganiban prepared the document Best Practices for Non-Profits in Second Life, the second in Global Kids Series on Virtual Worlds. Fall, 2007, and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rik is also responsible for a popular and influential blog at www.rikomatic.com.