Civic Engagement and Second Life

Last Thursday around noon, when every person with a car in the state of Massachusetts decided to take to the road at exactly the same time, I had my own solution to the traffic problem: I simply got out of my car, put it in my pocket, jumped up into the air and flew home. (Sure, I could have just teleported home with a snap of my fingers, but I thought I could use the exercise.)

Then I logged off Second Life, put my computer away and sat in real traffic for 4 hours, while trying to get from Beacon Hill to Porter Square.

A screenshot of a project from the daytime class.

Yes, while it would have been nice to fly over the traffic jam last week, I was actually just attending the Hub2 "Virtual Keys to the City" event at Emerson College. Since September, I've been participating in the Hub2 course at Emerson, taught by Professor Gene Koo of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The goal of the Hub2 project, and the corresponding course, is to use the software program Second Life to increase civic engagement in Boston.

At SCI we do a lot with using new technologies, mainly the web and e-mail, to increase civic engagement, while tying these tools as much as we can to offline outreach. So I was naturally drawn to participate in the Hub2 course when I first learned of it this past summer. I had never used Second Life, but had heard of it several times and was interested in learning more about it.

Although the course met in a computer lab, I was surprised that, for the first few sessions, 2/3 of the class time involved a discussion of the idea of community and neighborhoods in general, including conducting observations of public spaces in the vicinity of Emerson's campus. The remaining 1/3 was spent "in-world", learning some basics of Second Life.

I came away from these first few classes very skeptical of the Second Life software. First, it ran in its own program that users had to download and install. Second, the system requirements were high despite what I felt were less-than-impressive graphics quality. Specifically, the program would run for about 10 seconds before it would crash on my brand new Dell laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor, because Second Life (SL) is incompatible with Intel graphics chips. However, it would run fine on my older Dell laptop, with a Celeron M processor and the same family of graphics chip. Third, once you had it installed and running it was hard to use, partly because there are simply so many things you can do in SL--not only walk around virtual places and chat with other virtual characters, but build your own objects and add scripts to make them do things. Fourth, there are so many places you can go in SL, but no user-friendly portal or search engine, like you would find on the web, to help you get to what you're looking for. Fifth, most of these places were empty of other users--it was hard to find people to interact with.

Yes, that's a long list, and the organizers of the course were forthright in stating that SL had a lot of problems with accessibility. They explained that the Hub2 course focuses on virtual world software in general, and that at the moment, SL was their choice.

About halfway through the course, we split into three groups and began devoting 3/4 of class time to building in SL. My group chose the theme of collaboration, and after some brainstorming, we quickly settled on the idea of the Rose Kennedy Greenway as the actual space we wanted to recreate in SL. The learning curve for building was quite high, however, so by the time we really got rolling there weren't enough remaining classes for us to realize our vision. But this is all to say that eventually, once I realized what was possible and learned some basic skills for building in SL, I really enjoyed the process and started to see the value of it.

Our grand scheme was to design a virtual representation of the Greenway that depicted not only the physical space, but the public planning process behind it. Many people in our group felt that the process behind the Greenway wasn't transparent or participatory enough; thus, our virtual Greenway was designed so that anyone could move around objects (park benches, hot dog cart, playground) and configure the green space the way they wanted it. In order to foster collaboration, we added a floating amphitheater above the Greenway where users could sit and talk about their design plans.

So what's next for Hub2? I'm told that tentative plans are to organize a team of youths to conduct outreach in the neighborhoods surrounding the Greenway. Youths would take laptops with them and act as "tour guides" for residents as they explore and contribute to the virtual planning process. In this way, many of the accessibility issues would be overcome.

It's interesting to me that it's taken this long for virtual reality to catch on--surely the technology has been there for over a decade, and again, I don't see the SL software as particularly cutting edge, having grown up playing many 3D computer games like Halo and Quake. But perhaps the appeal isn't really the technology, but the ways it can be used to foster dialogue, expression and collaboration (the three "themes" of our three class groups) between community members and co-workers. In this way, perhaps the technology is responding to human needs--the growing realization of the importance of civic engagement--instead of the other way around.