2 Weeks in the ThinkBalm Innovation Community

For the last 2 weeks, I have actively participated in ThinkBalm's Innovation Community. For those of you who haven't heard of this new community, here are my impressions:

What is it:

In a nutshell, it's an online approach to inovation management. Built on the Spigit's serious game platform (see my earlier post explaining Spigit), ThinkBalm's community focuses on generating and critiquing ideas relating to the immersive internet. The ideas are refined through community member interaction and feedback.

How it works:

Take a brainstorming session, mix in equal parts of Wall Street, facebook, your favorite blogs,

market economics, election politics, LinkedIn, and academic peer reviewed journals, hit purée, and you start to get a feel for what it is and how it operates. Members have a range of methods to engage in the process, but it all starts with someone posting their idea.

The idea founder's goal is to progress their idea through a standard process of peer review hurtles, structured much like a business startup, with a hopefully successful IPO and strong market capitalization on the game's "spock" market. Based on peer feedback, founders can refine their ideas and, if necessary, even recruit partners with "spock" ownership incentives. Members provide feedback through discussion forums, by writing reviews, and by voting to "spig" or "scrap" the idea. Your can choose to change your vote if compelling evidence is presented in discussion or if the idea's team improves the idea. You can also spig and scrap discussion comments, which not only voices you opinion of the comment but also impacts the reputation of the member that posted the comment.

The Performance Feedback:

The variety of performance feedback provided quickly draws you into the community's "game" of innovation. The leaderboard gives the low-down on member and idea performance, ranking both on reputation, popularity, and wealth. It's a thrill seeing your ideas and your name rise and fall through the rankings.

So, why you should pay attention:

It's practical...

Sure, there is some pie-in-the-sky prognosticating (like one of my my ideas: Arrival of Ubiquitous Augmented Reality), but the collective wisdom of the vigorous community discussion always keeps the proverbial one foot on the ground. I have discovered it is a great way to improve the ideas you've developed, as long as you are willing to listen and adapt.

Stay on the cutting edge of innovative virtual environment thinking...

If you are interested or involved in virtual environments, whether it be for education or the enterprise, the community is an excellent source of innovative cutting-edge thinking.

Games are the future of work...

I'm very impressed with the way this "game" approaches the process of innovation. It's not a top-down, let's-meet-to-discuss-ways-our-organization-can-step-out-of-the-box, typical enterprise approach to promoting innovative thought and action. It's a fun, grass-roots, games approach to gathering innovations from the workforce, which is often the source of the most significant innovations.

It's fun...

Even after a long day of work, I still enjoy logging on and contributing my thoughts. It's just plain fun. And any tool an organization can deploy that taps into the heart of their stakeholders has enoromous potential.

MetaHappenings: PeaceFest 08

Date: Friday, August 15th - Sunday, August 17th
Time: 10am-Midnight (CST)
Location: At over 30 different sims within Second Life

What: "A global, interfaith, cross-cultural effort to create lasting peace through mobilizing support for and learning with real-life peace organizations. All proceeds from PeaceFest ‘08 will go to benefit Amnesty International, UNICEF, World Conference of Religions for Peace, Uthango Social Investments, and Kids for Peace.

This event represents a true cross-over from real-life to Second Life and back again as we bring real-life speakers in-world to discuss peace-related initiatives in our global open and free SL forum. Musicians and speakers will be streamed into SL while panel discussions and performances are streamed back out."

Personal Notes: I'll be working at a few of the Saturday events. If you have a Second Life account, log-in and stop by. I believe this SLURL will get you there.

Today on Tomorrow: Orchestrating Information in 3D

We are stuck in the past, in an antiquated paradigm. We are sipping through a tiny coffee stirring straw while we remain parched. We require a new information processing model for individuals, one with the ability to match the ever increasing levels of available information produced by our world.

We google search, read feeds, watch TV News, browse websites, read and write blogs, store bookmarks to sites, scratch notes onto paper, daydream while commuting, read/write/reply/forward emails, stuff thumbdrives, get managed by planners, cram papers into binders, interact over the phone, IM statements, attend meetings, record meetings, set more meetings, (did I mention meetings?), read & write books, have truly brilliant ponderings that evaporate in an instant before recording, wandering wikis, absorb excel spreadsheets, record/revise/file way word documents, solidify filing cabinets, hear podcasts, watch vodcasts, and so on. And while we do, all too often brilliant innovations vanish before birth due to the lack of the individual's ability to weave the disparate multi-disciplinary bits of information into a cohesive meaningful construct of knowledge. And not only that, even if and when we do achieve some semblance of a construct of understanding, new information always arrives to erode or eradicate the order.

Information orchestration models and tools of the future will empower individuals to navigate the oceans of information, assimilate useful streams of information, organize these streams into rapidly understood and useful forms, process these forms into useful and timely knowledge. Whatever these models will be, they will undoubtedly utilize more of our bodily senses in an effort to optimize the transaction (improve efficiency of throughput) between the human individual and the tool.

Imagine in the future immersing yourself into your Personal Knowledge Garden, a virtual 3D space containing spacially arranged plants. These plants are repositories of compiled and purposfully sorted information, varying in topic with each different species. Each plant in your garden is of different sizes, shapes, colors, feels, and smells. These differences are not merely cosmetic...the differences represent changes in a certain topic of interest. Grasping one flower, you are instantly exposed to a graphical summary of not the contents, but the changes, the growth of emphasis on one aspect of the topic (i.e. a flurry of information in the world relating to this topic). Further examination of the grown flower petal allows you to see the source information contributions to the plant. A graphical immersive representation of massive amounts of information like this garden would allow humans to utilize their full senses to more efficiently translate massive information into useable knowledge.

The Virtual Thunder Dome

Imagine a virtual environment that you could actually physically move around in. Your body, while moving in the real world, guides the path of your virtual avatar. Imagine an environment similar to a Star Trek holodeck, where you could explore unconfined to physical space restrictions.

Seem to good to be true?

Well, it is. But this product is going to try anyway. For some reason, I just don't see this sphere thing catching on.

Tools of the Trade: Ajaxlife.net

Problem: Got a work computer, or a laptop, that doesn't have the graphics muscles to run Second Life? Do you need to chat with your contacts/friends in Second Life, but don't really need to eat up processor time?

Possible Solution: Ajaxlife.net

My Observations: Accessing Second Life (an Multiple User Virtual Environment) normally requires downloaded software. To experience the world in all it's 3D glory, you do need a somewhat beefy graphics-capable computer system...something I do not have in my work office. Enter from stage right Ajaxlife. Ajaxlife is a web based interface for Second Life. You don't get all the pretty pictures, or get to move around, or voice talk, or even see anything for that matter. What you do get is this:

Access To

• Your inventory (and the ability to sort)

• Avatar profiles (and thus the ability to contact them)

Search Capabilities

• You can find non-friend Avatars

Communications

• Local Chat (Text chatting with avatars located near you in the Second Life sim world)

• Instant Messaging (think of it as a person-to-person text chat)

Tools

• Scan for nearby Avatars (since you are blind, comes in real handy)

• Stats (tells you when there is serious lag in world)

Travel

• Ability to TP to another location via the map
  

Bottomline: Incredibly useful tool for those needing access to the communication features of Second Life when they are away from a graphics-capable machine. It is very difficult to Teleport to another location, since you are as blind as a bat (my apologies to all the bats out there), which may prevent widespread use. No download required! Fairly simple to use (EXCEPT for traveling).

...and btw...this was developed by a teenage girl!

Metaverse U Conference

Fascinating stuff was addressed at Stanford's Metaverse U Conference today. I attended from within Second Life at Scilands island. The event was live webstreamed onto a bigscreen inworld. I would say roughly 40 people were in attendance in-world and maybe 60ish in real world. In-world participants not only could submit questions to an real-world moderator and have that moderator ask the speaker, but also conducted their own in-world text discussion over open chat lines.



The most fantastic presentation was by Jon Brouchoud (Wikitecture). I found the open-sourcing and massively outsourcing of architecture very promising, but the most interesting was the information display he developed. Users can come to the in-world island and via a 3-Dimensional display, know the status of various plans. Via a tower interface, users can load, inspect, and contribute to a plan.

This tool of information collection, manipulation, and display is exactly what I believe the world is heading towards. With the increase of the amount and availability of information, it is quickly becoming a world where those that can orchastrate and synthesize information excel. It is not enough to know about one subject. It is not enough to know how and where to get multiple sources of information on any subject. It is the ability to take massive amounts of diverse information, quickly, and synthesize that into nuggets of useful relevant and timely knowledge that will be most needed in the coming future. These emerging virtual tools will slowly develop into the tools used by such people in the future.

Needless to say, it's an exciting time to be involved with the emerging virtuality.

Virtual Reconnaissance

It is my intention, in the coming months, to dive into as many different virtual worlds as possible. Thus far, I have a pretty good take on Second Life. I have recently dug into Dofus, Multiverse, and Active Worlds. Next on my list are Entropia, There, and somehow Forterra and Open Croquet. I've pondered getting into World of Warcraft, but I just can't bring myself to commit to the subscription fee.
I really wish to answer the following:
Which will emerge as the leading business training platform?
What are their capabilities from a training and consulting perspective?
Which is the easiest and most cost-effective to enter?
Which captures my imagination and holds it the longest?

In a nutshell, what are my findings thus far?
Second Life:
+ The most potential, Very beautiful graphics throughout, Relatively good security and privacy features, Quick to pick up on the interface yet feature-detailed enough for the tech crowd, Good interaction and communication features, Strong micro communities throughout.
- Depending on where you visit you can run into a lot of childish jerks, Oftentimes laggy (pieces of landscape, body parts, clothing, movement missing or slowed), Lack of "Quest" or "purpose" can cause frustration.

Dofus:
+ Silly clean RPG fun, Clever artwork, Mildy entertaining storyline.
- This is pretty much a kids game, People in-world hardly ever communicate so no strong communities, Graphics are a bit lacking.

Active Worlds:
+ So far I have found none
- Orientation left me with no useful information, Communication better than Dofus but lacking in substance, Graphics much better visually than Dofus but far under those of 2L.