Had a really fun time yesterday on Randall’s Island on a staff retreat with the Online Leadership Program team at Global Kids. We started the morning playing bonding games in classic Global Kids-style. Then we spent a couple of hours talking about the overall direction of our work, how to best collaborate with each other,…
Category: Civil Society
Face-to-Face vs. Videoconferencing and Virtual Meetings: increasing the emotional bandwidth
Seeing some of the enterprise-level distance meeting and videoconferencing technologies at the Web2.0 Expo recently, I’ve been thinking about what sorts of lessons should be taken away for running effective and emotionally engaging meetings in virtual environments. Here’s some of my thinking on the matter…
War Child’s online peace march in Habbo Hotel today (video)
I dropped in on the "largest ever" online peace march organized by Warchild International in the teen virtual world of Habbo Hotel. Here’s some video I shot there. To call it a "march" was kind of a misnomer — it was basically 50-some avatars standing around and shouting "Peace" in the open chat. It was…
War Child International to organize “largest online protest ever” in Habbo Hotel
I just saw this on the War Child website: War Child and Habbo are teaming up for what promises to be the largest online protest ever. On 21st September, UN International Day of Peace, teens will gather in Habbo hotel to raise awareness about the effects of war. Habbo is a virtual community of millions…
State Dept & Youtube join forces to spur citizen videos on democracy
The United States State Department, YouTube and a host of non-profits, educational institutions and media companies are collaborating on an interesting civic engagement project entitled "Democracy: Your Voice. Your Video." The project challenges amateur videographers from around the world to submit three-minute videos answering the question "Democracy is…" Lots of interesting aspects to this project. …
Crossing the Metaversal Divide: Second Life teens exchange text messages with Ugandan girl on her cell phone
The screenshot here is kind of hard to parse so let me describe it. A young person (represented by the green furry) in Teen Second Life is composing a text message to send to another teen in Uganda that she will recieve on her cell phone as an SMS message. Meanwhile my avatar (the purple…
Madeleine Albright speaking at UT Austin and Second Life (video)
Tonight, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin hosted an address by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. I got to watch and participate in this event at the GSD&M Idea City Island Amphitheatre in Second Life (teleport SLURL). It was a good crowd for a foreign…
Using my geek powers for good: a Global Kids teambuilding exercise
Yesterday at Global Kids, we did a team-building activity called "The 2008 Street Fair: The Fall Collection." Organized by my colleagues Dominique and Sandip, the game was actually quite challenging and nuanced. We divided up into five teams of about eight people, who were each given a bag containing two items. The rules were as…
Notes from my talk on “Beyond Best Practices: Taking Non-profits to the Next Level in Second Life” at SLCC
For those that weren’t able to be there, here’s a quick rundown of what I spoke about at the Non-profit Commons mini-track at the Second Life Community Convention this past weekend in Tampa, Florida. While this year’s non-profit track had less folks participating than last year, we had some great exchanges with non-profit innovators like…
SLCC Wrap-up: Virtual educators dominate the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa
The three day Second Life Community Convention from September 5-7, 2008 in Tampa, Florida firmly made the case that some of the most vital and innovative work in the virtual world is being done by the education sector. With 400 some real world participants (plus others beaming in virtually) converging on the grand Marriott Waterside…