University of Southern California

On Monday, June 16,2008 over 40 avatars gathered for the announcement of the 5 selected finalists for the Second Life and the Public Good Community Challenge. Penelists selected The Ability Commons, Interactive Accessible Homes,Mauerkrankheit/Wallsicknedd, Native Lands Cultural Outreach, and The Texas Obesity Research Center. The groups now have two weeks to advocate for their project to secure community votes. The top three will be given seed funding of L$100,000 over three months to build their project and given the opportunity to present thr project at the annual State of Play Conference, this year held in Chicago.

 Douglas Thomas, Principle Investigator on a year-long exploration of virtual worlds supported by the MacArthur Foundation, opened the session by summarizing activites during the past year hosted by the Network Culture Project at the University of Southern California. Thomas announced that 27 proposals were received. "We were deeply impressed by the scope and ability of the projects that came in." Proposals were judged based on two criteria - unique used of the abilities and affordances of Second Life and Real world potential for impact.

Thomas was complimentary to all the proposals and went so far as to say that the top ten would all have been wonderful projects to see built out. "Each of these projects did an exceptional job of relating the uses of SL to problems of the physical world and helped us to work to define what a public good looks like in a virtual worlds."

Panel judge Rik Reil noted that he was "Pleased to see there wasn't a single proposal on fundraising, all engaged at a deeper level and no one proposed to create a tool  just for the sake of tools, everything was integrated." He noted that several proposals were health related and environment related.

Howard Rheingold added, " What was particularly intersting to me, and important were those instances where public good and worthy projects had a good match with thr affordances of Second Life." He also expressed concern around buildings communities in Second Life where it is difficult to get a robust community. "There needs to already be fairly large group withing or a significant marketing outreach to get them. 'The build it and they will come idea' is a guarantee for failure. You need to plan on bringing people in and have a critical mass. "

While the platform of Second Life was not always cooperative, with audio disturbances and lag between comments and movement, the community adjusted and was supportive of the selected teams. Review the five finalists on the Network Culture Project  page and vote for your favorite

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