Second Life: union protests, TV broadcast, and a lunge for Oscar consideration

Interesting to read, via the incom mailing list, about employee protests against IBM in Second Life.

Before passing this off as a complaint to a tiny audience and unlikely to have much power or effect, consider this: IBM is estimated to be investing $10 million on building its presence in virtual worlds including Second Life.

In Italy, IBM employees are unionized, and there has been some unhappy back and forth with management - protesting over pay, pension and health rights on one side, IBM withdrawing a ‘productive work benefit’ in response. According to the article, an international affiliation of workers unions (Union Network International) launched ‘unions 2.0′ - they trained protesters in how to use Second Life and gave protest kits to their avatars. Avatars then went to IBM locations, put up banners and slogans, and encouraged anyone to sign a petition. Some of them found their way to an online IBM meeting that was taking place in Second Life - they asked to speak to management (the meeting was about website functionality, so I don’t think that would have got them too far), and they were asked to take their protest out of the virtual meeting room. From a union negotiation perspective the initiative may not have gained them much, but what it did do is give media outlets a ‘hook’ to hang a union story on. It made national TV news in Italy. As a PR strategy, that’s pretty smart.

As real-world protests enter virtual worlds, so virtual worlds are jumping over to traditional, ‘real-world’ media.

I wrote earlier about Canada’s National Film Board putting some money into exploring virtual-world filmmaking.

According to a recent article in a Vancouver paper, HBO not long ago won a bidding war (against MTV and Sundance Channel) to broadcast My Second Life - content created in the land of avatars. San Francisco filmmaker Douglas Gayeton assumed (borrowed? stole? impersonated?) a character called Molotov, and filmed the avatar’s online adventures. Some of it showed up on YouTube, and within 72 hours it was the most-watched video there.

The series will be on HBO in the spring, and it is already being screened in L.A. to try to qualify it for Academy Award consideration.

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Related links:

an interview  Nedra Weinrich did a while ago about some innovative health education initiatives being undertaken by Center for Disease Control in Second Life.

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Important purposes served by brick walls

I’m beginning to see that two separate topics that have been on my mind can be - perhaps need to be - linked.

Both are about videos:

• The ‘jaw-dropping’ testimonies of cancer patients in Ontario, Canada who have been denied funding for their cancer treatments.
• The other, university professor Randy Pausch’s ‘last lecture’, which over the past week+ has had such a huge public response. It is the story of a man who desperately wants to see his kids grow up, but now knows that will not be possible. All three kids are under six, and they are why, at the end of his university talk to a full lecture hall, he told the assembled students and faculty that the talk they had heard was not for them.

Last year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation invited viewers to give their opinions on who is (or was - they can be dead) the greatest Canadian to date. Canadians finally decided on Tommy Douglas, who shifted Canada to universal health care. That Canadians held his initiative so incredibly important is why I’m surprised at the lack of outcry about the inequal and often inadequate health care treatment from province to province. I’m amazed that there aren’t more comments on this video, or more links to it from other sites.

Jumping back to Randy Pausch - one of the memorable things he discussed was the purpose served by brick walls. The brick wall is important, he said, because its existence (and our frustrations at how impassable it seems to be) lets us know how badly we want something. I love how this statement re-frames my perception of insurmountable obstacles.

It seems to me that we need to figure out how to bring that re-framing to activate more Canadians into moving toward that brick wall. We need a surge of civil society committed to removing the bricks.

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Clinton Global Initiative launches mycommitment.org

Looks like Bill Clinton has opened up his program to get people to commit to helping improve the world in whatever ways they can, to the larger development community and the public at large. The Clinton Global Initiative has launched ‘My Commitment‘.

The aim of website creators is to provide people with the resources to take action and make real change, locally and globally. They also aim to build community, to connect people with others who share the same vision for change and help them create networks to put plans into motion.

They offer tools for visitors to make commitments to act and track their progress and results, like a self-commitment pledge form (I’ve heard that people are more inclined to follow through once they put a commitment in writing, though that’s never had an effect either way for me). Other features include a database of volunteer opportunities, and ‘Commitment 101′ for those who want to do something to effect the world but don’t know where to begin. Perhaps best targeted to families/teachers, there’s 50 Ways to Change the World, that can be viewed from this page.

The Clinton Global Initiative is a project of the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton’s second book, GIVING: How Each of Us Can Change the World, features inspiring individuals and organizations taking innovative and unique approaches to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges. The book was released in September 2007.

The initiative seems, at least in part, like a global (and very well financed) version of changeeverything.

Carbon offsets for Second Life avatars or internet use?

From the KM4DEV list, an interesting post from Urs Karl Egger, of Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development:

The Web 2.0 that connects so nicely people all over the world in an allegedly environmental friendly way seems to have a downside as well.

According to a newsletter of a Swiss IT magazine, the amount of data in the Internet doubles every four months. YouTube alone produces obviously as much traffic as the whole Internet two years ago. Not only all the home and office PC but also server farms need huge amounts of electricity. For Second Life alone 4000 servers are needed, and according to Nicolas Carr each avatar in Second Life needs more power than a real human being in Brasil. The production of electricity for the Internet produces reportedly more CO2 than the whole air traffic…

I haven’t done any digging on this myself yet to confirm the facts, but it would be interesting to hear what others think.

How much will you be willing to pay in Linden dollars for carbon offsets for running your avatar?

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