Pics from virtual viewing of Congressional Hearing on virtual worlds today
Interesting hearing on virtual worlds this morning in the US Congress, chaired by internet defender Rep. Ed Markey. I got to watch the hearings from a virtual "Rayburn" conference room with a bunch of press folks and Lindens.
I was surprised that the hearing was mostly a bunch of softballs thrown to Second Life boosters from Linden Lab, TechSoup, IBM and New Media Consortium. Okay, there were a couple of inevitable questions related to child protection and Jihadists, but overall it was a positive interchange. And I didn't hear any references to gambling or taxation!
A video and text archive is already up at this link, for those that missed it. Meanwhile, here are a few pics...
The crowd of avatars chatting away while the representative from IBM gives his testimony live.
My avatar watching Philip Linden testifying.
The avatar of Rep Ed Markey presides over the virtual hearing. (Or just camps.)
Great pics Rik! I was watching and tweeting during the conference. Wish I'd known to jump into SL to take part.
Aside from the standard terrorism allocations, I think SL and VWs in general came off looking good. Glad to hear so much discussion on the educational potential of these spaces.
Posted by: liam | April 01, 2008 at 11:45 AM
Topic digest: http://yolto.com/FeedTopic.aspx?Id=646#85175
Posted by: Metaforum | April 02, 2008 at 08:26 AM
It's not surprising how soft-ball the questions were given how handpicked the testifiers were, and how the entire thing was staged by a friendly congressman.
I also have to wonder why "Lindens and select press only" got to sit in this empty virtual Rayburn and it wasn't open to the public at least to fill up the sim to 100.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/04/soft-ball.html
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 02, 2008 at 09:09 AM
The room was open until 9:45, and the reason Linden Lab chose to keep it closed initially was b/c they were afraid griefers would come. Rik was not one of the "select press", he just showed up when he heard it was open.
I was "hand-picked" by Colin Crowell, senator Markey's advisor. It was really just an educational/informational hearing, not intended to solve any problems (yet).
Re: Rik's question about why SL and not other virtual worlds, I am not sure why, but I don't think it has much to do with anything other than Colin was probably too busy/rushed to find someone from There.com (for example). I only got invited about 10 days before the hearing.
Posted by: Susan Tenby | April 02, 2008 at 10:02 AM
Dunno about the Rayburn sim. There was an overflow sim as well that was open. I know that lots of other people were gathering in random places and just watching it via the web while they backchatted.
Posted by: rikomatic | April 02, 2008 at 11:22 AM
A number of them were pointed to Capitol Hill South from a link on one of your previous posts on this topic, Rik. We thought there would be an in-world stream happening there, but alas no. Had to settle for watching the webstream and back-chatting (as you mentioned).
Posted by: Jamming Independent | April 02, 2008 at 11:38 AM
Ah, apologies to all those led astray by my rumor-mongering! I suck.
Posted by: rikomatic | April 02, 2008 at 11:45 AM