Nigel Paravane

So I’m hanging out in my SL office listening to a RL teleconference and all these people show up. Most were from the meeting, but one was just poking around and we got to talking. No one said “Come up to the office,” they just came, kind of like in RL except that we were separated, in some cases, by thousands of miles.

We were talking about all the different things that will be possible now that the SL client is open source. For example, you could build a native presentation viewer for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and put it up in meeting rooms. You can fake this today via bitmaps, but I mean real direct support. If you want to get fancy, you could even do collaborative document editing right in Second Life. Do we need to wait for a company to do this? Not at all, it’s open source.

Some of the SL discussion around the open sourcing yesterday was about adding accessibility features. This will be so, so important. Do we need to wait for a company to do this? Not at all, it’s open source.

I’ve been thinking about how to furnish the room in my SL office building where I will have big meetings. Originally I thought a large conference table, but now I’m leaning toward benches along the wall and “speakers” would stand up in the middle. One person suggested bean bags, but I think that might be a bit too cozy!