As I type this, I am just flying back from Leigh Jackson (BERR) and Ren Reynolds' (tVPN) excellent Virtual Policy 2008 event where I had the honor of being the closing keynote presenter. The event, hosted by the British Ministry of Business and Enterprise Regulatory Reform in London, was positioned as an educational venue for industry and academics to engage with government officials considering the best regulatory posture for social virtual spaces.
There were a number of highlights of the event, which Ren had broken into main-room events and panels, and separate 'deep-dive' breakouts to discuss specific issues in greater detail. Each of the panels I attended were populated by industry and academic experts with well-thought-out presentations and positions, which were elaborated on in even greater depth in the breakout sessions. All in all, the government (and industry) attendees to the event could not help but learn much more than they had anticipated.
My slides from the event (which are blissfully devoid of text except in sparse places, by deliberate consideration of the fatigued ocular capacities of the attendees at the end of the two full days of conference) I have uploaded to slideshare, or can be downloaded here.
Download vpolicy_closing_keynote_renaud.pdf
The overall theme to my closing keynote was one of keeping a high-altitude perspective when considering regulation of virtual worlds, given the rapid pace of technology development as well as the inherently porous nature of technologies and their natural tendency to absorb the best aspects of other technologies as well as be absorbed themselves by peer or succeeding technologies. As such, my slides have simple graphics representing my major categories of focus, including:
- Children's issues in virtual worlds
- The opportunities to revisit the traditional workspace arrangements in place in enterprise in favor of virtual spaces with telecommuters, and the resultant environmental impacts of such policies
- Intellectual property creation and protection in virtual spaces
- Identity, necessary anonymity, presence and building trust electronically
- Leveraging virtual spaces as a platform to incorporate more serious-games techniques into the general workplace
- And finally, the near-term opportunity represented by being able to maintain a flexible work-arrangement with the oldest 5% of the population to take advantage of their considerable experience and potentially capture their learnings in this electronically-mediated mechanism for archival and data-mining purposes.
Visiting Professor Dr. Richard Bartle had lucidly reminded the attendees the preceding day that any movement towards taxation of virtual economies must be weighed against the collateral impact to virtual currency exchange and commerce in gaming worlds. I would strongly suggest finding an archive of the 'Conversation with Richard Bartle' section of Tuesday's agenda for a concise and to-the-point summary of why a light-touch is the best course of regulatory action. If I find one I will append it to this post.
Should you have the opportunity to catch a replay of the event, which Ren and Leigh thoughtfully streamed into Second Life, I would suggest doing so. I hope that their future collaborations together on the subject bear as much fruit.
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