Best Practices for organizing SL/Real World events
From SimTeach
There seems to be a lot of interest in gathering knowledge on how multi-verse events that take place simultaneously in Second Life and the real world are best managed and organized. Is there an evolving set of "Best Practices" or a check-list of things to do to make sure your multi-verse event is a success? This has obvious applications to education, but also relates to entertainment, performance arts, and politics.
Let's populate this wiki page with an evolving set of ideas and suggestions that can inform how we break through the virtual wall to engage participants with each other, across virtual space and meat-space.
If you have organized events in-world with real world components (or vice versa) and have some advice for others, this is the place to drop it. Feel free to link to longer descriptions of your process and solutions that you came up with. This is just to get a collection of short ideas and suggestions together on one page.
Note: An in-world version of this wiki can be found in the ICT Library on Info Island.
Suggested Format: Suggestion / Idea Title: short description. Link to relevant event site, if any.
Contents |
Choose the Right Tech for Your Event
- Video is Cool but Audio is Easy: Obviously this will change as people get fatter pipes to the Net and the tools get easier to deploy, but for now you should consider whether or not streaming video or streaming audio is the right fit for your event. Is video a necessary or very important part of the presentation? I.e. listening to a live concert is very different from watching the musicians perform. Are your participants likely to be in low-bandwidth environments where audio works better? For technical details on how to stream music/audio into Second Life, please see Overview of Music and Audio in Second Life
- Provide Photos of Your Speakers: If you are going to support streaming audio only, consider setting up slides with pictures of your presenters that you can display as they are speaking. This can help your SL participants feel more connected to the speaker.
Multiple Moderators for Multi-verse Events
- Recruit Multiple Moderators: You will need at least two moderators, one in Second Life and one at the physical event, to help run the show. In addition, you will likely need a technical coordinator at the physical event who is ready to respond to problems in-world as they arise.
- Make Sure Your Moderator Welcomes SL Participants: Kind of an obvious point, but often forgetten by busy moderators.
Rezzing Second Life into Your RL Event
- Invite Your RL Participants to Explore Second Life: In your registration materials, emails, and website, be sure and promote the "multi-verse" aspects of your event. Tell people who to register on Second Life and what they can do there. Consider holding a pre-conference and/or post-conference event in Second Life to get people's feedback and suggestions.
- Let RL Participants See Chat Session of SL Participants: At your event, set up a large projection of the second life chat so your RL participants can watch the parallel discussion happening in SL. The downside to this is that it can be distracting to your RL audience and take away from your speakers if there is a lot of back-channel chatter going on in SL.
- Have a Computer set up during your coffee break for RL/SL interchanges: During a break in the program, have a computer set up with a volunteer already logged into SL. Encourage your real world participants to try out interacting with SL residents during the break. Have the screen projected on a wall, so others can view the interactions taking place.
Rezzing the RL Event into Second Life
- Have an Avatar of the RL Speaker Present in SL: If your speaker is comfortable with being in Second Life while they are speaking, that's great. SL residents will often attend better to an avatar that they can see in front of them rather than an abstract voice or webcast video of the RL speaker.
- Make Powerpoint Slides available ahead of time: Provide objects in world where people can review ahead of time the powerpoint presentations of your presenters. That way, they can get a sense of whether or not they want to stick around for the whole talk, or just review the slides later at their leisure.
Give All Participants Voice
- Facilitate Q & A Periods for Both SL and RL Participants: In your event, make sure to include time for both real world and Second Life participants to have a chance to ask questions. You may need to appoint someone in-world to take questions from residents via IM, and then summarize them verbally for real world participants. This was done quite successfully at the Beyond Broadcast Conference at Harvard in May 06
- Allow virtual Participants to Speak Directly to Speakers: Using VOIP tools like Skype, create opportunities for online participants who might also be in in-world to ask questions to speakers at your RL event. This was done for example at the SL Town Hall Meeting held in May 2006 where SL residents were able to speak directly with Philip Linden.
- Limit Microphones to just your speakers: If you have multiple speakers, it may be a good idea for the speakers to have microphones (and linked in through Ventrilo or Teamspeak, for example), and field questions from the audience in text only. This can increase the signal:noise ratio, and allows for a recording of the audio to be made without seeking permission from all audience members. An example of a successful discussion in this manner was the QUT World IP Day 2006 discussion.
Other Resources for Event Organizers
- Global Kids have prepared a very useful "Guide to Presenting in SL" that makes a number of useful suggestions for how to organize effective RW/SL events.
- Satchmo Prototype shares in his blog a number of interesting observations about the use of video versus avatars to represent real world events in Second Life. He also muses on the factors that create a successful in-world event in another blog post.
