VWC | Meetings - 27 March 2008

Virtual-Worlds Consortium Meeting: 27 March 2008
in Second Life

About the Meeting

This second virtual meeting of the Virtual Worlds Consortium was hosted by Rivers Run Red (RRR) on its private island in Second Life. Building on the collaboration theme of the 25 February 2008 face-to-face VWC meeting, this session focused on the potential of virtual worlds to enable online workspaces.

Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red, opened the proceedings. As well as describing the general background of RRR, Bovington said that his company (and he believes many others in the industry) is turning its attention to internal enterprise uses of virtual worlds instead of the marketing and advertising initiatives that have dominated the commercial activities of virtual worlds in recent years. Bovington went on to outline his company's approach to creating virtual workspaces (see Immersive Workspace video below).

The next presenter was Kat Dawe, New Ways of Working activation manager at Unilever. Dawe presented Unilever's experiences in setting up a virtual workspace. Dawe began by outlining why virtual working is important in Unilever. Like many large companies, Unilever is not only global but increasingly dispersed: Its employees work from multiple locations, on multiple projects, and in teams that comprise people from a variety of geographic locations. Unilever is always on the look out for ways to reduce travel costs and improve working conditions through more flexible ways of working—and in the process being more successful in attracting global talent into Unilever. In 2008, with the help of RRR, Unilever created a pilot virtual workspace in Second Life with a group of 58 users from various brand and product category teams in Unilever. The project—a three- to six-month experiment in Second Life to measure business benefits resulting from global, virtual team collaboration—was successful, and Unilever will likely take its virtual-workspace plans further. But in the fall of 2008, it will make a decision about the specifics of the future direction of this project and the potential business application of virtual worlds at Unilever. In a question-and-answer session Dawe told the group that Unilever might consider alternative platforms to Second Life and that the project team was lucky to receive good support from senior management and from IT.

Eilif Trondsen and Rob Edmonds closed the meeting by thanking all speakers and participants. We also thank the Rivers Run Red team for its support and hosting of this meeting and of course Kat Dawe for sharing the experience that she and her colleagues have gained from their project. The use of virtual worlds for collaborative work, especially among virtual teams, is one of the key applications of virtual worlds in enterprises that we will monitor carefully in VWC and revisit from time to time.

Meeting Agenda and Presentations

Meeting Announcement and Agenda (PDF)
Immersive Workspace Video by Rivers Run Red:
Background Information on Rivers Run Red (PDF)
Kat Dawe's presentation can not be posted publicly due to Unilever's policy

Meeting Photo Album

See a series of photos taken at the meeting.