Also, if we wait until “all your other stars are aligned and functioning optimally” we’d never try anything innovative. We have a triple bottom line and I think ChangeEverything.ca beautifully responds to a pillar other than the economic, and therefore is an extremely important step for Vancity to take.

It also has created tremendous excitement around the possibilities of the online channel that help us do exactly what you suggest, which is improve some basic customer service functions of vancity.com.

The current hype / promotion for SL does not make sense given the user base. OK it may well be a glimpse into the future, but I am not sure that that glimpse is necessarily a positive development for a whole raft of personal, professional and social reasons.

I also think that it is stretch to link decreasing business travel with SL as nothing in my view is as effective as old fashioned personal selling and face to face deal making - I can’t see this changing not for a generation at least.

My other point is that you have to take some accountability for promoting these things particulalry given how you position Social Signal. I am sure the negative comments about SL can be refuted by many many enthusiastic technologists and who I am to argue. The fact remains that whilst there may be some benefit down the road it doesn’t really change the impact that the technology has today.

As for changeverything I respect your commitment to this project but it’s something I can’t get my head around. I suspect that is a cultural and business gap between us. I can’t help feeling that if as much effort and enthusiasm had been channeled into an improved customer service experience, better online tools for managing personal affairs and the ability to receive SMS banking alerts it would be better for the customer. To me changeverything is the sort of project you do when all your other stars are aligned and functioning optimally.

You might want to give the comments thread under Nick Carr’s back-of-
an-envelope estimate another read, though — especially towards the
bottom. Markus Breuer makes a pretty persuasive case that the actual
energy use of an avatar is about four per cent (!) of what Nick calculates.

In any event, the amount of energy any particular tool consumes —
whether it’s Second Life, a streetcar or your own blog — is only
part of the picture. You have to weigh such costs against the
benefits it achieves. (Which is one reason why Al Gore’s right-wing
critics, who point to his home’s energy consumption, are so far off-
base. That, and the fact that he diligently counters it with carbon
offsets… but that’s a whole other story.)

Running the server that powers ChangeEverything.ca requires its share
of electricity — probably not that dissimilar to the draw from a
Second Life sim — but that energy helped bring us the phenomena of
Got Hats? and Envirowoman. We never try to justify a tool for its own
sake, whether it’s blogging, podcasting or Second Life; we look at
what it can do to advance our clients’ goals.

There’s a more subtle point that’s often missed when people react
against technological change: the activity a particular tool
displaces. Transit uses energy, but it’s an improvement over the
private automobile; manufacturing solar panels takes resources, but
they pale in comparison to, say, coal-fired generation of
electricity. The frequent failure to recognize those advances is one
of the more unfair uphill battles that renewable energy and other new
(or renewed!) technologies have to fight.

So when you consider Second Life, by all means consider its energy
consumption. But think about this, too: one of the most hideously
wasteful activities we undertake, activists and corporate executives
alike, is air travel. And immersive environments like Second Life
offer real prospects for replacing travel, especially now that
features like voice conferencing are being added. Already, companies
like Sun Microsystems and IBM are turning to options like SL to
supplant face-to-face business meetings.

Now, if you want to argue that Second Life has a long way to go
before its interface is comfortable and easy to work with, and before
it has the kind of stability we’d all like to see, you won’t find
much disagreement from me. But its growth has continued at an
impressive pace; the number of people “in-world” at any given time
has roughly doubled even since I wrote the white paper you linked to.
That tells me that there’s an experience here so compelling that
users are willing to leap the hurdles thrown up by tech shortcomings
to get to it.

And those shortcomings are being overcome, bit by bit. Open-sourcing
the client software (and soon the server software) will help. Better
performance, improved rendering and an increasingly compelling
feature set are amplifying Second Life’s underlying strength: an
online interactive experience unlike any other, one that allows rich
engagement and dialogue.

It isn’t for everyone (as someone who doesn’t click with SL, you’re
by no means alone!) — but then, no medium is, especially online.
We’d do our clients and their publics a disservice if we rejected a
tool out of hand because we dislike it. Assessing it dispassionately,
and asking it who it can help us reach and how it can help us engage
with them, is something our clients rightly expect from us.