There’s a workshop planned for mid-January at IDC (The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzeliya), titled ‘Virtual Worlds, Real People’, which focuses on the psychological, sociological, and communication aspects of virtual worlds.
The workshop is academic oriented, and the folks over at IDC have invited me to lecture about the business implications of virtual worlds, and especially what IBM is doing there, and why.
In order to prepare for the presentation, I search some internal and external resources. My first destination was Roo Reynolds, IBM’s own Metaverse Evangelist, working our of Hursley, UK.
In 50 words, Roo Reynolds is a Metaverse Evangelist based at IBM UK’s Hursley Park laboratory. For the past two years he has been helping people understand the importance of social software and virtual worlds. He’s also helping create a virtual world within IBM’s intranet. He is rather tall, and blogs at rooreynolds.com.
After that, I found a post from The CIO network, called Advice and Opinion, which gives a pretty good idea of why virtual worlds are the next thing for collaboration, and why Roo is the person to talk to, and learn from.
I’m happy IBM has a metaverse evangelist because virtual worlds hold tremendous promise for collaboration and work of all kinds, and IBM’s got lots of bright people and plenty of money to put into a) figuring out how to make that work and b) communicating that to the aforementioned chronically unhip businesspeople.
The full post is here.
You can also watch Roo’s presentation, The IBM 2010 CIO Outlook at slideshare.net.
See you at the workshop…
