CaseCamp SecondLife – My remote virtual experience

CaseCamp Second Life made its debut last night. Space was limited and unfortunately I was not one of the ‘chosen’ to attend. However, June Li came to my rescue and offered to webconference me in to her computer as she did receive one of the coveted spots.

So there I was conferenced in to June’s computer and listening to the audio via her speakerphone. If you thought attending an event in a virtual world was strange try seeing it seeing it through someone else’s avatar eyes! (Did I mention I left the festivities of a holiday party early in order to attend this event? My friends did agree that leaving to attend another event in a virtual world was the most unique ‘have to go’ excuse they’d ever heard).

I was glad I’d cut the holiday festivities short as the presentations were interesting and I certainly felt like I was participating in something completely new and unique.

• Doug Walker from the World RockPaperScissors Society (RPS) spoke first about how the RPS society has experienced amazing growth, all through word of mouth and viral marketing. (We only ended up hearing about half of the presentation as it took a few minutes to figure out the audio and how to make the presentation slides clear).
• Michael Seaton from Scotiabank (and AIMS board member) talked about how Scotiabank engaged with Ottawa hockey fans and substantially increased its brand awareness in the area.
• John Wall talked about how AccuRev optimized a Google Adwords campaign. (We missed part of this one due to audio glitches)
• Eli Singer gave a great overview on a successful campaign the World Wildlife Federation ran in Toronto recently. Using Flickr, Youtube, and hundreds of black balloons the campaign garnered a lot more publicity than originally anticipated.

I have to admit that I still prefer the in-person CaseCamp but I was glad June made it possible for me to attend the Second Life version. Of course it’s still all so new that at times the technology does seem a little clunky, especially to noobies. And I’m…or should I say Trixie Malone (my Second Life avatar) is definitely still in the noobie phase!

Thanks to Bryan Person, Kate Trgovac, CC Chapman, and Eli Singer for organizing this event.

There are lots of photos on flickr if you're interested. Here is one I took:

Comments

[Bryan Person, Bryper.com]

Kathryn:

What a great story of how you managed to take part in CaseCamp Second Life. If only we had thought of that beforehand, too, we might have been able to toss it out as an idea so that more folks could have participated. Next time, hopefully?

Now I'm curious to see how you might also create a Second Life experience for your AIMS Canada.

--Bryan Person
CaseCamp Second Life organier

[Kathryn @ AIMS]

Thanks Bryan - June Li came up with the web conferencing idea the afternoon of the event so there wasn't much time to spread the word.

A few weeks ago I had thought about getting a few people together in the first world to participate in CaseCampSL as a group. Might be interesting to get the in-person and virtual world thing happening at the same time.