Synthetic Environments and the Enterprise

Atty Mullins of the Santa Fe Institute sends along a link detailing the February 20 SFI sponsored Synthetic Environments and the Enterprise meeting. Much of the symposium will also be presented in Second Life in Cisco Corporation's theater. Details in the link.

" ... There’s a lot going on right now in a place that doesn’t really exist. Millions of people are spending part of every day engaged with others in intense collaboration, competition and exploration in virtual online worlds. Some are playing massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft™ and others are meeting people via their computer-generated avatars in a virtual world known as Second Life™. Entertainment applications are driving technology — as always for cutting edge media — but serious people are asking more and more thoughtful questions about how these new ways of connecting people and problems can be harnessed for real-world challenges. This meeting is a chance to see what business can learn from the rich tapestry of human behavior now playing out in synthetic environments. We will look at initial corporate efforts to meet customers in these worlds and attempts to address the challenge of managing collaborations across large scales of time and geography. We will explore how old models of leadership hold up in these brave new worlds and which of the successful game design principles can be integrated into enterprise workflow today. Invited participants will have a chance to place their own bets on the pace of innovation in enterprise application of game-like technology ...