Grass Roots of Internet Users and Virtual Worlds: Case Study of the Contact Consortium

Laval 18-21 May 2000
The Grass Roots of Internet Users and Virtual Worlds
A Case Study of Contact Consortium

Jan de Bruin & Dirk-Jan de Bruin
Tilburg University/Virtual World Consortium
P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg  The Netherlands
J.A.W.deBruin@Kub.nl
href="http://www.virtualworlds.org/">www.virtualworlds.org

Bruce Damer & Stuart  Gold
Contact Consortium
343 Soquel Ave, Suite 70
Santa Cruz CA 95062-2305 USA

Keywords

Virtual or imaginary organizations, Inhabited or Social Virtual Worlds, 3D-meetings, computer-supported cooperative work.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

The paper is published as: Jan de
Bruin, Dirk-Jan de Bruin, Bruce Damer, and Stuart Gold, 'The Grass Roots of
Internet Users and Virtual Worlds: A Case Study of Contact Consortium' in:
Simon Richir & Bernard Taravel (eds.), VRIC 2000 Proceedings, Laval, 2000:
pp. 142-153 (ISBN 2-9513952-1-3).

ABSTRACT

A movement of dedicated Internet users wants to colonize Cyberspace by creating graphical Inhabited Virtual Worlds (IVW). Social movements need organizations to give them direction. Contact Consortium (CCON) is one of the spearheads of that movement (section 1). To understand the IVW-movement, it is important to observe the stimuli this movement received from the text based Virtual World-movement of MUDs and MOO’s and the developments in gaming (section 2). The convergence of technologies and the crossover between social contexts is further developed in section 3. Against this background, we picture in section 4 CCON as an example of a totally virtual organization. Large-scale events that inspire and mobilize the adherents are then essential. For CCON, the annual conference fulfills this function. Since 1998, CCON’s yearly large-scale event was held totally in Cyberspace. In section 5, we summarize our experiences. In section 6, we describe certain evolutionary levels that are relevant for describing IVWs. It is our belief that IVWs should include all kinds of social technologies and institutions in order to make IVWs more real ‘worlds’ in the philosophical sense.

1.INTRODUCTION

Virtual or imaginary organizations utilize an inspiring vision, information technology, alliances, and other types of net­works to initiate and sustain a boundary-transcending activity (Hedberg et al., 1997: 14). This type of organization can therefore act as the organizational arms of a movement. The imaginary organization is based on integrative forces other than force and utilitarian motives (money) alone. Trust, synergy, and information tech­nology are high on the list of those forces. With only a small core of employees, the imaginary organization can have an impact far greater than you might expect from its formal size, because of these characteristics and the trust developed by the many individuals involved. Organizations can become imaginary, or virtual, by a kind of transformation; Contact Consortium (CCON) started in this way. As a virtual organization, CCON has always depended heavily on the cooperation of volunteers. For a virtual organization that is as dependent on its boundary-transcending activities and the efforts of volunteers as CCON, it is very important to organize large-scale events that generate commitment and consensus. These events should reinforce the vision, maintain old bonds and create new ones, exchange information and make the culture once more part of the collective memory of the movement. The annual conferences of Contact Consortium serve these functions. In 1998, CCON introduced two new elements: a conference and a trade show, which were entirely held in a universe of interconnected Virtual Worlds. This was very convenient for the participants of the IVW-movement who are dispersed all over the world. CCON wants to colonize Cyberspace by creating Inhabited Virtual Worlds. The real test for a world is: can you create sustainable and self-sufficient societies where complex social interactions, like holding a conference, organizing a trade show, organizing a architectural competition (Damer, et al., 1999), are possible with a full range of social institutions to shape those interactions? Only then can the traditional philosophical concept of world as an all-encompassing context for the totality of human activities and experiences be taken seriously (Düsing, 1986). CCON's activities are focused on a variety of institution-building activities and, in doing so, they take the concept of world very seriously. We will return to this topic in section 6. The growing galaxy of interconnected IVWs is not only a technological, but also a new social reality. In this paper we stress the importance of studying IVWs as a social reality in its own right. In section 2, we give a short overview of the history of IVWs as a new medium, and highlight the different social contexts that were important in shaping them. In this paper, we focus also on the new impulses that IVWs can receive from other realms of social life, such as the realm of organizational and policy-making activities where virtual or digital meetings take, for instance, place in the Electronic Meeting Room (EMR) of business organizations or Government agencies. This type of virtual meetings can, however, also occur in IVWs. The convergence and merging between the various forms of ICT in different social contexts is the topic of section 3. We hope that the concept of 3D-meetings in IVWs can add something to the older concepts of digital, virtual or electronic meetings. To demonstrate the possibilities of 3D-meetings, we look at the AVATARS 98 conference in section
4. This is the main focus of the paper. In section 5, we summarize the experiences of this particular type of virtual (mass) meeting in IVW. In section 6 we speculate on the future of IVW and argue for the inclusion of social technologies in the IVW browsers.

2.HISTORY

Virtual community finds its technological, but also social roots in the earliest text-based multi-user environments. In the 1970s and '80s we saw the development of UseNET, LISTSERVs, MUDs, MOOs, IRC and conferencing systems like the WELL (Rheingold, 1993), and in the ’90s this continued on the World Wide Web. The merging of text-based chat channels with a visual interface in which users were represented as Avatars first occurred in Habitat in the mid-1980s (Benedikt, 1991) and reached an important milestone with the launch of the 3D Internet-based Worlds Chat in the spring of 1995. VR-systems did not primarily influence the growth of online IVWs. We attribute their growth more to the fact that they built on their roots in MUDs and text-based real-time chat systems. Existing 3D-rendering engines, originally developed for gaming applications, provided the graphical component.  Furthermore, the type of online IVWs that spread over the Internet, could run effectively on a large range of consumer computing platforms at modem speeds. To summary our position, the impetus for the fast growth of online IVWs comes mostly from the realms of pastime (chat systems and protocols) and games (rendering engines) and not so much from VR-systems. The technology involved in serving up an IVW experience is impressive: for example, from client-server architectures, to 3D object models, to tricks dealing with latency, and finally to databases managing and mirroring hundreds of millions of objects and thousands of users across networks at modem dial-up speeds. But, as we stress all the time, IVWs are not only impressive as a technological phenomenon. There are also complex social problems involved. A social community has to guard its boundaries. This creates the social problem of citizen authorization and crowd control and so on. An impressive example pf an IVW is AlphaWorld, which started in the summer of 1995. Currently, over 50 million objects occupy AlphaWorld, which can be visited by users with ordinary consumer computers. The literature surrounding Virtual World architectures, community development (Damer, 1995, 1996, 1998; Powers, 1997) and avatar design (Wilcox, 1998) is comprehensive and growing, so we will not address these topics further here. IVWs are, as a medium, still in their infancy. At the July 1998 Avatar conference, consensus emerged that it was too early to know how the medium would ultimately be used. Avatar Cyberspace should continue to evolve for its own sake and not to serve possibly inappropriate applications. Virtual Worlds fall currently into three categories: multi-million dollar efforts in multi-player entertainment, smaller social and creative spaces supported as research efforts or home-brewed digital spaces by die-hard builders. The last category can increase enormously. The present generation is used to the document-based web. The next generation, brought up on Doom and Quake, is used to environments that stress navigation through very complex, 3D spaces full of behaviors. Will that generation bring us more into Virtual Worlds for play, learning, work, and just being? In ten years will Cyberspace look like Gibson’s Matrix or Stephenson’s Metaverse (Gibson, 1984, Stephenson, 1992), or will the document-based web and streaming video and audio spaces be the dominant paradigm?

3.THE CROSSOVER BETWEEN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Predicting the development of technologies is difficult, if not impossible. However some tendencies can be applied. A familiar hypothesis is that technologies initially emerge and develop independent of each other, but eventually merge: The technological islands form a mainland or at least a peninsula. This also applies to the technological developments within the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In ICT literature, the concept of ‘convergence’ is often used to describe such developments.  We pointed already to examples of crossovers between the realms of chat and gaming and the realm of IVWs. The next logical step is to see if the idea of conferencing and collaborative teamwork in IVW will eventually merge with the technological solutions being developed in the realm of business and government.  In the 1970s, we saw the application of a variety of new social technologies to cope with the complexities of steering and policy processes in business and government, such as Delphi, Brainstorming, Scenario Writing and so on. Lots of these social technologies originated in new advisory organizations such as Rand and were further developed by the emerging policy sciences (Dror, 1971a and b). These social technologies didn’t change the traditional types of communication all at once. Today brainstorming is still mostly done in a room with people talking face-to-face. The basic assumption in conferencing is that face-to-face interaction is the richest form of communication for which computer-mediated communication is only a poor substitute. 

Those social technologies were soon transformed into software (Groupware). Brainstorming, multi-criteria evaluation, voting, interviewing with questionnaires, measuring opinions, mind mapping and so on, can nowadays all be done in a computer-aided way.  A whole new field of research emerged where the traditionally employed social technologies, such as brainstorming, are compared with computer supported ones (Petrovic & Krickl, 1994).  These computer-supported social technologies eventually appeared in package form. The functionality of those clusters of computer programs is aptly expressed in descriptions such as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). The metaphor of a meeting in a room created the well-known concept of the Electronic Meeting Room (EMR). EMRs were erected all over the world by using a local access network of computers powered by Groupware (Weatherall & Nunamaker, 1999). In these meetings, people were still physically in the same room at the same time and place. The traditional face-to-face talks were then supplemented by computer-aided communication. By using notebooks etc., a mobile EMR can be created. For a couple of years now, Tilburg University has employed a mobile EMR using the Group Systems software (Smits et al., 1998). You can concentrate on improving the software, or try to improve the relation between the bundle of software programs and complex social processes such as (participatory) policy-making (Bongers et al., 1998, De Bruin & Van Harberden, 1999). Older versions of these software bundles were rather weak on graphical applications and not primarily designed with the Internet in mind. A meeting in this type of EMR is not really a very rich multimedia event. 

The flexibility of computer-supported cooperative work is extremely enhanced when we move to web-moderated communication. Virtual teams, people working together via electronic networks, are an example. In a world in which globalization is supposed to be a trend, we even encounter expressions like global teams defined as a temporary, culturally diverse, geographically dispersed, electronically communicating work group' (Jarvenpaa et al., 1998: 3). If virtual organizations grow, these virtual teams will increase in importance. In section 1 we described trust as an all-important prerequisite for virtual organizations. Trust is necessary to cope with complexity and reduce the social control necessary to implement a certain task. In discussing trust in virtual teams, types of media richness, forms of  social presence and identification, and  types of action need to be addressed. Is it possible to build up trust in a short time? Can we, for instance, apply Meyerson,s theory of swift trust (1996) in temporary teams such as filmcrews, theater and architectural groups, to virtual teams preparing an event in IVW as described in section 4?

This type of collaborative, computer-moderated work can be done using various technologies. Electronic mail technology and chat room technology are still the most frequently used. The trend is, however, towards rich multimedia digital conferencing on the Internet. Various prototypes are being produced at this very moment. The intention is to marry the user-friendliness of Web-based multimedia browser interfaces with on-line interaction and collaboration, using text, graphics, and voice communications’ (Bisdikian et al., 1998: 282).

However, this approach is still about interfaces; users don't feel like they're in a place. In section 4 below, we present a picture of a web-enabled multimedia teleconferencing system, set within a string of connected places, viz. various Inhabited Virtual Worlds.

4. AVATARS98

Digital Space Corporation (www.digitalspace.com) produced for the Contact Consortium, which is a global forum on the development of IVW Cyberspace, Avatars98. The Avatars98 conference was the third in a series of annual conferences hosted by the Contact Consortium and its corporate, institutional and individual membership. The first two events were held in traditional facilities in San Francisco in 1996 and 1997. It was decided to put the medium of Inhabited Virtual Worlds to the test and hold the entire conference online in 1998. On November 21, 1998, the Contact Consortium (www.ccon.org) hosted the world's first conference and trade show inside Cyberspace. It allowed several hundred organizations to connect synchronously with each other and the attendees.
By inside Cyberspace we mean that the main interaction of the conference was carried out within 3D Virtual Worlds on the Internet. Unlike other models of  ‘cyber-conferences, this event did not simple broadcast events happening at one location to another, but instead moved the main interaction into one shared cognitive Cyberspace inhabited in real-time by attendees represented as Avatars A number of Virtual World platforms, such as Active Worlds, Blaxxun, Traveler, WorldsAway and Roomancer, and several webcast technologies were used. The main focus was the ‘AV98' conference hall in the Active Worlds platform. The Avatars98 world was designed to be usable by attendees on low-end (Pentium 100) computers on minimal net connections (14.4 BPS speed modems). The Active Worlds technology provides streaming and reuse of 3D objects in a Lego-like manner, so the designers produced a series of components (struts, signs, potted plants) that were put together to make the conference hall. Avatars, animated 3D models of users, were also specially designed (some wearing conference T-shirts). Once these objects streamed into the cache of attendees' hard disks, rendering could be done locally. Streaming webcasts were presented on some of the 3D surfaces to bridge some of the 40 physical locations into the virtual attendees within the world. Communication was carried out by text chat, which was also logged for the conference proceedings. The AV98 world is a one-kilometer square space in which a conventional conference hall was constructed. Digital Space worked with dozens of volunteers, including the prime object and hall design team of Koolworlds (brothers Max and Dax from Vancouver Washington in the USA) under the guidance of Digital Space partner Stuart Gold, an architect from London.

The conference hall featured
·        A Ground Zero landing zone for new attendees;
·        A series of 48 exhibits for participating companies and organizations;
·        An art gallery;   

A webcam wall showing two dozen  webcasts from participating locations;
·        A big board conference schedule;
·        An awards area,
·        Six speaker pods for parallel tracks in virtual breakout rooms.

To give an impression of how the conference was conducted, we go briefly to one of the tracks. CCON has several Special Interest Groups (SIGs), each covering a certain topic. Several SIGs organized their own track. One of the more popular
involved the relation between Virtual Worlds and learning. The Avatars98 Educators' Track was one of the best attended and best produced at the conference. Bonnie
DeVarco, track coordinator, is preparing a report about the behind the scenes
planning and operation of the track, which will discuss the following standard elements:

Introduction to the pod, the track and the speakers;

Setting up a speaker series in Cyberspace;

Real-time slide shows and panel discussion in a distributed environment;

Student experiences from the panel;

Instant logging and posting of conference proceedings.

5.   LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT 3D-MEETINGS

Highlights of the AV98 conference:

More attendance: Avatars98 exceeded all expectations. The attendance, calculated at over 4,000 visitors, was ten times that of the previous physically located conferences.

Cost-effectiveness: The budgetary outlay, excluding the extensive volunteer time costs, was 10% of the previous years.

Mobilization of groups: By moving the conference inside Cyberspace, we empowered local groups and organizations to host their own events. Art museums had public openings with the Virtual Worlds displayed on the walls, cybercafes created evening parties and discussion, school and university classes convened and connected in, and people hosted gatherings in their own homes.

Satisfied customers: Attendees reported to us that they had enjoyed presentations and discussions in the parallel tracks and other areas such as the art show. Order was kept by a volunteer organization the PeaceKeepers who disciplined unruly attendees by ejecting them from the world for periods of time. No attendee reported undue offense or disappointment with the event other than reflecting the sometimes slow performance of their browser in heavily populated areas.

Fundraising: The sale of booth space in the exhibit hall raised funds for the Consortium (although much of this space was donated, as the exercise was still very experimental).

Labor-saving automation: Bots, or automated agents, helped answer  questions and direct attendees. They also provided entertainment in the form of marching bands. Bots will be used more extensively in the future to man exhibits and interact with attendees, offering them web tours, video promotions, capturing visitor data in card swipe fashion and awarding prizes.

Things that could be improved:

Definition of functions: Exhibits hosts found that they did not want to stay in their booths the whole time but instead mingled with the crowds at  Ground Zero and elsewhere.

Audio broadcast: We will also attempt
one-way audio broadcasts for speakers in a future event.

In conclusion, while quite labor intensive, virtual conferences and trade shows modeled after Avatars98 will produce wide coverage and easy access for large audiences. It can be packaged for a number of themes including a Cyberspace extension to existing ‘real world’ events, and some of the most interesting activities yet offered on the Internet. We expect events like this to be increasingly part of the online time of ordinary and business net users alike in Cyberspace.

6.      CONCLUSIONS:
EVOLUTIONARY LEVELS OF THE MEDIUM IVW

We opened our paper by observing that the further development of IVW of Avatar Worlds on the Internet is not easy to predict. With that in mind, we close this paper with some tentative observations, roughly using, Parsons theory of evolutionary levels (Parsons, 1966) to the evolution of IVWs: Parsons distinguishes the primitive, the intermediate and the modern level. We put the first two together as the primitive/intermediate level and stress the importance of the distinction between that level and the modern level. In the early phase of colonizing Cyberspace by constructing 3D-IVWs, it is natural that a lot of attention goes to the construction of the worlds. This entails a lot of architectural work on the layout of the world and its buildings. Also, much attention is paid to the design of Avatars. Many IVWs are in this spadework phase and are only creating the preconditions for becoming a society; because basic anthropological institutions that regulate action are lacking. In the second phase of the lifecycle of IVW, normally the basic anthropological institutions are erected to regulate action within an IVW. In social theory, it is customary to speak of these basic anthropological institutions with the function of streamlining human activities around basic human needs. These include institutions that control sex (marriage), the institutions
of communication (language), the institutions of constitutive symbolism and those that give meaning to life (religion) and so on.  IVWs, or Avatar societies in which these institutions are operational, can be labeled  primitive/intermediate societies. If we look at the existing IVWs, it is evident that most IVWs are in the spadework or primitive/intermediate society phase; In the modern phase of the development of IVWs, or societies, we typically observe that the functional differentiation of societies manifests itself by new types of institutions. There will be a strict division of labor. As a result of that, we then normally will have (bureaucratic) organizations. There will also be the economic institutions of money and market systems. Also juridical institutions of universalistic systems of law (basic human rights and so on) will be present. In a modern society an institutionalized system to guide society and develop policy (a political system) can also be observed

If we look at the Special Interest Groups of CCON, this virtual organization is facilitating the breakthrough of IVWs from the primitive/intermediate to the modern evolutionary level of societies. On the
modern evolutionary level, IVWs need the social technologies associated with various functional subsystems of society. The integration of Groupware in the VW browsers would make them an even more exiting place to be, and would also make them more suitable, as an exercise ground, for the policy and organizational tasks of real life.

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and Trust in Global Virtual Teams, in: JCMC, 1998, pp. 1-40.

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Biographical Information
Bruce Damer and Stuart Gold are members of the Contact
Consortium. Damer co-founded the organiza­tion in 1995 and Gold has headed up
TheU Virtual University projects since 1996. Dr. Jan de Bruin is a policy scientist
at Tilburg University, who is trained as an economist, sociologist, and political
scientist. Dirk-Jan de Bruin is a member of Contact Consortium and founder of
Multi-User Virtual Worlds Consortium.

Appendix: Elements of a complex Virtual Meeting
in an IVW

Avatars

Avatars are the visual embodiment of people in Cyberspace. Attendees at virtual meetings are all given a choice of avatars to represent them. They can be quite fanciful or down to earth. By using Avatars, you can go beyond simple conferencing in which (spoken) text and documents are exchanged. Avatars can, increasingly so, embody such important aspects of human communication as gestures, proximity to the group, and emotion. The virtual worlds in which avatars can be used can be very powerful in supporting
collaboration and complex work and learning processes. Virtual worlds are not merely transmissions of one real world place to another; they are new spaces that we enter, spaces that exist nowhere else but in Cyberspace. Virtual Worlds and Avatars are uniquely suited to support virtual meetings, from small gatherings up to cyber-trade shows with thousands of attendees connecting in from all over the Earth.

There are as many styles and shapes of virtual meeting spaces as there are 'function spaces' in traditional settings. Three types are pictured here. The private auditorium, where 'one to many' presentations are done to usually closed audiences with the assistance of bot-driven slide shows or audio.
The multisession meeting space, where a larger open attendance experiences a two way interaction with one or more speakers during a track of related topics, supported by web links, live video and audio streaming and backchannel chat for questions and answers.
Lastly, we point to the conference space. As an example, we show the Educators track, where presenter Margaret Corbit of the Cornell University Theory Center is presenting in the speaker pod to a collected audience of educators interested in the use of Virtual Worlds in the learning setting. Margaret’s slides are being changed in real time by session coordinator Bonnie De Varco.

As in a physical trade show, virtual exhibitions permit a large number of organizations to present their wares, offerings or interesting content to a walk-by audience. Pictured here is a sampling of a 16 by 16 meter sized booth from the web-based booking page and completed booths by companies such as Boeing that appeared along one island in the Avatars98 conference hall. A person from the sponsoring organization can occupy booths (sometimes called 'stands') full or part-time. In some cases, bots (automated conversational agents) can be present in the booth and seek to get the attention of passers-by. Bots can present a number of simple options and answer questions, or drive the visitor's web-browser to retrieve their conference pass information and perform a card swipe operation in exchange for sending information or free gifts. Lastly, booths can serve as portals into either the organization's website or to custom built virtual worlds where special talks or events might be sponsored on the day of the conference. Furthermore, at the Ground Zero landing zone there was also an art gallery with images from artists all over the web.

Crowd Flow and Management

Crowd management is important in all large event spaces like a conference hall or theme park. But unlike visitors in physical reality, IVW visitors can instantaneously ‘teleport’ or ‘warp’ from one location to another. Central in AV98 was a tall 3D billboard of events with times and meetings. Clicking on any panel on the Big Board would warp the visitor to the appropriate space. Also important for crowd management are broadcast chat messages that reach every attendee with updates, time announcements, etc. Providing conference directory objects within view of every location in a conference hall gives visitors the option to click on a directory and access the parallel Web browser page for the event. Web pages will also have URL links, which can warp or teleport visitors within the worlds.

Extra Events

The feeling of total immersion in a world can be improved by adding extra events to a cyberconference or trade show. For instance, AV98 included an art gallery permitting the public to submit 2D artworks or photographic images for display, and also a webcasting wall to display live camera views of a number of participating real-world locations or news broadcasts. To create an encompassing context for the (large-scale) event, it is also important that, in IVWs, mediacasts can provide streams of video and audio from real-world locations directly onto surfaces in the virtual world or onto parallel web pages.

Web casting can provide streams of video and audio from real-world locations directly onto surfaces in the virtual world (seen here on the left is a CNN broadcast of returning astronaut John Glen in orbit in 1998) or onto parallel web pages. These mediacasts are often very important to create context for the event and can be featured in session spaces to stream speakers out to live 'in-avatar' audiences who may be talking back by text chat or shared voice channels

Every virtual meeting will have some physical team locations, even if to merely coordinate the action in-world. The proper definition of roles, clearly posted information about schedule, group dynamics and a culture of respect and quality hosting, handling fatigue after hours at the keyboard, and providing interesting visuals by webcasting from the ‘operations center’ all bring a virtual event to life. It has often been said that some of the presence of the ‘people behind the avatars’ can be felt at well run events, and good team management and motivation at the physical locales is a key to producing this general feeling.

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