Chris's Random Ramblings
On Friday I wandered along to a public talk and discussion with Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Topics discussed ranged from anti-terrorism laws, copyright issues and how taxation could apply to virtual worlds. It was organised by the Creative Commons organisation, and held on 4 sims in Second Life.
Some of the discussion was way above my understanding of the law (I suspect there were a few lawyers asking questions), but much of it was pretty interesting. Demonstrated a good sense of humour too, for example when a griefer dressed as a giant wooden box jumped on stage, he commented "That's an example of the kind of threat that worries me -- a huge box marching through an amphitheatre".
There were excerpts from his recent book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency as well as a virtual book signing (yes thats kind of an odd thing to have) afterwards.
It was the first big public SL event I've attended and overall I was pretty impressed by how well it worked. Certainly its not the kind of event I would have been able to attend in real life and worked much better than a talk using IRC, feeling much more like attending a real life event. I think similar kind of events involving people in the Open Source world could work quite well, and make it much easier for those who don't live in the big cities to participate. With the ongoing development of libsecondlife, an open source implementation for the Second Life client, hopefully there'll be more interest from the community.
Kelly has built a giant LCA08 tangram penguin in Second Life. Its big enough that you can make it out from the online SL map.
