Democracy Island

Interface Design Terraforming

Here is the current shape of Democracy Island (16x16 acres of virtual real estate in Second Life), designed and terraformed in a collaboration between the class and Future Prototype, who have been assisting us with some of our first builds:

The spoke-and-hub layout creates a central meeting ground and nexus connecting six mini-islands with their own projects and tools in progress. The pic on the bottom left shows the island being worked on (click to enlarge) and the pic on the bottom middle is from a Second Life town hall meeting (held elsewhere) with over 50 avatars engaged in discussion—such a cool image of the kind of lively civic involvement Democracy Island is being built for.

What an interesting design challenge this is when each of the mini-islands has content that would traditionally be housed on seperate 2D websites. Kind of a mix of web design, social software building, information architecture (literally at times giving form to information), and...landscaping? It strikes me that in laying out the island's geography we're working towards the design of something like a democratic circuit board for efficiently organizing group knowledge and feedback (pic of circuit board with partial island overlay on bottom right), finding the right physical shapes and spatial relationships to make everything work together. Can't wait to see more rules-of-thumb emerging for this kind of spatial design, and to help contribute to those lessons as Democracy Island moves forward.

Landing Lights Park 3D Wiki Breaks Virtual Ground

On Tuesday evening NYC public official Tom Lowenhaupt met with the Queens Community Board Technology Advisory Committee to show off Second Life and the first stages of the public park prototype happening on Democracy Island. Accomplished Second Life builder Hiro Pendragon is working on the park model, which will take the form of a 3D wiki allowing for multiple versions of the model to be group-edited. The 3D wiki will be a rallying point for the local Queens community who will be able to give and see input into their public park before it is physically altered.

Here are some pictures of the build in progress with Google Map photos of the physical site (click to enlarge):

A Democracy of Groups

Democracy Island founder Beth Noveck has a brand new paper, A Democracy of Groups, in the First Monday peer reviewed Internet journal.

Digital community guru Howard Rheingold calls it "one of the most important and exciting papers I've read since I first encountered Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect [1962]." No small comparison as Doug created the computer mouse and was instrumental in developing hypertext and many other innovations that have defined the digital age. w00t Beth!

That comment is made all the better since we'll be streaming live audio and video of Doug Engelbart speaking on large-scale collective IQ at the Bay Area Future Salon on November 30th into Democracy Island. So maybe he and Beth can meet each other in the 3D virtual world, one body in Palo Alto, one in New York City.

Democracy Island Hits the News

InformationWeek has a new article featuring Democracy Island. Check it out: "Online Virtual World is Part Fantasy, Part Civics Experiment"

From the article:

Democracy Island may sound like a remote location for the next episode of a reality TV series, but it's actually a three-dimensional testing ground inside an online virtual world called Second Life.

The layout of local parks in some Queens neighborhoods of New York City is the first project up for debate on the island, a 16 square acre piece of land that only exists inside a domain that combines a chat room vibe with video game fantasy.

Beginning this week, a member of the Queens Community Board, Thomas Lowenhaupt, will take prototypes of parks and post 3-D models of them on the island for his neighbors to check out and give their comments.

Jerry Paffendorf, the project manager for Democracy Island, calls the work a "3-D wiki," alluding to Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers, who may edit articles once they are published...

Welcome To Democracy Island: Your Blog Can't Do This

Welcome to the Democracy Island project blog! We're building tools, systems, and environments in the 3D virtual world of Second Life to foster and enhance real world civic participation. Short project description:

Virtual world environment to offer government entities and interest groups an on-line space for conducting citizen consultation. In short, this project will use the metaphor of the “county fair,” a familiar civic event in the life of a community. This will be a place – like a meeting tent, a town hall or even a shopping mall – where groups can congregate online. The aim of this project is to design a space where interested parties, such as trade associations, activist groups and scientific experts, will be able to set up virtual booths for presentation of information and deliberation as well as advocacy.

Introducing the team, I'm the Project Manager working with Professor Beth Noveck and David Johnson's E-Democracy class at the New York Law School. Keep your eye on this blog for updates from all of us as we now move from planning to building. As I put it in the title of a recent presentation at the Serious Games Summit: "Your blog can't do this." 3D massively multi-user web-connected world, here we come!