IBM Start Virtual Worlds Community for Academics

Here at IBM, we receive many requests from academics interested in virtual worlds research, about our work in Second Life and other virtual environments.  For some time, we’ve been wondering what to do with these requests, as there are generally many more than we can field, but yet we’d love to engage.  So…. we’ve decided to use our own (new!) Lotus Connections community tools platform, to setup a community for anyone interested in engaging with IBM and their academic peers.  The idea being, that many of the requests we receive have similar themes, so by forming a community we can ensure that we don’t all reinvent the wheel and we can all address the big topics that are bubbling to the surface.

Bear with us… 

• the tool itself is new (read Beta!)
• it’s early days for us in deciding how best to “run” this community
• it’s probably me that will have to go in and approve your request 🙂

However, rather than waiting for ages and navel-gaze as to the answers and issues above, we thought we’d be ibm2.0 about it and get the thing running and see what happens!  🙂

So consider this a very soft and quiet “launch”.  If you want to come and play:

1. Register for an IBM ID.  You’ll need to use an “academic” email address from your academic institution so that we can verify you are an academic.
2. Request to join the community.
3. Fill our your profile so people know who you are.
4. Get collaborating!

Please let us know how we can make it better too!

So… if it becomes something people find useful and is a “success”, we’ll make a bit more of a hoo ha about it, you never know, we might even do a proper launch!  🙂