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My name is Bottesini Brockholst. My shirt (purple) and jacket (red) clash horribly. My nose has a distinct curve to the left. I can fly. I’m homeless and penniless. The other day, I spent about half an hour trapped in…

The battery of equipment that you witnessed does give you a sense of the costs involved. At one level, virtual worlding is EXPENSIVE! At another, SL is dirt cheat — free! — accounts can be made now without even a credit card. But you do need broadband, and a wireless laptop is not good enough for flying and doing things in SL; you need a serious computer and graphics card. The costs of server/simulators to take on any serious project inworld; and the enormous amount of manhours you need to throw at SL to make it work (which you do willingly, but still have to come from somewhere) all have to be factors that any non-profit on a limited budget have to study in SL. So far, a lot of the SL educational/nonprofit scene is more about showing the technology *itself* off and talking about the technology *itself*, so it has a superficial content-free quality about it. This is inevitable at the early stages, but bears pointing out, to get people thinking more about what they are really going to DO with this technology.

People tend to look at a virtual world and think two things about it: how can I reach its potentially massive audiences, those millions playing WoW or even just the 7,000 logged on at any one time in SL; or how can I re-enact or bring in for involvement my group serving those with needs?

I think these two approaches have their limitations which unfortunately will make people reject SL if they don’t have either huge budgets or huge technological enthusiasms like TechSoup. That’s why I struggle to think about how to use and explain SL in ways so that it could work for people effectively.

The audiences in SL aren’t big and are disaffected and atomized; there isn’t a mass media (yet) yet within the curious ‘mass media’ of SL itself, and only 40 people can fit on a server at any one time. Re-enacting the suffering of humans, especially in remote areas like Darfur, opens up a lot of questions of morality and appropriateness, of reductivist approaches that commodify suffering so that wealthy Westerners can have a feel-good cause to work on in between their shopping for avatar accessories.

I think the more tethered you can keep your non-profit cause to a real person, a real event, and use SL as a way to reach and talk about and store impressions of that cause, the more successful. For me, the fake campfire set-up with the crisp and pristine pixelated prim tents of Camp Darfur on SL’s Better World Island come close to demeaning the victims, though that was not intended; they diminish the real horrors of people who have no firewood, because they get raped trying to gather it — these are the criticisms Ethan Zuckerman made.

What’s more successful about the BW set-up elsewhere on the island is a picture of a RL teacher in Africa and his diary and letters; interacting with that one display about that one actual person; the thought that you are able to participate in his life, so remote from your own, and possibly donate something — a letter he could read to his students there; a dollar of your own money; a book that you might mail even in snail mail. The more singular interface gets you past the four walls of the virtual world.

I’ve written about how the Memory Palace idea of using virtual architecture to educate, explain, remember can definitely be explored, but if it is any sort of superficial or re-enactment of suffering or atrocities or deformities, it could really miss the mark. For me, a build that would involve an actual doctor who went and performed actual surgery on a child he helped, a build that reflected his experiences, what that village looked like; some elements of the story without having to risk reductivism or even atrocity porn by a fascile stage set — that might work. But I do think there has to be willingness to be critical about what works and doesn’t work at this stage.

You wouldn’t expect Flash or a new website to solve your NGO’s fund-raising or mission problems; only people dedicated to helping other people can do that; they can only raise money if their cause and advocacy is persuasive and just. SL and other virtual platforms should likely be viewed in the same way.

Last night, flying around SL, I found somebody’s “help Camp Darfur” display in their store, right next to their vendors selling their whips and chains and latex for the BDSM lifestyle popular in SL. I found this too much mixing of metaphors and logged off.

The charity work that dealt with actual avatar experiences, say in the 7/7 London terrorist bombing or the Katrina hurricane, seemed to work better in the SL context than more abstract causes about people — or even avatars — you couldn’t see or imagine.

Great summary! And,yes I will give you a run through, get your avatar set up, etc.

Your in-house guest

If you want to know more about the possibilities for NPOs, Beth interviewed me for BlogHer too, and I elaborate a bit more on what I see as the potential for nonprofits in SL in that interview.

Thanks for coming along to the Net Tuesday event. Join us on Fridays in the TechSoup meetings in SL (8:30am PST, every Friday) and you can see that this is just the beginning.