What is Residents

This chapter considers the virtual world Second Life as a workplace. It argues that despite its apparent novelty, Second Life is descended from a 2000-year-old tradition of immersive art that informs its popular attraction and its two big business drivers, knowledge management and marketing. To illustrate this, I describe a project by the international advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which shows how knowledge management and marketing can come together in a virtual workplace. The chapter further contends that it is insufficient to simply attain virtual presence in order to achieve knowledge management goals. Instead, intellectual property rights and their management must also be addressed. Because avatars in Second Life own the items they create and can explicitly set permission rights, Second Life users can share virtual goods and knowledge easily, and in the tradition of hacker culture and open source coding. Despite general opposition to Digital Rights Management from some in the open source community, I argue that it is necessary to ensure that the metadata, such as the original creator information, is protected to encourage the sharing and transfer of knowledge in a virtual workplace. The creator of Second Life, Linden Lab, opened up the source code of the client software, thus allowing organizations to further benefit from this virtual workplace.