Collaboration in virtual worlds is one of their many applications, and new environments arrive every day offering everything from content-specific immersive environments (VLES for music) to social/entertainment platforms (Kaneva). Thinking about how to use platforms like Second Life for business collaboration and community-building, I’m struck by how the principles of open source development including Wikis might provide a rich source of lessons and ideas.

Wiki Patterns for example, offers a toolkit for companies and communities looking to optimize the use of Wikis. But this toolkit sounds suitable as a “best practices toolkit” for Second Life. Some examples of community-building best practices from the site (just swap out the word wiki for Second Life):

Barn Raising
A wiki BarnRaising is a planned event in which a community meets at a designated time to build content on the wiki together. One person alone can’t build all the content in a wiki, and a community of people needs to understand how to use the wiki, and feel a sense of buy-in for it to become successful. A BarnRaising achieves this because people come expecting to learn how to use the wiki, and they are able to interact with each other as they work, thus strengthening community bonds and creating a support network that keeps people using the wiki.

Charter
A Wiki Charter is a document that sets guidelines for community collaboration and respectful, productive activity on the wiki. The charter should be created at the start of a new wiki so that new members have the benefit of community guidelines as soon as they begin to collaborate.

A well-crafted region or community charter is a critical governance model not just for immersive sims, but for collaborative activities as well.

Poker
The Poker pattern encourages putting seemingly trivial content into your wiki to give a non-threatening reason to use it .
There is a very low barrier to creating a new wiki page, as anyone can do it. So simple things, trivial things, silly things that one might not ordinarily have considered putting on the company intranet become fair game. As long as there is one person on the team interested enough to do it, then the content can be shared.

Hmmm. Well, there’s a lot of poker in SL, but who knew it was such a positive thing?

This is a nice little site with lots of nuggets for community and collaborative managers using virtual world platforms, which in some ways are massive, organic, and powerful Wikis themselves (just in 3D!)