Four Types of IBM Involvement in Second Life
Looking up from coding some day job stuff (for IBM) I noticed this post by Prokofy Neva. No matter what you think of Prokofy I hope you will consider my response below to Prokofy’s post if you happened to read it. I almost didn’t respond at all. Obviously I have never represented IBM nor seek to now. I only want to express my personal experience with SLers who happen to work at IBM. Prokofy poses the question:
The Quiet by AM Radio. Is it all produced and paid for and insinuated by IBM?
AM is very much not the kind to respond to such speculation. So I guess I will. No, AM has gone to great pains to separate his IBM involvement from his SL experience, like so many others. AM has inspired me and others to pursue our creativity in SL, never because he was an IBMer, although I first met AM in an IBM sandbox building his first rusted train engine. I treasure his art and friendship. Without IBM I might not have known him, but my appreciation is not because of IBM.
In fact, I have met and befriended dozens, maybe hundreds, of IBMers active in SL over the last three years including Dale Innis, whose art I love. We IBMers are obviously a very diverse group in our opinions, involvement and openness of identity. I thank IBM for introducing me to Second Life but my Second Life is my own.
Prokofy’s four points bring out a desire in me to understand different groups of SL IBMers and what they may or may not represent. I already discussed perspectives in a generic sense. But this specific grouping and comparison seems fair and relevant for other large enterprises.
SLers who represent IBM
The first group are those who are paid to work with Second Life as a part of their job. If any group has influence with Linden Labs this is the one. Some officially and publicly represent IBM, others clearly do not. IBM is a very big company so you may hear different aspects of even official IBM press from people and regional leaders. I am sometimes surprised by who ends up speaking officially for IBM. Nevertheless, unless someone clearly represents IBM by introduction or declaration, no person’s statements should be taken as IBM policy or direction. That said, IBM official policy and direction never represents all the opinions of all those who work at IBM. IBM is too big a company for that. Civil discussion of all points is encouraged internally and publicly by IBM’s forward-thinking social media guidelines.
As for the history of representation and IBM in general in Second Life, readers can learn about those who first brought Second Life into IBM in Rita King’s From Firepit to Forbidden City. This document shares the weaknesses of any enterprise chronicle but is worth understanding.
IBMers who use SLE but are not SLers
This quickly growing group comes from Second Life Enterprise. Some may become SLers, many may not. If these SLE users ever do become SLers there is currently no way to know. The line between work and play has clearly been drawn by having one avatar for SLE and another for SL, if a user wishes it. This separation and the user perspectives involved are at the heart of the SLE challenge I recently discussed.
SLers who are known to work for IBM
These blue SLers do not hide their association with IBM. Among them are visible volunteers, not paid for any activities in SL or virtual worlds though managers may approve such involvement on company time . VUC members, IBM Mentors, and other greater community members, fall into this category. This group also includes many who may actually make money as a hobby or side-job within the Second Life economy and who may elect to make some of these creations available to IBM in one form other another.
SLers who work for IBM but don’t tell
Though impossible to count, I suspect the largest group is that of very active SLers that want nothing to do with IBM when it comes to SL. If initial 2007 public VUC membership numbers are any indication, this group could be much more than 6000 by now.
Not unlike World-of-Warcraft playing IBMers, these SLers see no reason at all to mix their SL activities and creations with anything IBM is doing. Some are very successfully tied to the SL economy and may even fear IBM IP entanglements. They’d rather stay as far away from IBM’s IP radar than deal openly with the question, when does my gaming become my company’s intellectual property. Some grow to a level where it becomes nearly impossible to keep secret that they work for IBM. Some eventually ”come out’ for one reason or another despite their level of visibility.
On a personal note …
I will confess although I gave Second Life a second look after seeing Sam in the Forbidden City and enjoying learning a lot from IBMers and other friends in the IBM Sandbox that events brought me to hide my IBM-ness for most all of 2008. For 2009 I focused on OpenSim and IBM volunteer communities like the VUC and IBM Mentors, on my own time and some on-the-clock with manager approval. Today, mostly out of personal time-constraints I’ve shifted away from IBM volunteer involvement and admit sometimes wishing I could return to the blissfully anonymous group of active SLers who happen to be IBMers. Without alting or leaving IBM I am unable to do so, neither of which is doable for me.
The bigger picture.
These realities are evidence for some interesting conclusions I first read Daniel Pink make about the world-of-work and how tools such as Second Life and social media are involved in the shifting framework of the modern work place. Even if we don’t all become free-agents, how will the ideas of the Free Agent Nation manifest themselves in the enterprise? What role will social media and Second Life play in that enterprise evolution? What will happen to big companies that choose to ignore these observable changes?
Watching some of the most talented developers, artists, and thinkers disassociate themselves from their primary employer when it comes to their real passion because of conflicting enterprise priorities is hard to watch. Unfortunately I think it will not change for many years to come, perhaps not until the ‘gaming’ generation takes a firmer hold on the enterprise. Companies that figure out how to align worker personal passion with the goals and remuneration of the enterprise will dominate the 21st century. Virtual worlds will play a big part. I have no doubt about that. But it might take a Whole New Mind for some decision-makers to consider properly.
This entry was posted on November 19, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags ibm, lindenlabs, policy, secondlife, socialmedia, virtualworlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 19, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Interesting thoughts! I haven’t felt any pressure at all to disassociate from my primary employer, in either RL or SL. But then I’m in SL just for fun and socializing and creativity, not for business stuff, so there’s no conflict-of-interest. (I was doing some inworld stuff for work last year; this year the last SL-related thing that happened at work was a former manager that I ran into in the restroom asking me for tips about customizing his hair.
)
I tend to assume things are simple until they actually get complex. I don’t think conflict-of-interest considerations are wildly different between RL and SL; I shouldn’t be competing with my employer in SL, just like I shouldn’t be competing with my employer in RL. I’m free to have whatever political opinions I want to in SL, just like I am in RL. And I’m not part of any secret conspiracy in either one. ^_^
November 19, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Yes Dale, good clarification. I know you and AM both have never disassociated yourselves. I could see that being implied after rereading. Didn’t intend that. That said, I do know other less visible content creators who do.
What is it about people secretly asking how to improve their hair? Hah. Just shows that privately at least, most everyone cares more than they will publicly admit about the appearance of their avatar.
By the way, that is why I returned to socializing, creativity, and helping out at ISTE. Somewhere along the way I stopped having as much fun and wanted it back. I still believe if you are not having fun in SL, or even SLE, then the whole point is lost. Just needed to remember that. Although I don’t spend nearly the time I used to in SL it is a lot more fun when I am there now.
November 21, 2009 at 11:47 am
Thanks for your post, Mo, but here’s what’s all wrong with it:
1. The fact that you don’t represent IBM in making these claims means these categories of yours are only your opinion and represent nothing, and certainly don’t represent any critical or impartial view of IBM.
2. Dale Innis is, as usual, cheerfully manipulative — but sinister. Precisely because his employer finds it convenient to let him savage people like me repeatedly, he can get away with it. IBM has guidelines for social media that say “don’t pick fights,” yet Dale Innis feels he can violate them with impunity because he believes he is “refuting lies” when he constantly badgers me. But what he’s doing is merely adding another layer of his own distractions to people calling him on what he is doing. It’s no accident when Dale crosses the street and comes into JIRAs I’m submitting or commenting on — when he wasn’t in there before — and then seeks to undermine them. He’s doing that with an agenda — and that agenda is an explicitly corporate IBM agenda.
IBM gains plausible deniability when it has people like Dale Innis harass residents, but I’m here to say that it cannot get a pass in doing that.
And what has he been doing? Pursuing a relentless, cunning jihad for more than a year now against a chief critic of SL — me — in order to influence the features set. A classic example is his refusal to admit the validity of the share bug (which you yourself saw me replicate for you) because it doesn’t serve the copyleftist agenda which says “builders’ convenience in permissions-free environments must trump everything” (which is a developers’ notion and therefore pumped by IBM and people like Dale).
Another classic example is his pretense to support my campaign about landmarks, but only to hollow it out and then substitute it with in fact an consent to allow the Lindens to remove it, and a distraction to third-party viewers. Mission accomplished!
It’s understood IBM will fight for the set of features that best suit its corporate agenda and it is as free to do that as any free actor in a free economy. But to be a responsible corporate citizen, it must do so on avatars that are labelled “IBM lobbyists” and not pretend that the people doing the lobbying are just good citizens, hobbyists, people of good will merely expressing their opinion, blah blah. They aren’t. They are conscious promoters of the IBM agenda — IBM knows it; they know it; we know it. It’s an unfair fight and IBM needs to stop lobbying this way and also “picking fights” in this way.
It seems to me from reading the IBM directives that as a matter of course, you would write a disclaimer on an individual employee’s blog that it does not reflect their employer’s views, and that some sort of IBM minder of social media is needed to tell people like Dale that they are out of line — and not tell people like you that you are out of line. Criticism is to be expected; harassment should not be. That Dale *still* bucks this and still smilingly and impudently disregards this lets us know the sense of backing he has from his superiors, who smirk as well — and your craven caving to him here lets me know that for some reason you, too, feel bullied by Dale. But ultimately, that smirking face is bad for public relations and IBM has to realize that.
And Mo, you need to see what this smirking face of Dale Innis does: he calls a legitimate concern about avatars showing up as children who practice BDSM (!), in a PG space to boot, as “sexpanic” that shouldn’t be valid because it suppresses free expression and “victimless edginess”. Instead of seeking to push the BDSM edgecasing edgyness agenda, Dale should keep his support of broadly offensive material like this on his own sim, because IBM shouldn’t have its corporate face tied to BDSM children — full stop. If I have to keep explaining that, it’s only because IBM senior executives aren’t viewing this yet. You won’t need me to explain this again after they do.
As for AM Radio, again, my concerns are legitimate, and they are necessary, and we can’t know that his invocation of IBM ties didn’t help in getting his media coverage, and that’s troubling.
Your categorization of IBMers in SL isn’t really the way it works, and you know it.
In fact, like most big companies with experimental technology, IBM seems to have unabashedly followed a kind of blue-team/red-team etc approach, either tacitly or deliberately – in fact they may have more than just pro/con, but have a variety of ways in which they solicit field data and play even employees off against each other for management benefit.
Some IBMs hate SL. They either are wedded to Active Worlds or other platforms or hate the sordid reputation clinging to SL, that in fact comes from people with high-visibility corporate-linked avatars like Dale Innis sprinkling edgecasing and broadly offensive missives replete with smilies, not from ordinary residents themselves. OR they simply think that the telephone and the mobile phone with its applications are the future, and that video conferencing is good enough.
They don’t see the need to avatarize and complexify their interactions, they don’t get the value add.
Don’t forget, Mo, that a tenant on my experimental building rental, Jessica Qin, went on to become the lead architect for the IBM sims in SL. She did not identify herself as IBM to me. She “mingled with the natives”. Yeah, that’s great for her, but it raises troubling implications. If she didn’t have that latitude to come in anonymously and poke around and gradually then convince her bosses at IBM to take SL more seriously, she might not have won them over. But it also feels like me and other people then are being used. We’re stage props that have to be worked over and kept in the dark and relied upon to be gullible and not expect that we’re part of some big experiment that some corporation is doing.
I don’t think that given IBM’s huge role in SL, with its explicit and special partnership with LL, where it got to be the first firewalled company and still invests heavily in things like SLE, whatever its wandering eyes to OpenSim and lack of loyalty to LL, that every employee in some kind of business here who by definition then is lobbying for the features sets should be identified as IBM on their profile.
IBM is now associated with something really negative and nasty: the forking of the marketplace into the GSP insiders who get to have an SL Market store not open to other merchants. That’s really an unfair screwin gover of the marketplace; it’s the stuff of which the Intel lawsuit was made over. Just because it is happening in a small virtual world with relatively few users and with virtual goods doesn’t make it any more credible or right. It’s wrong. And that’s how IBM will be judged: how it treats the ordinary public.
November 21, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Just noting for the benefit of any reader not familiar with the situation that essentially everything Prokofy says about me is untrue. See:
http://daleinnis.wordpress.com/about/grpn/
As my weblog clearly indicates, I do not in any way represent IBM in Second Life. My actions and statements are entirely my own.
November 24, 2009 at 10:54 am
Prokofy, I know you feel strongly. I find it very difficult to allow public defamatory accusations that I have no way to substantiate to remain on my blog. Were such made against you as well I would have the same difficulty. Let’s consider this topic closed and move on. Thank you.
December 4, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Honestly, Prok, I’m not that smart. And it took a lot more people than just me to convince IBM to investigate virtual worlds technology. I wasn’t some advance scout sent into SL to infiltrate and pave the way for the arrival of the Mothership. For a long time, I was just another person who got hooked on SL and liked it a lot — and then one happy day when my company decided to get serious about it, I was lucky enough to join the core group and get involved. The fact that I had a lot of experience with SL made a lot of difference, for sure — but there was no cold-blooded plan in place to “go undercover and study the natives” or any such deviousness.