I arrived at the café minutes prior to the 7:00 PM PST start time to find several people already there, including the award winning Machinama Creator and journalist Draxtor Despres who was there to film the meeting. Ms Vita, stylishly attired in a grey skirted business suit, sat on a stool on stage where she exchanged greetings with early arrivals and those that were soon to arrive. Shortly after the scheduled start time, she opened the session by asking everyone to introduce themselves and to say why they were there. The conversation occurred primarily in spatial voice along with text chat. Ms Vita, with the able assistance of Perplexity Peccable who transcribed voice into text chat and Cotton Thorne who gave voice to text chat, served as the moderator for the discussion. The range of attendees is broad based, from first life health care givers to those who have or are actively engaged in receiving care for either themselves or loved ones in real life and those who were there simply because they are concerned and interested in the issue. Each are active and engaged residents of second life. Avatars such as Gentle Heron, president of Virtual Ability, Inc, or Jonah Zenovka Founder of Twilight's Peace an interfaith group and Perplexity Peccable, founder of SLHealthy and Healthcare Education in SL who is a medical librarian in her first life. All had a common desire, to have their voices heard, recorded and presented to the incoming administration.
"Our goal here is to discuss the questions provided by the transition team and draft a submission based on our findings and conclusions which I will submit to the Health Policy team. The questions were sent to you all via email but I have them here in-world on a slide show for easy reference." Vita said as the introductions were completed. She then added. "I really want to encourage everyone's active participation in this process. Although we will strive to find common ground, if our consensus is that there is a lack of consensus we will submit that as part of our findings. I encourage you all to a healthy and respectful debate on this complex issue. Let your voice be heard. This is your forum."
"We will review the questions one at a time and discuss each one. The decision on whether to focus our submission on all questions or focus on a specific area is ours to make. I would suggest that we get through the questions and decide at that time which, if any, area provided material we want to focus on for our submission. We'll decide that with a group vote. After the discussion questions and our vote, I'll ask you to create a note card with your avatar name, your RL name if you choose to disclose it and your answers to the survey questions. There are slides prepared with the questions for your reference. As your moderator for the evening, I will not actively participate in the debate. My role is to keep the discussion moving and I may on occasion ask that we move on to the next person or topic." She said and then asked the attendees if there were any questions.
No questions were asked so the process began and the seven questions were presented beginning with the first, which asked session attendees to state, "Briefly, from your own experience, what do you perceive is the biggest problem in the health system?"
It began and continued for the next two hours, an event that was being replicated in many places of the United States. Only this one occurred in a virtual world. And they were engaged, these avatars, engaged and passionate, and ably facilitated by Ms Vita who deftly drew each into a productive discourse. It was a remarkable process to observe this virtual meeting. A meeting where attendee's could not see each other, only the virtual representations of themselves, avatars engaged in a civil and open discourse on an issue that has perplexed and vexed the United States for many years now. At the session conclusion, note cards were distributed for participants in gathering additional responses for the final report. The dialog complete all were invited to the front of the café for a group photograph.
In a post script to the session, Siri informed me that Draxtor Despres and Nonny Writer were working on a documentary of the meeting and it would be completed in early January. She also said that Drax had spoken to "Globalvision"in New York. They had contacted him and wanted to interview us regarding this project for a real life documentary on President-Elect Obama's administration grassroots organizer efforts. She then added, "It's an awesome opportunity to get the word out about the power of second life"
By Nazz Lane
