Leery About Cities Online? No. Leery About Virtual Decatur? Yes.
Decatur Metro | March 4, 2009The 13th Floor blog over at Governing.com uses Virtual Decatur as an example of the “leeriness” residents feel when their cities venture online.
But just so we’re clear, I may indeed be hesitant to embrace “Virtual Decatur“, but at the same time I fully embrace Open City Hall, the online requests/concerns site, the Decatur Minute, and any future, full-fledged redesign of the city’s hefty but scattered website.
So, let’s try not to peg those who are highly skeptical of this idea as “anti-technology”. In fact, I would bet that the more tech-savvy the person, the less likely they would be to embrace this idea. Second Life now sits comfortably in 2007’s wastepaper basket, and was never a place where people got together to have substantive conversations. Instead it served as more of an alternate reality for players. Combined with an assumed high-cost, these things indeed make me “leery” of the idea.
But that’s just my opinion. Though I guess I could be perceived as biased, since this is currently where many of the city’s online interactions occur.
h/t: InDecatur
BTW, the RFI’s for this project were due February 13th. The next step is to invite vendors to demonstrate the project, but that date is still TBD according to the city’s website.
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I would have to be in total agreement here.
Yes, the concept is cool.
Yes, it got us some good press in Germany, FWIW. Or was it Britain?
IMHO, if funds should be spent in ANY way here, it should be for the redesign of the website.
Overall functionality improvement along with look and feel would benefit the community much better than the virtual idea.
I have to jump in here and say that your use of Second Life as an example of why this can’t work is fault-ridden logic. Second Life is plauged by many issues but failure is not one of them. Linden Labs makes (notice the tense) so much money that it has it’s own GDP. Also I don’t think that Decatur will use a Second Life space anyway. Read the RFI on their site. They are clearly looking for custom software to be developed here. The site redesign you so badly wanted could easily be incorporated into this project. You’re just being unimaginative. You see Second Life and assume every virtual environment must be the same but it’s clear from the RFI that the city is aiming for something better. Think about how you could benefit from a working scale model of a city with real people.
Also if you google government and SL I think you might find that your comment (“Second Life now sits comfortably in 2007’s wastepaper basket, and was never a place where people got together to have substantive conversations. Instead it served as more of an alternate reality for players.” ) is dead wrong. Our president campaigned on SL. Nuff said…