The 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.