During the projectday one workshop was used to discuss the feasibility of virtual worlds for nomadic working. We see a growing group of nomadic workers, as work is not fixed solely to the office anymore. Increasingly people are working from home or the customer. Besides organizational problems, like planning of resources and projects also personal problems for nomadic workers arise. For example, keeping in touch and in sync with your colleauges and team members becomes more complex. One possible way to deal with these complexities is by using virtual worlds. This workshop was used to play with two virtual world demonstrations and to discuss the merits and drawbacks of this type of technology for nomadic workers.

The participants of the workshop were divided into two groups. One group played with the Virtual Media Office demonstration, prepared by Sefan Burgers from Ericsson. The second group played with the Second Life demonstration, prepared by Bart van den Hooff of the VU.

The result was a nice discussion from which the following elements struck me:

• Staying in touch with colleagues can be facilitated using virtual worlds however currently it cannot complete replace face to face contact. For example, drinking coffee at a coffee corner is still very valuable. Maybe a good virtual coffee machine could be a way to go.
• Choosing (remote) team members using virtual worlds could become more objective as politics and personal aspects play a lesser role.
• Virtual worlds (including avatars) could become a intuitive graphical interface on top of the resources of a worker.
• A lot of workers use tools with a lot of (unintuitive) features (e.g. email), virtual worlds could provide a intuitive interface that discloses all these features in a more natural way, after a learning curve has been taken.
• Not all tasks of a knowledge worker may be suitable to perform in a virtual world (e.g. editing excel).
• The more important decisions become, the more face to face contact is needed to also grasp indirect communication aspects (e.g. body language). Current virtual worlds are less suitable to grasp indirect communications and hence may be less suitable for very important/delicate decisions.

Mike from Jam visualized outcomes of the discussion. More of the results (also from the other workshops) can be found here.