VCE-0 - Description of Initial Virtual Collaboration Environment

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverable: VCE-0
• Due: 31-May-2009
• Date: 21st May 2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Technical POC: Sue Archer
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

The initial VCE-0 is based on readily available off-the-shelf components and using the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) existing facilities in Second Life. It is an initial facility provided ahead of the delivery of the OpenVCE project's own Second Life island becoming available. It is intended to establish a range of functions that may be required by the Community of Interest, and which can be tested in later phases of the project. Several alternative means of providing some of the functions have been explored.

The current functionality is available at http://openvce.net and the choices that have been made from the platforms that can provide the functionality in current use are described in http://openvce.net/index.php/more - an archive of the status at the time of this report is shown in the table below:

Selection of Functionality by Platform at 21-May-2009

This mapping may change in response to experience gained with VCE-0, prior to the introduction of VCE-1. All the capabilities listed are enabled and can be accessed by the direct links above, even if not currently chosen as the selected mechanism.

* Selected Mechanism

o Available on Platform

Early Trials and Uses of VCE-0

The VCE-0 facility has been used in early trials and community meetings as follows:

These events and the issues they raised will be more fully reported on in the first formal project report (REP-1).

VIWS-0 Interim Events and Workshops

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverable: None
• Due: 30-Aug-2009
• Date: 28-Aug-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Technical POC: Sue Archer
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

No deliverable is planned for August 2009.  However, considerable work is underway on the OpenVCE project, on the OpenVCE.net web site and on the VCE region in Second Life. 

OpenVCE Collaboration Facilities

A new data base server (Linux OS, Intel quad core processor, plus RAID array disks) has been delivered and is in use in test mode ready to accept the increase in demand when the WoSCR community is invited to join OpenVCE.net.  Ot will also have a more reliable and regular, less manually backup process.

Considerable experimentation with the use of social networking  features, and community activity awareness in OpenVCE.net and other platforms (such as Ning) has been in progress.

Workshop, Meetings and Events

A number of workshops and events already have been run, and preparations made for the VCE-LOE scenario-based limited objective experiment.

Elements include:

• Relay through OpenVCE facilities of SORASCS-09 event at CMU on 4th May 2009 - http://openvce.net/event/sorasc09
• A series of technical meetings to have discussions and test technical collaboration facilities - MEET-1 to MEET-8 - http://openvce.net/openvce-meets
• A tour of the VCE facilities in Second Life for USJFCOM and other participants  (25 in total) - http://openvce.net/vce-tour
• Support for the JFL JOE Program.
• Discussions of support for the Irregular Warfare Training Symposium in September 2009 - http://openvce.net/event-iwts09
• Support for collaborative meetings for WoSCR community members.
• Establishment of VATAR program for indiction events fro new avatars, and running first two events in series - http://openvce.net/vatar
• A number of other tests, real meeting relays, and live streams of informal discussions.

The SORASCS09 workshop on 4-May-2009 was in fact was the first workshop run on the VCE facilities or the WoSCR community and was in effect an early delivery of what was intended for VIWS-1 which is due at the end of September 2009. However, other events are under discussion such as IWTS09 and a possible WoSCR community workshop to brief the community on the projects and progress to date.

REP-1 - OpenVCE Project Report 1

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverable: REP-1
• Due: 30-Jun-2009
• Date of Last Revision: 28-Jun-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.

Focus of the Project

The focus of the project is to create and make practical use of a generic virtual collaboration environment (VCE), which will include a virtual 3D collaboration space in a virtual world (VW) and a more traditional, “Web 2.0” collaboration site. Initially, this VCE will be developed for the PMESII Community of Interest (CoI) concerned with flexible situation analysis and decision making in the context of multi-agency, international crisis response events and missions.

The specific virtual world platform employed will be representative of the current state-of-the-art, and be sufficiently open, accessible and available at low (or no) cost to its potential users. The environment should allow for a range of requirements to be studied, experimented with and reported upon. A range of “Web 2.0” collaboration tools are anticipated as being used in the website that is part of the VCE and these tools will be made accessible through the virtual (3D) collaboration space where appropriate, resulting in an integrated environment. Representative examples of such tools will be employed for the PMESII CoI VCE demonstrator, and the intention is not to develop new custom tools in this rapidly developing area.

The project will be unclassified. Publications and no closed results are highly encouraged.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

Virtual World Platform Pre-commitment

Over the last 2 years, the AIAI team has been evaluating a number of virtual world platforms specifically in the context of their potential for collaboration, support to training exercises, etc. The criteria considered, along with a range of other feature comparisons made by others, can be seen at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/i-vw/eval.html. AIAI team members have gained experience by immersion in a number of the available platforms ranging from freely available open offerings through to expensive professional systems with considerable package content to support professional simulations. They have engaged with the development community for some of these platforms, and attended in-world events, workshops and trade conferences relating to the communities of suppliers and users. They have also had exchanges with companies and communities about to bring new richer virtual worlds to market in the coming year. They have experience though actual use, in some cases significant use, of:

• Linden Labs Second Life
• Open Source Opensim
• RealXtend
• Forterra OLIVE
• Metaversum Twinity
• MindArk Entropian Universe
• There
• Sony Home
• Active Worlds
• Kaneva
• IMVU
• A range of Flash-based virtual worlds
• Lively by Google
• Sun Microsystems Project Wonderland

Some of these are proprietary and closed environments, with little or no content creation by a user allowed. Others support rich content generation both in external tools that have their results imported, and with internal tools. A number of these environments support standard collaboration tools such as chat/IM, VoIP, group management and permissions based on membership lists. Some have rich media facilities; others are intended for use alongside other tools that support such functionality. Some allow for rich 3D model import and export in a standards-based form; others use their own proprietary formats.

This experience has indicated that, as of early 2009, a project that seeks to provide public space and flexibility can most easily be achieved on Second Life™, more specifically the Second Life Grid server and tools which underlay that service. This choice also fits well with availability and potential usefulness of an open source variant of the server which can be self hosted and run in both open and closed (behind firewall) environments, Opensim. Conveniently, some exchange of resources between these platforms is possible, and they can both be accessed through the same (open source) viewer which is itself cross platform and freely available.

Thus, prior to the OpenVCE project starting, a pre-commitment to use Second Life (and Opensim) as the virtual word platform for the 3D aspect of the VCE has been made. The project will document its experience of seeking to meet the community’s requirements via these exemplar virtual worlds’ platforms and will note issues as they arise. The final report will document the fit of them to the requirements, and make recommendations for the future.

Integration with Collaboration (Web 2.0) Style Tools

Many of the requirements to support collaboration within the community relate to what are termed Web 2.0 tools, tools which allow for significant community content creation, review, comment and change. They include social networking, groupware, wikis, shared document repositories, and media sharing facilities. It is not the intention of this project to “reinvent the wheel” for such tools, but to show how they can be used successfully and productively alongside and from within the 3D virtual world as part of an integrated VCE. Accordingly, a number of such collaboration tools, representative of those that would be required in future environments, will be selected as the basis for this project.

Under investigation was the potential utility and cost of using a commercial suite of tools to connect Second Life to Web 2.0 collaboration aids, rather than using freely available, but sometimes difficult to use and support, community tools. This route was not very promising and has now been abandoned in favour of an open solution.

Current Selection of Functionality by Platform (Snapshot at 28-Jun-2009)

Functionality, Platforms, and Choices - The table below gives an overview of the "Current Selection of Functionality by Platform" as a snapshot. This mapping may change. All the capabilities listed are enabled in the respective environments and can be accessed by direct links for experimentation, even if they are not currently chosen as the selected mechanism for OpenVCE.

Initial custom selections from a range of platforms was replaced initially by a Joomla-based web portal, and the current facility as at the end of June 2009 is a Drupal-based web portal.

* Selected Mechanism
o Available on Platform

Issues Arising from using VCE-0 and Means to Address Them

• Lack of ability to install SL Viewer or VW software client and firewall issues, especially with real time streaming port 554. A range of backup and alternative access methods have been tried, some involving screen sharing and webcasting approaches.  Experience is being gained to adopt appropriate mechanisms for the OpenVCE framework and for use initially in VCE-1.
• Pixel resolution on screen for in-world images in displays, streaming media resolution appropriate to content . Guidelines for OpenVCE meetings and meeting organizer protocols are under development.
• Twitter status updates were not obvious, as there was no mechanism to draw a user's attention to them. Suggest new posts received are "said" on open chat. Give ability to turn off the feeds, and to turn on or instantly update them, rather than waiting for next timed update.
• Audio loopback problems can occur in a number of situations, e.g. with Second Life voice. This is usually the problem of an open mic. Advice can be given and checks done. E.g. see the draft 3D space user advice page http://tr.im/slchecks
• Audio loopback also occurred with the methods used to do meeting recoding via screencasting and Wirecast recording. A fix will be to not feed the live stream being recorded back into the meeting space.
• If a speaker had problems with their SL voice input dropping out or stopping working, they sometimes would not know that themselves. Unless others told them. This is because users are unlikely to be focussing on their own avatar's SL voice indicators. A fix is to suggest active speakers bring up the small indicator window of "Active Speakers" next to the "click to speak" button in the SL Viewer. This shows if you are yourself broadcasting. A means to document this in the meeting and 3d space user support pages will be needed.
• A way to assist users, and especially new users, to select suitable camera angles, or focus on specific screens, displays or in-world objects under discussion would be useful. Consider an "I-HUD"- perhaps associated with the "I-Tag" - to allow the current media feed, or specific in-world textures in posters, screens, etc (all displayed via changing the texture UUID of the HUD) without the user having to select specific camera positions or media screens.
• A way to better inform external systems and meeting participants about the presence of an avatar, their position in the meeting space, and to provide access to the most common forms of information, such as real world persona and link to their user profile, could be useful. Consider an instrumented "I-Seat" connected to the I-X Services and I-Room helper.

OpenVCE MEET-1

The first project meeting in the virtual world was conducted on May 19, 2009. This was a workshop for the OpenVCE team, WoSCR program managers and key collaborators to discuss initial VCE functionality and the platforms being explored to provide them. This event made use of the VCE-0 interim Virtual Collaboration Environment on the "Virtual University of Edinburgh" SL island for a meeting on a topic of interest to the community. For more details see:

http://openvce.net/event-openvce-meet1 or http://tr.im/vcemeet1

The experience of the meeting was evaluated using a questionaire that is part of the collaboration website. Of the 10 participants present at the meeting in the virtual world, 50% completed the questionaire after the meeting, and all the respondents were quite experienced VW users.

The only question on which there was complete agreement concerns the overall experience of the use of a virtual world for the meeting: all respondents felt this to be good.

Answers to other questions were mixed, and given the small number of answers, they should not be over-interpreted. Concerning the meeting itself, the access to on-line material seemed to work well, whereas awareness of identity was an issue. Concerning technical facitities, participants seemed to like the video quality and chat facilities provided, and there are no aspects that stood out in a negative way.

One remark from the comments section of the questionaire is also interesting: it was felt there was just too much to do as an event organizer, presumably distracting from the topic of the meeting.

OpenVCE MEET-2 and MEET-3

A number of other meetings have taken place in the OpenVCE 3D Space in Second Life and have been of a more technical nature, e.g. on 17th June and 23rd June, 2009.  These have tested in-world facilities, aspects of the web portal, backup modalities, and addressed issues of access through firewalls, etc.

The main issue arising fro work to date has been access when in restrictive firewall locations, or when software such as the Second Life viewer cannot be installed. A number of alternative access and screencasting methods have been tried in these meeting to address this. Including using Harmonie Web's Adobe Connect mechanisms to screencast a view on it the 3D space, alongside a custom chat tool which can run in a browser and provide 2-2ay chat to the 3D space in Second Life.  A number of tests of this framework have been tried during June 2009.

Task 2: Iterative Virtual Workshop Series (IVWS)

A workshop series for the community will be designed and run to gather experience, to support the community as it forms, and to explore novel ways to interact. To gain experience, there have been early experiments in usig the VCE-0 facilities with two events: EIE09 and SORASCS09.

EIE09 - 29th April 2009

http://openvce.net/event-eie09 or http://tr.im/eie09

Trial of the facilities in preparation for SORASCS09. Relay of invited talk by Guy Kawasaki in an Edinburgh event to a virtual audience. There were 25 virtual participants in total across the 2 sessions relayed into Second Life.

SORASCS09 - 4th May 2009

http://openvce.net/event-sorascs09 or http://tr.im/sorascs09

Whole of Society Crises Response (WoSCR) Community of Interest Workshop on Service Oriented Architecture for Analysis of Socio-Cultural Systems (SORASCS) held at CMU on 4th and 5th May, 2009, with 3 sessions on 4th May being relayed into Second Life, and facilities available for Second Life audience to ask POC questions and give comments to main meeting. There were 19 virtual particiopants in total across the 3 sessions relayed into Second Life.

SORASCS09 Event Information and Status Notification

This tested a number of methods:

1. Meeting registration and contact with attendees via EventBrite on http://eventbrite.com/
2. Status updates via Twitter on http://twitter.com/ and using an in-world SLTweets HUD for avatars.

Issues with the Twitter status mechanism included hitting a limitation on number of calls a single host can make to the information feed mechanism at Twitter.com, which leads to the feed being halted for a period. Improved ways to throttle the calls being made on such services have already been made, and clearer ways to indicate if and when any status feed is not updated will be required in future.

SORASCS09 Event Logging

This was itself an experiment using various commercially availlable and OpenVCE team provided faclities:

1. Standard Second Life Viewer Chat Logs enabled on open chat via Edit -> Preferences -> Communication -> "Save a log of open chat on my computer".
2. A2Z Labs Visit Counter to log avatar names and time spent in event zone.
3. GPL Chat Logger to log open chat for avatars who specifically are asked for and give permision for logging to take place.
4. OpenVCE I-Room Chat Logging Experiment.
5. I-X I-Room Helper to allow for avatar presence notfication to external I-X web service, specific actions recording, etc.

Note that some avatars "speak" in open chat, and are logged if they approved this, others choose to conduct 1-1 conversations in IM direct to the avatar and this private messaging is not logged. Conversations can end up mixed between open chat and private IMs. This is especially so where more experienced participants help newer ones. Hence some answers appear where questions are not posed.

Chat logs may be too partial to be directly useful as a narrative, especially where voice, or real meeting link-ups are involved. But they can be useful to retrieve important resources such as links, mentions of names, contacts, projects, organisations, relationships, etc.

SORASCS09 Event Management

A number of methods were used to suport the event and test out ideas for the IVWS workshops and future events:

1. Single stable URL with a clear description of event, all URLs, 3D Space location, current status, and POCs. Used before, during and for after event resources.
2. Short URLs to allow easy communication with event particioants, in status feeds and for e-mails, chat, etc. using http://tr.im/
3. Availability of a nominated virtual personality, Skye Gears, to assist event participants with setup or access problems, and to point at alternatives [problem, some people did not know if this was a real person or an AI-run "bot"]
4. Backup 3D Spaces in the event of capacity overload (beyond 80 avatars or so) or problems with chosen 3D facility.
5. Backup media feeds and other communication resources ready to go if there were problems in the main facilility.

SORASCS09 After Event Questionnaire

This was itself an experiment, and trying out mechanism for polling and seeking feedback after events. Various mechanisms were available and tried:

• Joomla single choice poll directly in the http://openvce.net event web page
• Inworld (Second Life) A2Z Labs Voting System
• Yahoo group single choice and multiple selection polls
• Doodle multiple choice polls via http://doodle.com/
• Specific multiple choice questionnaires with PHP script handling of results to polls@openvce.net

Questionnaire used:

Q1: How much experience of Second Life have you had?

1. Less than 1 week
2. Less than 1 month
3. Less than 3 months
4. More than 3 months

How well did the Virtual World facilities and features work for this event?

[ N/A, 1=Poor, 2=Fair, 3=Good, 4=Excellent ]

• Q2: Access to the Virtual World event and initial orientation.
• Q3: Interaction with other avatars via text chat.
• Q4: Interaction with other avatars via voice chat.
• Q5: Audio relay of the event.
• Q6: Video relay of the event.
• Q7: Point-of-contact avatar for assistance with facilities.
• Q8: Access to external information via in-world web links.
• Q9: Event status displays (such as Twitter feeds).
• Q10: Overall experience of using Virtual World facilities during the event.
• Any other comments, issues or observations for the organizers of the event?

Resuts page: http://openvce.net/alt/script/questionnaire-results.php (also snapshot shown below as at 12-May-2009 with 12 responses)

Comments attached:

• Very good session 1, video locked up once, and Second Life crashed once. Session 2 CourseCast was surprisingly good, but froze once, apparently due to video freeze at CMU feed end.
• Just would be nice to have a more interactive experience within SL, and to have access to the digital briefs as we're watching them. That makes it easier to focus on what you want to take notes on... rather than copying the data from the slideshows.
• currently working firewall issues. Hope to have resolved by 19 May 09.
• This survey is a blunt instrument. who is the POC avatar? How should I have really known? Was it a person or an AI progam, or should I care? Overall, between 2 and 3 and better than nothing.
• Nice start. I will say your website is busy and sometimes time consuming to find the link your looking for.
• As I am an experienced user of SL facilities, this event demonstrated a very useful platform for remote meetings and interactions. Such facilities are especially crucial when there is real risk for pandemic of infectious diseases where face-to-face meetings with a large numbers of people from all over the world are generally avoided; while at the time, multi-modality (voice, text, graph, images and videos) information is vital to be shared instantly and constantly among relevant authorities, experts and practitioners. Such facilities are certainly a step towards the right direction for a greener planet - instance and rich information may be shared without having to travel.

Related comments from Jeff Hansberger, after IAEM Swine Flu exercise (see below) on 5-May-2009:

• There is a lot of individual variability regarding voice audio. For events and exercises where voice communication will be primarily used, I recommend we have a test room/s that must be passed through before attendees enter the primary meeting space. This test room would have one or more support folks to help people use voice, adjust settings, etc. and then provide access to the general meeting.
• Interesting dynamic between voice and chat messages. Need a general protocol to guide when to use each?
• Text on any slides should be very large and the amount of text should be kept at a minimum for individual slides.
• With a lot of people in a room, the names of individual's over their avatar can obscure presentation areas (slides/video).

SORASCS09 Event Issues, Lessons Learned and Suggestions

The experience of supporting CMU for this event was useful, and led to a number of observations.

1. If the 3D Space became unavailable (e.g. due to unforseen outage of the Linden Labs service for Second Life), backup locations or facilities would be needed, and easily switched to. This was in place in a simple way even for this early event.
2. People struggle to get audio and video working, especially if they are new users, and need assistance to get things going quickly, or identify more serious firewall problems. The availability of a meeting support assitant avatar "Skye Gears" was intended to be a start on such support. Improvements in future could include improved web-based and in-world checklists and an "Event Reception" area to prequalify users and their avatars against key collaboration facilities (such as control of camera to look at objects/screens, ability to see streaming media and ability to use voice).
3. In this event we used streaming media to show the real event slides, as well as the audience or speaker. Ways to present PowerPoint-style slide material easily is required, and for this to synchronise with a real meeting space may be needed.
4. There is a need for improved event logging facilities, and ways to capture the meetingn in a more useful form for later analysis, sharing and replay.
5. Improved polling and after event questionnairs are needed, and for these to generate data in a form more easily suited to immediate presentation and later analysis.
6. A way to tie real user names to avatar names in such collaborative meetings is needed. This is especially improtant for meeting organizers, and those linking the real and virtual participants to relay questions, etc.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Limited Objective Experiment (VCE-LOE)

Possible Scenarios

The idea behind the scenario-based Limited Objective Experiment is to stress the community with a representative real word critical emergency response problem.The first step of this task is the selection of an appropriate scenario for the experiment. Currently, there are five scenarios under consideration:

• Operation Able Sword - a training scenario used within USJFCOM/JPRC's PRETC in Fredericksburg, based in Tunisia and the surrounding region with diplomatic aspects relating to Tunisia's neighbours and Italy. Materials and permission to use these for research are already with the research team.
• Pacifica - an island scenario with humanitarian or emergency response elements, already used within COMPOEX, DARPA, USAF and other programmes, and in recent research funded by the Army Research Labs at Fort Monmouth relating to mobile vehicles, UAVs and monitoring of an area under an emergency.
• Binni - a multinational peacekeeping operation set in the Red Sea area in 2011 at a time of local conflict over resources in an area that is increasing in productivity due to climate change.  The scenario was created for multinational research by The Technical Co-operation Program (TTCP http://www.dtic.mil/ttcp/) between the Governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States who actively pursue international research collaboration on a broad range of topics of military interest. Technical Panel 9 (TP9) Command and Control (C2) Systems Applications within TTCP C3I Group encouraged the work which also involved a broad range of other agencies, organisations and academics. More details at http://binni.org.
• Operation Unified Assistance - elements of military support to the humanitarian efforts relating to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Data was captured and made available to the research community by the 33-nation Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT).
• Swine Flu Exercise - a scenario based on one originally developed by RAND Corporation for management of pandemics.  It was used during the "1st International Virtual Emergency Exercise" taking place at a Disaster and Emergency Management (DEM) facility created in Second Life. The scenario was developed for the training of emergency managers and deals with a swine flu outbreak in a fictitious city (in the virtual world).

The WoSCR OpenVCE team are engaged in trials of scenario based virtual exercises in Second Life and other virtual worlds such as Forterra OLIVE. They were participants and observers in the "1st International Virtual Emergency Exercise" taking place on 5th May 2009 at the Disaster and Emergency Management (DEM) facility created in Second Life by Ali Asgary and his team at York University, Toronto, Canada. The exercise was organized by the Emergency Management Program at York University and supported by the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) in Canada. The exercise involved role play in a simulation of the handling of a Swine Flu (Influenza A H1N1) outbreak in a region. It made use of a tabletop simuilation exercise for pandemic influenza preparedness in local health agencies (RAND Technical Report 319) created by RAND Corporation in 2006.

More details in the Exercise Flyer [PDF Format]. Screen videos of the exercise are at: http://www.yorku.ca/cst/zDEMmovies-temp/

This exercise was used to elicit ideas for VCE-LOE later in the OpenVCE project work.

Selection Criteria

To choose between these possible scenarios a number of criteria are relevant.

From the SOW: The problem must engage a diverse audience to include experts from the security, social science, humanitarian relief, training, logistics, policy, strategic engagement, and industry domains. While an experiment like this could be used by DoS, Industry, NGO's, or, multinational organization, this LOE will focus on how the intelligence, operations, and requirements cells within a Joint Task Force will access and engage such a community to come up with a "whole of society" approach to the problem vs. a military only solution. One approach may be to separate two "JTF" cells to assess the final solution, increase in communication, and/or type of people engaged.

From this it is clear that a main criterion for scenario selection must be the possibility to engage community members with different backgrounds, the scenarios should involve a political, military, economic, social, information and infrastructure element. Operation Able Sword involves different aspects, but the focus is clearly on the military operation and integrating all PMESII elements might be difficult, especially because the current SAR tasks are relatively small scale. The Pacifica scenario is more open allowing for an easier integration.  Binni and Operation Unified Assistance could involve the whole spectrum of the PMESII elements. The same is probably true for the swine flu scenario.

Another important criterion is the potential for escalation: ideally the LOE should show how the analysis of the situation in terms of the PMESII elements can avoid an escalation that might otherwise occur. This is an escalation in the military sense, eventually leading to force on force battles. As the latter two scenarios, Unified Assistance and swine flu, are about humanitarian missions, the potential for military escalation is rather limited. It could be possible to engineer a military conflict into such a scenario though, e.g. around a facrtory that produces anti-viral drugs. Pacifica was not designed for force on force scenarios either, but could be extended. Operation Able Sword, where SAR mssions are involved, can lead to complications especially on neutral territory. The scenario that most naturally has a potential for escalation is Binni, where there are many opportunities for increased regional tension between the countries directly involved in the conflict, and their neighbouring regions, where many regional and cultural issues can arise.

Form a developer perspective, an important aspect is the availability of suitable scenario resources. The aim here should be to reuse existing material to avoid unnecessary work. A lot of material is available to AIAI on the first scenario, which has been made available to AIAI during the work with PRETC on the IBC/COMPOEX Co-OPR project. While this material is not restricted, is was not intended for free distribution either. This should not be a problem for the current project, however. The Pacifica scenario was developed at AIAI and all background material is freely available. The scenario is based on a fictional island, but was developed from a real world scenario.  It involved a team of civilian and military subject matter experts, US government labs, companies and academics under the leadership of AIAI. The Binni material is openly available specificlaly for projects such as this one, and is available at http://binni.org . The material on Unified Assistance stems from real sources collected during the unfolding of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Material for a swine flu scenario is not based on real data but RAND Corporation have provided material to use in such exercises. Similar events (e.g. Spanish flu) have taken place, and a lot of material is available in the form of emergency response plans generated by various public bodies.

Another criterion that might be considered is whether the scenario is set in an existing place. This will allow general web-resources such as, for example, the CIA world factbook to be used in an exercise, adding to the realism. 

Plans for next period (July and August 2009)

The main focus for work in the next reporting period is on:

• design and build of the Virtual Collaboration Environment version 1 (VCE-1 ) which also involves bringing the newly developed Second Life region "VCE" into use;
• preparation for the first Virtual Interative Workshop Series (VIWS-1) involving a number of preparatory activities and test events for that;
• these also will involve a gradual build up of links to the WoSCR community beyond the 20 or so people currently involved, as sufficient functionality can be provided to be attractive and potentially useful to new entrants; and
• the scenario to be used for the LOE series will be selected and developed, which will itself involve a number of meetings with OpenVCE project and WoSCR community members using the VCE facilities in a test mode.

VCE-1

The Second Life island "VCE" is already available, and an initial mockup design has been established to help indentify requirements and look at scale of buildings, etc.

The current requirements are listed at: http://openvce.net/vce-island-plan

For the in-world assets, the aim is to have a set that can be given away in a box to anyone, and will give all the assets, textures, scripts, etc. with full permissions, along with web server side components (Apache, PHP, MySQL compatible) as hooks to richer (to be developed) services.  

We are going to use a version 2 of the open source Clever Zebra assets in world in joint development work now underway with Clever zebra.  A review of their current assets is at:

http://openvce.net/openvce-dev-clever-zebra-assets-review 

LOE

The current report lists a set of candidate scenarios and some criteria for selection. The next step has to be a discussion with project sponsors as to whether they feel all the criteria are appropriate and what additional features they would like to see in the scenario if any. This discussion should be at the beginning of the next reporting period in order to make sure that the initial scenario can be developed. A preliminary LOE involving some SMEs could be conducted end of July and the first LOE can be conducted (with a small number of users initially) towards the end of the reporting period.

VCE-1 - Virtual Collaboration Environment - 1

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverable: VCE-1
• Due: 31-July-2009
• Date: 30-July-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Technical POC: Sue Archer
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

VCE-1 is intended as the virtual collaboration environment that will support initial experimentation for the WoSCR community. It builds on the VCE-0 temporary facilities which provided early access to meeting and collaboration spaces for the WoSCR community and OpenVCE project managers, collaborators and team and managers.  The experimentation and trial of a number of facilities and platforms that  led up to VCE-1 are described in earlier deliverables:

• VCE-1 (http://openvce.net/openvce-vce0)
• REP-1 (http://openvce.net/openvce-rep1)

The Virtual Collaboration Envioronment consists of five elements:

1. A web site and capabilities to support community social networking and collaboration.
2. Facilities in a virtual world to meet in "3D space".
3. Mechanisms to access the collaboration space and recordings of events via alternative and backup means.
4. Protocols, processes and tips to get the best use out of the facilities.
5. Resources for the OpenVCE and its communities of interest.

All elements are present in VCE-1, can be used immediately, and will now be further refined in the light of experience in productive use.

VCE-1 Web Site

The web element is based on Drupal, the open source content management system, following experimentation with Joomla, and a range of social networking sites such as Ning, Grou.ps, Facebook, Google Groups and Yahoo groups.  See http://openvce.net/more for a full description of the many experiments and platforms surveyed, tested and compared.

Further experimentation continues with collaborative faclilities to augment the current set up.  This includes experimentation with Moodle/Sloodle for improved and flexible presentation methods linking the web with the 3D space.

3D Space

The 3d space facilities initially use Second Life but are designed to be easily ported to a self hosted and potentially firewalled Opensim setup, and with more work could be used in other virtual worlds.   

Some of the key Second Life (and Opensim) in world facilities build upon existing open source assets available from Clever Zebra, and with their support a new set of adaptable assets has been created and made available in open source under the flexible Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).  The development process for these assets in conjunction with the OpenVCE project team is described at http://openvce.net/vce-island-plan along with a series of plans, maps and designs shown there. 

The in-world elements consist of:

1. Central Plaza - with status feeds, info and new screens, etc for community.
2. Orientation Area - to assist new users.
3. Venue for lecture theatre style events for 50-100 avatars + 3 sim extension to add a further 100-200 users in the audience.
4. Expo Pavilion - with showcase of COMPOEX and other PMESII/WoSCR relevant tools.
5. I-Zone -  for WoSCR experimentation and brainstorming stye meetings. This is based on a larger version of AIAI's I-Room. A second I-Zone building can quickly be placed on the VCE region to allow a capability for two experimental groups, perhaps using alternative collaboration methods which are being compared. See http://openvce.net/izone
6. Project suites for collaborators such as ARL (Jeff Hansberger and Tim Bacon), Perigean Technologies (Brian Moon) and David Fliesen (USJFCOM Joint Futures Group Joint Operating Environment program).

A number of capabilities have been provided to enrich the links between the web and the 3D Space elements of the VCE:

• An "I-Tag" that can be worn by avatars in Second Life and which links to the Drupal web portal user profile.  This can help link real and virtual personas in collaborations, and opens up a range of ways in which experimentation instrumentation, recording, feedback and other things can be done.  See http://openvce.net/itag
• Improved mechanism for uploading a presentation (such as from PowerPoint via PDF) and quickly making it available to shared screens in Second Life.  See http://openvce.net/presenter
• A way to link a web chat tool to chat in the Second Life 3D Space.  See http://openvce.net/isay

Alternative Access and Event Recording

Using Wirecast screencasting and a Quicktime Steaming Service (via University of Edinburgh or commercial services) and Adobe Connect (via Harmonie Web or University of Edinburgh Adobe Connect Servers).  See http://openvce.net/3d-space-alt and http://openvce.net/3d-space-hw

Example recordings and other media for OpenVCE events can be found in after events materials on the various event web pages.

At the suggestion of Jeff Hansberhger, BBN conducted a test of their AMC Speech to text converter to see how it could support VCE experimentation and workshops.  The OpenVCE project produced audio files for OpenVCE MEET-4 and MEET5, and the results created by Ehry MacRostie at BBN are available at http://openvce.net/resources/audio/ . The transcriptions produced by BBN are available in the after events materials for OpenVCE MEET-4 (http://openvce.net/event-openvce-meet4) and MEET-5 (http://openvce.net/event-openvce-meet5).

Protocols, Procedures and Tips

A range of procedures have been developed to set up and run events, and to advise community group managers and event organizers and attendees on ways to interact and use the faclities.  See http://openvce.net/sop and http://openvce.net/faq for more details.  These will be significantly extended and experimented with in the next phase of the project with guidance and protocol design by Rob Cross at the Univesity of Virginia. 

OpenVCE Resources

A range of graphic materials, including logos, icons, artwork and style sheets have been produced.  Details at:

http://openvce.net/resources/images/logos/openvce/

Demonstration Event

On 30-July-2009, a presentation showing the VCE-1 and the current state of work on the project was given to aproxiamtely 25 members of USJFCOM and EUCOM via Second Life, HarmonieWeb Adiobe Connect, and through makimg available a video tour of the facilities:

• Pre-recorded Tour:

  • http://youtube.com/watch?v=K4PYUsWDskU [YouTube, 9 minutes]

  • http://media.aiai.ed.ac.uk/Project/OpenVCE/Video/Tour/VCE-Tour.mov [Quicktime MOV Format, 14 minutes]

• Adobe Connect Recording of the Tour [1 hour]: https://adobe.harmonieweb.org/p50674205/ 

• Status of project presentation: http://openvce.net/sites/default/files/2009-07-31-VCE1.pdf

Next Steps

• Preparations for VIWS-1
• Preparation of the Expo Pavilion with PMESII-related tool and model providers
• Support to NATO, ARL, USJFCOM/J9 and Joint Futures Lab events and meetings as possible
• Support for a growing number of WoSCR community users and encouragement to enter and use VCE
• Work on scenario selection for VCE-LOE, along with initial experiments and instrumentation trials
• Continued work on the OpenVCE.net web side, presentation routes, improved links between web and virtual world (I-Tag), etc.

VIWS-1 - Virtual Iterative Workshop Series - 1 - Notes

The Venue @ VCE

Meeting on 28-Sep-2009 - More details at http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-1

Notes are retained here for ideas that led up to the running of the workshop, and which could be useful for future workshops.

VIWS Proposed Topics

Topics for first or subsequent workshops that have been proposed include:

1. Briefing on social networking platform features (SP?)
2. Briefing on virtual world platform features (SP?)
3. Briefing on features of crisis and emergency response networks such as ISCRAM, SAHANA, PKSOI (GW?)
4. Panel discussion: What functionality is needed specifically for the WoSCR VCE? (JH, TB, AT, +?)
5. Cognitive work analysis to help guide what functions should be provided in the 2D portal and how best to organize them (JH)
6. COMPOEX Decision Support Tool Showcase: each decision-support tool "feed" could be displayed simultaneously in the environment and a presentation made by owners/participants (avatars). In this way, the participating workshop members could simultaneously compare these to help determine those with the greatest degree of centrality (WoSCR/COMPOEX/PMESII participants) [suggestion by Randy Garrett]
7. An issue that would be enticing to both the modeling and simulation community and the WoSCR community and of interest to the COMPOEX prpgram participants is: "What is the right level for building a computational mode in the WoSCR domain?" (JH, Ed Waltz. BAe Systems).
8. Paul Bonney suggested a workshop to reach a consensus on Subject Matter Expert (SME) criteria. Many projects (inc. ACSA) are predicated on Subject Matter Experts (SME’s). However, what is an SME?  Is selection and self-declaration in “The Brain” valid, verifiable, and reliable? How would a non-expert (crisis response action/project officer focused on a specific situation w/o the time nor the interest in increased situational understanding) quickly know who to trust and which opinions are best?  Luckily, SL’s virtual nature highlights the question of trust that is to easily downplayed in the real world and offers additional capabilities to evaluate trust. It may be worthwhile to have a workshop to reach a consensus on what are the criteria for an SME,  the appropriate role of  the CoI wrt an SME, coupling traditional criteria and “user” feedback to SNA Perhaps each avatar could be tied to the “BRAIN” and as SL participation/experience and expertise evolves dynamically the avatar (his appearance?) would gain/loose stature (titles, cords, medals, etc).

Proposed September 2009 Event

A simple community update event in VCE about 2 hours long.

Invite people in and get them used to the social network side and a few trail events to get them used to their avatars before they meet together.

Invitation could maybe go to those who took the trouble to register on Catalyst.. which is about 200-300 at August 2009 of the 1600 mailing list for WoSCR community held by USJFCOM.

Agenda could be:

1. Introduction by Tim Bacon/Jeff Hansberger on WoSCR community and elements of the project - basically brief the Cmap of the program.
2. CMU briefing on status of Catalyst DB/The Brain, show a use or two, take questions, and then say what the next steps are.
3. Tour of VCE Expo, show COMPEX tools and other PMESII analysis related tools perhaps with Simulex involved manning their area to engage with audience.
4. Next stages of the VCE, Protocol work, etc.  mention of forthcoming experimentation, and call to community for engagement. Tim bacon and Jeff Hansberger.

Expo Pavilion

Showcase of COMPOEX and other PMESII related programs, resources and tools with posters for some (linked to external information URL) and richer experience/display stand for others. Possibility of a live link to run or use the tool and present some result in a web page or even in world if posible.

Lead Up Experiments and Trials

• 3D Space meeting to collaborate while modifying a joint community document (e.g. add a column for a new platform to a table of features such as at http://openvce.net/index.php/more
• 3D Space meeting to collaborate while usign a web based multi=-user concept mapping tol (such as IHMC CMaas and/or web-versions of Open University Compendium and Cohere: http://cohereweb.net).
• Webcast trial to establish easy route from Powerpoint or OpenOffice docuent to a web accessible image format presentable copy, which can the be webcast by a speaker into a single URL for use in any browser or on media screens in Second Life or Opensim. See demos:
  • Slideshow - Presenter: http://openvce.net/webcast/demo/control.html Audience: http://openvce.net/webcast/demo/
  • Dynamic URL Show - Presenter: http://openvce.net/webcast/seturl/seturl.php Audience: http://openvce.net/webcast/seturl/webscreen.html (issue of server time being out from client time so update can be delayed?
• Screencast tests for windows and full screens from PC and Mac at various resolutions (at elast 1024x768 to be tred) and with various client numbers (up to limits foreseen for VIWS-1 at least - possibly 50)

Notes on Open University Tools

Open University's Compendium, ClaiMaker (and the web 2.0 prototype OU are now developing Cohere: http://cohereweb.net) are tuned to support deliberation and debate when there are different views of the world we want to capture, not just one map of the world.

Compendium also supports node tagging and in particular, the (Ted Nelson) hypertext concept of transclusions: same node viewable and editable in multiple views, which is very useful for modelling entities from different perspectives or having them connected into different conversations.

The IBIS/QOC language in use can be applied to any discussion, but can be used to scaffold a methodology, as in the IBC/COMPOEX project Co-OPR, which raises specific kinds of Qs/Os and Cs.

Compendium is LGPL open source, has a Java library of classes for external apps to read/write directly (used in NASA applications) and exports XML (and in some projects RDF).

REP-2 - OpenVCE Project Report 2

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverables: REP-2 and VIWS-1
• Due: 30-Sep-2009
• Date of Last Revision: 29-Sep-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

The Virtual Collaboration Environment has now been put into active use for the community.  This report lists some of the achievements in the period, and formally reports the completion of the deliverables REP-2 and VIWS-1.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

The 3D space on the VCE region in Second Life is now well developed, and can be considered stable to support the work program. A map is shown here:

A number of buildings are available and have been released in open source in collaboration with Clever Zebra:

The assets include:

• Central Plaza
• Orientation Area
• Amphitheatre (configurable for 1-4 sims)
• Breakout Rooms
• Expo Pavilion
• Large Project Room
• Small Project Room
• HQ Building
• Box of Landscaping Elements
• Box of Textures
• Box of Orientation Signs

I-Rooms/I-Zones

We have also provided two "I-Zones" - two storey building with central area and 4 work zones, designed for collaborative and brain storming style meetings. They can be used as an operations center also. Plenty of wall space for displays and gadgets. Each of the 4 corners can easily be converted to a small two storey block, or a larger double height block. The I-Room style buildings are used in the I-X/I-Room research on intelligent collaborative and task support environments at AIAI, The University of Edinburgh.

Joint Operating Environment (JOE) GeoDome

We have continued to support David Fliesen of the Joint Futures laboratory, USJFCOM in his work on using Virtual Spaces to support the JOE community. In return, he has been most helpful in developing a number of elements of the VCE and OpenVCE.net platform, including graphic design elements.

Open Source Systems and 3D Spaces

Work has begun on the initial Opensim (http://opensimulator.org) 3D space that will offer facilities for collaboratiive 3D spaces that can be self hosted, and can potentially be used behind firewalls or with levels of security that cannot be offered by commercial services such as Linden Lab's Second Life.

NATO Event

Elements of the OpenVCE.net screen presentation system were used to support an event run within Second Life on 22nd to 24th September 2009 for the NATO Modeling and Simulation Working Group 078.  See http://openvce.net/event-nato-mswg078-2009 

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

Virtual Iterative Workshop Series Workshop 1

VIWS-1 took place on 28th September 2009 using the amphitheatre area of the VCE region in Second Life and Harmonie Web Adobe Connect.  The event setup, booking (using EventBrite), status and reporting facilities of the web collaboration portal were used. For more details of the event and a full recording of it, see  http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-1

38 people registered for the event, with 20 attending in Second Life and 14 on Adobe Connect.  There was overlap of 2 people in both groups.

OpenVCE Team Meetings - MEET-4 to MEET-11

A variety of OpenVCE Team meetings involving the project managers at USJFCOM/J9/ARL and other WoSCR program participants have taken place.  Each has tested and driven the further refinement of the technical collaboration facilities on the web collaboration portal and in the 3D space.  For more information see http://openvce.net/openvce-meets 

VATAR and Expo Tours

Events to support the community have now begun on a regular basis.  See http://openvce.net/vatar and http://openvce.net/expo-tour

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Limited Objective Experiment (VCE-LOE)

Preliminary discussions have taken place to prepare for the scenario driven experimentation.  A Swine Flu scenario has been selected by the program managers for these experiments.   The I-Zones on the VCE region in Second Life and the facilities and collaboration portal linkups within them have been prepared to allow for these experiments.

Plans for Next Period (October 2009 to December 2009)

The main focus for work in the next reporting period is on:

• A further workshop for the WoSCR community planned for 15th October 2009 to discuss the VCE facilities and get feedback on what is required - see http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-2
• A third workshop on 28th October 2009 as an introduction to and lead in to the scenario based series of experiments that will take place from November 2009 through February 2010.
• Continued support to the community of interest to encourage and support their trials with virtual worlds and virtual collaboration environments.
• Initial work on the open source Opensim environment which can be used by the WoSCR community as an alternative to the commercially-available Linden Labs Second Life virtual world.
• Selection of the facilities to be provided in the collaboration portal element of OpenVCE.net, and refinement of them to meet community requirements.
• Refinement of the visual appearance of http://openvce.net collaboration portal, by trying out and adapting Drupal themes.
• Collaboration with CMU to experiment with a demonstration of a link between the 3D space and the Catalyst/The Brain survey data base.
• Collaboration with Rob Cross at the University of Virginia on the Virtual Collaboration Protocol and experiments with OpenVCE.net facilities to support such standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols for distributed collaboration.

VCE-2 - Virtual Collaboration Environment - 2

• OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE
• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118

• Deliverables: VCE-2
• Due: 31-Oct-2009
• Date of Last Revision: 29-Oct-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

Workshops for the Whole of Society Crises Response (WEoSCR) community have started.  We are ahead of schedule on VIWS-2 which was delivered on 15-Oct-2009 rather than by 31-Dec-2009.  A third extra workshop, VIWS-3 was delivered on 28-Oct-2009.  VCE-2, which provided the initial Drupal CMS web-based Collaboration Portal and the Second Life based 3D Space has been used and refined during these workshops.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

As reported at the end of September 2009, the 3D space on the VCE region in Second Life is now well developed, and can be considered stable to support the work program. Developments continue with improved ways to blog, micro-blog (Twitter) and link between the collaboration portal and the virtual world.

Focus has shifted in the last month to refinement of the Collaboration Portal elements of the VCE.  In particular, a more selective approach has been taken to the facilities on show to normal users (whether guests not logged in, or community members after login).  More facilities are exposed to administrators and "group leaders".  The content available is as follows:

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

Virtual Iterative Workshop Series Workshop 2

VIWS-2 took place on 15th October 2009 using the amphitheatre area of the VCE region in Second Life and Harmonie Web Adobe Connect.  The event setup, booking (using EventBrite), status and reporting facilities of the web collaboration portal were used. For more details of the event and a full recording of it, see:

http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-2

The event specifically described the current VCE-2 facilites and planned developments.  The full PowerPoint briefings is available at:

http://openvce.net/sites/default/files/WoSCR-VIWS2-Part3-VCE-Tate.ppt

43 people registered for the event, with at least 23 attending in Second Life and at least 15 on Adobe Connect. 

Virtual Iterative Workshop Series Workshop 3

VIWS-3, a smaller event for people interested in the planned VCE experimentation, took place on 28th October 2009 using the amphitheatre area of the VCE region in Second Life and Harmonie Web Adobe Connect.  The event setup, booking (using EventBrite), status and reporting facilities of the web collaboration portal were used. For more details of the event and a full recording of it, see:

http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-3

The event specifically described the planned Swine Flu scenario-based experiment series, now to be known and the Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE). 

11 people originally registered for the event, 11 attended in Second Life and 4 via Adobe Connect. 

OpenVCE Team Meetings - MEET-12 to MEET-14

OpenVCE Team meetings involving the project managers at USJFCOM/J9/ARL and other WoSCR program participants have taken place.  Each has tested and driven the further refinement of the technical collaboration facilities on the web collaboration portal and in the 3D space.  For more information see:

http://openvce.net/openvce-meets 

VATAR and Expo Tours

Events to support the community have now begun on a regular basis.  See:

http://openvce.net/vatar and http://openvce.net/expo-tour

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Limited Objective Experiment (VCE-LOE)

VIWS-3 was used to brief the potential participants and wider WoSCR community on the plans for the experiment series - now to be known as the Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE). A Swine Flu scenario has been selected by the program managers for these experiments.   The I-Zones on the VCE region in Second Life and the facilities and collaboration portal linkups within them are being prepared to allow for these experiments.

Plans for Next Period (November 2009 to December 2009)

The main focus for work in the next reporting period is on:

• Planning for and support to the scenario-based Limited Objective Experiments. An initial experiment will be carried out usig OpenVCE.net team members and others involved already.  This will check the approach and pave the way for experiments planned for January and February 2010.
• Refinement of the facilities to be provided in the collaboration portal element of OpenVCE.net to meet community requirements and deal with community feedback.
• Refinement of the visual appearance of http://openvce.net collaboration portal, by trying out and adapting Drupal themes.
• Continued collaboration with CMU to experiment with a demonstration of a link between the 3D space and the Catalyst/The Brain survey data base. see http://openvce.net/catalyst
• Collaboration with Rob Cross at the University of Virginia on the Virtual Collaboration Protocol and experiments with OpenVCE.net facilities to support such standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols for distributed collaboration. See http://openvce.net/sop-vcp-collaborate
• Continued support to the community of interest to encourage and support their trials with virtual worlds and virtual collaboration environments.
• Initial work on the open source Opensim environment which can be used by the WoSCR community as an alternative to the commercially-available Linden Labs Second Life virtual world, potentially for behind the firewall and secure uses. 

REP-2A - Project Report 2A

OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE

• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118
• Deliverables: None Due
• Due: 30-Nov-2009
• Date of Last Revision: 27-Nov-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents, Laurel Allender, Chuck Elder, William Kirby
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This is an interim report in a month when no formal deliverable is due.  Note that several deliverables are ahead of schedule.  For convenience, this report documents some of the main work items that have been progressed in the last month.

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

As reported previously, we are ahead of schedule on VIWS-2 which was delivered on 15-Oct-2009 rather than by 31-Dec-2009. 

The experiment plans have been changed at the request of the project managers to include experiments in February and March 2010. Proposed dates for the events are now listed at:

http://openvce.net/event-woscr-list

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

As reported previously, the 3D space on the VCE region in Second Life is now reasonably stable, and in regular use for project and community meetings.

An initial version of the 3D OpenVCE.net assets has been ported by Clever Zebra and the OpenVCE.net team into Opensim, and made available as an "Opensim Archive" (OAR) file which can be freely downloaded and used by Opensim users.  See

http://openvce.net/vwassets

A region called "NewVCE" has been made available in cooperation with the Opensim-based "New World Grid" and should be available for 2 years in the first instance.  This can be accessed for Opensim trials and evaluation use and for experiments by all WoSCR community and OpenVCE.net users.  It initially contains the OpenVCE.net 3D assets. see image above. This region will be made similar to the Second Life VCE region shortly, and provided with the same types of meeting spaces, project suites and two experiment support "I-Rooms".

The OpenVCE I-Zone/I-Room facilities have been entered into the US Army Research Labs sponsored Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge.  This is principally to promote the OpenVCE project, the assets available and to encourage use across the US government in future.  See the OpenVCE I-Room entry at:

http://openvce.net/fvwc-2009-iroom 

Experiments with alternative "Themes" for the Drupal-based web collaboration portal have been progressing.  A custom theme that is very adaptable (based on the "Zen" theme for Drupal) has been used.  See image here:

This two column layout is more in style with the suggestions for the collaboration portal areas proposed by Jeff Hansberger in his design inputs, and which respect the Cognitive Work Analysis he has conducted for the work.

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

As previously noted, VIWS-2 and VIWS-3 have already been completed. A suggestion has been made from the OpenVCE project team that a final "VIWS-4" workshop for the WoSCR community be held near the end of the project period.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) - Limited Objective Experiment (previously VCE-LOE)

A Swine Flu scenario has been selected by the program managers for these experiments.   The two I-Zones on the VCE region in Second Life and two concurrent use experimental versions of the web collaboration portal are being prepared for the experiments.

On the technical side, the deployment of dedicated VCE sites for VCEE purposes has been investigated. The XAMPP package for conveniently and quickly installing an Apache web-server and associated technologies (MySQL, PHP, etc) on a Windows PC has been used to provide a base for the Drupal site (note that version 1.7.2 of XAMPP does not work with the current version of Drupal - there is an incompatibility with the bundled version (5.3) of PHP; use version 1.7.1 instead). A snapshot (consisting of a copy of the website files and a dump of the database content) of the 'live' OpenVCE site (i.e., openvce.net, including wiki) is then installed on the PC, and can be configured as appropriate for the experiment (by, for example, using the alternative theme described above). Deployment of VCE sites in this fashion can be done in a relatively short time (a matter of hours).

At the time of writing it is proposed to deploy a separate site for each team participating in the VCEE; this should both prevent 'contamination' of the live site, and confusion between content developed by the different teams, as well as facilitating the collection of data (the site can be restricted to use only by team members, and can be taken off-line at the end of the experiment to preserve the data for later analysis). However, we would still need to determine the initial state of this site - that is, what content is provided, and equally important, what content is removed from the live site.

Plans for Next Period (December 2009)

The main focus for work in the next reporting period is on:

• Planning for and support to the scenario-based Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) with an initial run through to test facilities by the project managers, OpenVCE.net team and active VCE project collaborators initially in December 2009.  This will check the approach and pave the way for the main experiments planned for January and February 2010.
• Continued refinement of the visual appearance of http://openvce.net collaboration portal, by trying out and adapting the 2 column Drupal theme.
• Collaboration with Rob Cross at the University of Virginia on the Virtual Collaboration Protocol and experiments with OpenVCE.net facilities to support such standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols for distributed collaboration. See http://openvce.net/sop-vcp-collaborate
• Continued support to the community of interest to encourage and support their trials with virtual worlds and virtual collaboration environments.
• Continued work on the open source Opensim environment which can be used by the WoSCR community as an alternative to the commercially-available Linden Labs Second Life virtual world, potentially for behind the firewall and secure uses. 

VIWS-2 - Virtual Iterative Workshop Series - 2

OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE

• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118
• Deliverables: VIWS-2
• Due: 31-Dec-2009
• Date of Last Revision: 18-Dec-2009
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents, Laurel Allender, Chuck Elder, William Kirby
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

As reported previously, we delivered VIWS-2 (and an extra VIWS-3) ahead of schedule. 

The experiment plans have been changed at the request of the project managers to include experiments in January and February 2010, with an initial test by VCE collaborators and OpenVCE.net team members to test the current virtual collaboration protocol and experimental facilities in December 2009. Planned dates for the experimental events are listed at:

http://openvce.net/event-woscr-list

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

As reported previously, the 3D space on the VCE region in Second Life is now stable and in regular use for project and community meetings.

The OpenVCE assets created by Clever Zebra and AIAI have been ported to Opensim, made available for download by others as an "Opensim Archive" (OAR) and established as the "NewVCE" region in the Opensim-based New World Grid, which already makes an open source software-based virtual collaboration environment 3D space available to the WoSCR community.

As mentioned previously, the OpenVCE I-Zone/I-Room facilities have been entered into the US Army Research Labs sponsored Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge (FVWC).  An entry has also now been made into the 2010 Linden prize, for innovative work in virtual worlds that has an impact in the real world. These efforts are principally to promote the OpenVCE project, the assets available, and to encourage use across the US government in future.  See the OpenVCE I-Room entires for the FVWC and the 2010 Linden prize at:

• http://openvce.net/fvwc-2009-iroom 
• http://openvce.net/2010-linden-prize-iroom

Experiments with alternative "Themes" for the Drupal-based web collaboration portal have been progressing. The two-column layout style adopted is more in line with the suggestions for the collaboration portal areas proposed by Jeff Hansberger in his design inputs, and which respect the Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) he has conducted for the work.

As shown above, the CWA-inspired two-column layout, and a focus on activity support for teams using the virtual collaboration protocol, has been used on limited access experimental sites (easdale.aiai.ed.ac.uk and grimsay.aiai.ed.ac.uk) which are clones of the core content from the main OpenVCE.net site, but which provide closed environments suited to providing support for the experimental Teams A and B for the Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) series of limited objective experiments.

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

As previously noted, VIWS-2 and VIWS-3 have already been completed. Full reports of these workshops are at:

• http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-2
• http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-3

A suggestion has been made from the OpenVCE project team that a final "VIWS-4" workshop for the WoSCR community be held near the end of the project period.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) - Limited Objective Experiment (previously VCE-LOE)

A pandemic flu scenario has been selected by the program managers for these experiments.  

In preparation for this experiment,  two I-Zones on the VCE region in Second Life and two concurrent-use experimental versions of the web collaboration portal were prepared. The I-Zones are the publicly accessible 3D meeting spaces that are always available in SL. The two collaboration portals however were copies of the original OpenVCE website with some modifications. This was to ensure that documents created as part of the experiment could not be found by general search engines and cause confusion. Furthermore this set-up made it possible to remove any results from this experiment that would otherwise be visible to the public and, more specifically, to the subjects of the next experiment in January.

In the week of 14th December 2009, a trial of the experimental facilities was conducted by the OpenVCE.net and VCE program teams, set up as two experimental groups. In preparation for the experiment both teams were provided with a document describing the scenario - a new strain of H1N1 and upcoming events, which may require action. The task for the team was to analyse the situation and current plans, and come up with recommendations.

The first meeting that was part of the experiment in SL took place on Monday morning EST. In this meeting, the team cooprdinators were briefed on the scenario and the resources that were made available to them to address the problem. Emphasis was put on the fact that Team A was expected to use the Virtual Collaboration Protocol. The way this was to be implemented in the experiment was explained to the team coordinator. In fact, other team members were there as observers.

This initial briefing was followed by the team coordinator getting in touch with his team and organizing the first steps of the protocol to be executed by the team. This was followed by more offline activity in which team members were asked to use the collaboration site to produce the documents that the protocol asks for.  A number of on-line meetings in the Second Life I-Zone followed. Team A used these meetings to discuss the intermediate results as planned.

The final team meetings that were part of the experiment took place on Thursday morning EST. This was followed by another meeting, again in Second Life, that was not part of the experiment but intended for a discussion about the experiment. Discussions during the experiments and in this wrap up session looked at the issues raised and lessons learned.  These included:

• a suggestion that there should be a SINGLE team page for the case materials, tables and inputs from individuals and the integrated information called for in the protocol, rather than this being scattered about.
• a feeling that the MediaWiki style of editing of shared documents was not appropriate, and should be replaced with the WYSIWYG style of editing available on Drupal pages.
• difficulty of taking individual inputs and "pasting" them into the integrated versions of a number of the virtual collaboration protocol products. This included the loss of authorship or attribution of some entries, which needed columns adding, etc.  Better design of the individual inputs is called for to have similar columns to the integrated versions, even though some information may strictly not be needed on individual entries.
• a concern over the lack of obvious flow of the activities in the protocol.  It was observed that experimental facilities for this were available in the right hand team activities support box, but was not used in VCEE-0 (which sought to use MediaWiki for much of the shared information).
• a number of suggestions for changes in the early stages of the virtual collaboration protocol to focus on setting up the team and case collaboration space and web page.
• technical difficulties using web presentation upload on the special closed web sites (subsequently fixed), and a need to be able to rapidly switch to show any URL on screen, and refresh the web page.

A meeting is planned on 8th January 2010, ahead of VCEE-1 later in January, between the OpenVCE.net team, Rob Cross and the project managers and other VCE project collaborators to discuss the protocol, the lessons learned from this run through, and to conduct a further rapid run-through, with Rob Cross present, of the stages of the protocol on a case.

Plans for Next Period (January and February 2010)

The main focus for work in the next reporting period is on:

• The main effort will now switch to preparation and support for the two main limited objective experiments, now called the Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment (VCEE) series.
• But other work will continue to ensure that the OpenVCE.net project results are refined and made widely available:
  • Continued refinement of the visual appearance of http://openvce.net collaboration portal, by trying out and adapting the 2 column Drupal theme.
  • Collaboration with Rob Cross at the University of Virginia on the Virtual Collaboration Protocol and experiments with OpenVCE.net facilities to support such standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols for distributed collaboration. See http://openvce.net/sop-vcp-collaborate.
  • Continued support to the community of interest to encourage and support their trials with virtual worlds and virtual collaboration environments.
  • Continued work on the open source Opensim environment which can be used by the WoSCR community as an alternative to the commercially-available Linden Labs Second Life virtual world, potentially for behind the firewall and secure uses. 

VCE-LOE - Virtual Collaboration Environment - Limited Objective Experiment

OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE

• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118
• Deliverables: VCEE-1 (was VCE-LOE)
• Due: 31-Jan-2010
• Date of Last Revision: 31-Jan-2010
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents, Laurel Allender, Chuck Elder, William Kirby
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures.  The workplan and deliverables map can be found at:

http://openvce.net/resources/woscr-vce/WoSCR-CoI-VCE-Workplan-2009-05-07.pdf

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

The original name of the Virtual Collaboration Environment Limited Objective Experiment deliverable was VCE-LOE.  It has subsequently been replaced by a series of experiments called Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE). Initial experimental events were held on 14th-17th December 2009 (VCEE-0) and a run through of the virtual collaboration portal supported by the virtual collaboration environment was conducted on 8th January 2010. The first real experiment was conducted from 25th-29th January 2010 (VCEE-1) with an introductory meeting on 22-Jan-2010.  A further experiment is planned on 22nd-26th February 2010 (VCEE-2).

The OpenVCE.net 3D spaces are reasonably stable with the Central Plaza, venue@VCE amphitheatre and two experimental I-Zones in regular use. The assets have been provided in a form anyone can copy and re-use.  A copy of this setup has now been provided and released for anyone to copy on the open source Opensim platform using New World Grid.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

Given the results of the preliminary experiment amongst the team members, it was decided to put some further development effort into the OpenVCE website in order to improve the support for the Virtual Collaboration Protocol (VCP).

A number of web-forms were created that correspond directly to the various maps and templates mentioned in the protocol. These provide the user with an interface that looks very similar to what they may have seen in the VCP document. Underpinning these forms is a set of new tables in the Drupal database that are updated through the forms. Furthermore, information flows between the different forms such that users do not have to re-enter information.

In addition to the forms, a kind of to-do list was implemented that allows the process coordinator (the lead role in the VCP) to update and monitor progress in the protocol. This enables the various web forms as appropriate.

This new extension to the OpenVCE website is underpinned by more than 1000 lines of PHP code.

To support users in the experiment, a number Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were created that explain how the VCP support on the website works. This was linked into an electronic version of the VCP, also located on the wiki, and using the SOP extension developed by the project.

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

No activity in this period.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) - Limited Objective Experiment (previously VCE-LOE)

Friday: Introduction to the Experiment

The experiment was kicked off with a plenary meeting in Second Life on Friday, January 22, 9am Eastern Time.

Since many of the participants were new to Second Life, the initial 15 minutes were set aside for helping new residents. Most of the developer team was performing this task, but specifically Skye Gears was available as a dedicated avator for this job, for this meeting as well as for the rest of the experiment.

The main part of the plenary session was filled by a talk (by Austin Tate) about Second Life, the OpenVCE project and the aims of the experiment. Jeff Hansberger then continued to introduce some of the technicalities including the consent form that participants in the experiment had to complete.

Following the plenary session, the two teams were asked to go their respective meeting spaces in SL.

Team A:

This team was given a detailed presentation of the facilities available in the meeting room, including the presenter screen that they would be using during the experiment. Furthermore, the support provided by the latest version of the OpenVCE website that was exclusively available to Team A as explained in a presentation. the slides were subsequently sent to the team members and the video explaining the Virtual Collaboration protocol (VCP) was pointed out to the team. Specifically, the team member playing the role of the process coordinator was given a demonstration of the facilities they would have to use during the following week.

Team B:

Team B were introduced to the collaboration facilities within the I-Zone West. A script as used for this is at: http://openvce.net/izone-quickstart

Monday-Thursday: The Reindeer Flu Scenario

The scenario was sent as a word document to the two team leaders on Monday morning (9am, Eastern Time). Now it was up to the teams organize a response to the problem they were given.

Team A:

The process coordinator forwarded the scenario document to the team members by email, which is consistent with the VCP. In this email, the coordinator also provided instruction for the first asynchronous task: to complete the individual experience map. The first team meeting was set for Tuesday morning.

By Tuesday, the team members had completed defined the problem dimensions through the appropriate web form. This worked flawlessly. The team identified a total of 23 problem dimensions.

The meeting started with considerable delay as one of the team members had audio problems that could not be resolved. At this point, there were 4 team members in team A. The discussion of the problem dimensions successfully reduced the number of problem dimension by identifying a set of 5 wider categories into which the dimensions were grouped. This discussion was summarized in a concept map that was crested by Brian Moon during the meeting and then "written up" by the process coordinator using the appropriate form on the website. The team was then asked to complete the individual experience matrix in time for the next meeting the following day.

Filling out this matrix did not cause any major issue. A minor technical issue (team members did not read the instructions) caused no further problems.

The slides that were generated automatically for the meeting on Wednesday turned out to contain too much text to fit onto the presenter screen in SL. However, this was not an issue as the internal browser could be used to view the complete content. The case planner (a role in the VCP) then took over to identify the subteams that would work on the different problem dimensions, summarize the approach they were planning on taking, and agreeing a deadline for the respective contributions.

The third and final meeting prescribed by the VCP took place on Thursday. The solutions for the individual dimensions were discussed during that meeting. The input for this discussion were solution pages on the website, the output was a complex concept map that identified the relations between the different dimensions. All this was integrated in to final deliverable after the meeting and posted to the team via. email.

During the various phases mentioned above a number of ways were used record information about the progress of the collaboration. Audio and video recording as well as chat logs of the various meeting in SL were made. The website kept all the information entered in versions for later extraction. E-mails were cc-ed to the experimenters for later analysis.

Team B:

Team B were left to organize themselves as they wished in an "ad hoc" fashion or using any mechanism they already would adopt in such teams.  Support was given to enable the to achieve what they sought to do in the I-Zone and using the web collaboration portal, but no guidance on what to use at any stage of the process was given.

Friday: Collecting Initial Feedback

A plenary session concluded this experiment. The aim of this session was to collect initial feedback from participants, first via prepared questionnaires, and then with a more open discussion session.

Issues Encountered

A number of technical issues were encountered during the experiment:

• Not everybody was able to see the presenter screen: this seems to be related to the software installed on the computer running the SL client, which relies on Quicktime to render certain types of content on the screen. This issue was addressed immediately by making the screen "say" the URL to the current slide in chat so that everybody could click on the link and view the slide in the internal or external browser. This solution seemed to work well.
• Subjects new to second life had problems with their audio capabilities. Most of these could be resolved with help from Skye Gears, but there were users with headsets that they had never tried before, and those could not be addressed on-line.
• Considering the number of technologies available to the teams, only a relatively small number was actually used during the meeting.
• Audio recordings of the meetings were more difficult than expected. SoundTap produced good results but audio was dropped frequently on one of the recording machines, but it is not clear why that was. Adobe Connect audio and video recordings worked (when Harmonie Web Adobe Connect was accessible), but required a dedicated computer to run on.

Plans for Next Period (February 2010)

The main activities for February are as follows:

• attempt analysis of the data collected during the experiment
• modify VCP and OpenVCE based on feedback
• conduct second part of the Reindeer Flu experiment (VCEE-2)
• finalize the open source virtual worlds assets for Second Life and Opensim, especially the completion of the "Presenter" screen.

REP-3 - OpenVCE Project Report 3

OpenVCE - USJFCOM-ARL-Alion/WoSCR VCE

• Parent Contract: DAAD19-01-C-0065
• Subcontract No. SFP1196749DP
• Task Order No. 118
• Deliverables: VCE-3 and REP-3
• Due: 28-Feb-2010
• Date of Last Revision: 28-Feb-2010
• To: Project Managers: Jeff Hansberger, Tim Bacon
• Sub-contract Administration: Debbie Puckett
• Reporting cc: Debbie Koch, Cathi Brents, Laurel Allender, Chuck Elder, William Kirby
• Classification: Unclassified, Public Release

This report documents technical progress, problems that occurred during the period of performance, resolutions during that period, and activities planned for the next reporting period for each of the tasks in the SOW. A separate confidential section of the report describes expenditures to date, remaining funds, and planned expenditures. The workplan and deliverables map can be found at:

• http://openvce.net/resources/woscr-vce/WoSCR-CoI-VCE-Workplan-2009-05-07.pdf

OpenVCE Project Progress and Review

The Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 1 (VCEE-1) was completed at the end of January 2010. VCEE-2 was held over the period 19th-26th February 2010. The OpenVCE.net web portal and 3D spaces in Second Life and Opensim are available for use by the WoSCR community, and the web and virtual worlds assets have been released in open source for all to use (OpenVCE-1 and VCE-3).  Work continues to make available experimental data from VCEE-2; to plan a Virtual Worlds Workshop (VIWS-4) to communicate the results of the whole WoSCR program including OpenVCE; to continue to promote and write-up the work; to continue to expand the open source software and assets; and to explore future uses and developments of the initial virtual collaboration environment.

Task 1: Virtual Collaboration Environment (VCE)

The OpenVCE virtual worlds assets have been released for Second Life and Opensim, and a Drupal distribution made available to act as the basis for a Web Portal to support collaboration sites similar to OpenVCE.net.  This is internal milestone OpenVCE-1.

• http://openvce.net/downloads
• http://openvce.net/vwassets
• http://openvce.net/resources/downloads/

The team propose to continue to provide the OpenVCE.net web server and management of the Second Life VCE region and OpenSimulator (OpenSim) New World Grid NewVCE region for the community while staffing resources at AIAI allow it, and certainly to the end of 2010.  This is deliverable VCE-3.

Requests for changes or improvements will continue to be noted and acted upon where feasible.

The OpenVCE.net team will continue to encourage external and community participation in the development of the OpenVCE.net facilities on the web and in 3D virtual worlds spaces.

Following the release of the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta in late February 2010, experiments on the OpenVCE region in Second Life have demonstrated a range of advanced collaborative facilities, and which seem likely to form the basis of much richer future collaborative systems for the WoSCR community. See

• http://openvce.net/sl-viewer-2-shared-media-demos

The viewer provides a new user interface and, importantly for those interested in collaborative systems, "Shared Media".  Shared Media allows a wide range of web pages, video types (including Flash and YouTube), movies, etc to be displayed on any face of any primitive in Second Life. This represents a vast improvement on the previous (Second Life Viewer 1.23 and before) "media texture" that was limited to a single URL for each plot of land in Second Life.

Here are some images of our tests of a range of capabilities of the shared media mechanism involving:

• Google Docs
• Google Wave
• Shared Interactive Whiteboard with display of MS Office, Open Office and PDF content
• Adobe Connect with live shared screen display, audio and video feeds.

The demonstration Shared Media displays are available to those using Second Life Viewer 2.0 in the I-Zone@VCE:

• http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/VCE/114/45/23 

Task 2: Virtual Iterative Workshop Series (VIWS)

The team propose to work with the program mangers and the WoSCR community past the formal end of the project to use the OpenVCE.net facilities to conduct a further workshop (provisionally designated VIWS-4) to describe the results of the OpenVCE.net project and its experiments to the WoSCR community. See http://openvce.net/event-woscr-viws-4

This may also involve use of the OpenVCE Expo Pavilion and its displays about projects and tools relevant to the WoSCR community. See http://openvce.net/expo.

Task 3: Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiments (VCEE) - Limited Objective Experiment (previously VCE-LOE)

The Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 1 (VCEE-1) was completed at the end of January 2010, and logging information from the experiment was extracted and made available early in February. This included:

• Adobe Connect recording of the plenary sessions, Team A and Team B 3D spaces - video, audio and text chat can be seen.
• Audio (MP3) recordings of the meetings and team spaces.
• Text chat log in a form compliant with Linden Labs' Second Life usage terms and conditions by allowing specific opt-in and opt-out on an individual avatar basis, and viewing or changing of logging status at any time.
• Activity logs in the form of spreadsheet tables (CSV) for the web portal for Team A (http://easdale.aiai.ed.ac.uk) and Team B (http://fiaray.aiai.ed.ac.uk).

The experience gained during VCEE-1 was used to guide the design of the second, more ambitious, experiment, Virtual Collaboration Environment Experiment 2 (VCEE-2). This experiment was to involve two teams, as before, but now each team included more members (roughly twice as many active participants in each as in VCEE-1) with a wider range of emergency response experience, and there was to be a clearer distinction between the technology available to Team A (which had available to it: the OpenVCE I-Zone facilities; a dedicated OpenVCE web-portal; the Virtual Collaboration Protocol; web-based support for following the Protocol; and access to the Catalyst tool for searching for external expertise, if this were thought necessary) and that available to Team B (Adobe Connect for synchronous meetings and a support web-page). The experiment was to be based around the same scenario developed for VCEE-1, and, as with the earlier experiment, was scheduled to take place over several days. In the days leading up to the experiment, technology assistance and testing, orientation and induction was provided to Team A.

VCEE-2 was held over the period 19th-26th February 2010; see:

• http://openvce.net/event-woscr-vcee-2 for status, schedule and supplementary information.
• http://openvce.net/event-woscr-vcee-2-participants for lists of the participants.

The images below show a Team A meeting in the I-Zone, with observers monitoring the proceedings, and the final wrap-up session.

The experiment was conducted successfully, a fact due in no small part to the dedication and effort of the participants (to whom we hereby express our gratitude). Data collection and archiving continues, with detailed recordings of activity during the experiment created across a range of modalities:

• Adobe Connect video, audio and text chat
• Audio (MP3)
• Chat logs (text)
• Activity logs in the form of spreadsheet tables (CSV) for the web portal for Team A (http://easdale.aiai.ed.ac.uk)
• Screen images

These experimental resources are available for WoSCR community and participants' research analysis - please contact Austin Tate <a.tate@ed.ac.uk> in the first instance.

• Username and password required for access.
• http://openvce.net/resources/protected/events/woscr/vcee2/

At the end of VCEE-2 a wrap-up review meeting was held on Friday 26th February 2010 with members of Team A and Team B attending via Second Life or the linked Adobe Connect meeting space.

One issue that was raised by participants, and that continues to be problematic, is the need for much easier ways to see the list of participants, their names, organizations, skills and experience, roles in the team, profile images for recognition, and the relation of this information to their virtual world avatar presence.  More work is needed to make this easier to set up and use during busy meetings. Work has been started on this during OpenVCE with:

• I-Tags
• Web link-up between real and virtual personas
• Team and case support pages indicating team membership and roles
• Improved and more easily visible and accessible real and virtual worlds profiles on the web and in Virtual Worlds (e.g. via the new Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta avatar information popup and profile pages).

Reporting, Outreach and Write-up

• Entry for Federal Virtual World Challenge 2009-2010 - http://openvce.net/fvwc-2009-iroom
• Entry for Linden Prize 2010 - http://openvce.net/2010-linden-prize-iroom and http://fvwc-iroom.blogspot.com/
• Hansberger, J., Tate, A., Moon, B. and Cross, R., Cognitively Engineering a Virtual Collaboration Environment for Crisis Response, Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Working. (CSCW 2010), Savannah, Georgia, USA, 6-10 February 2010. Abstract and Poster.
• Tate, A. (2010) I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual Worlds, X10 Workshop on Extensible Virtual Worlds (http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10). Organized by the IBM Academy of Technology and the University of Arkansas. Second Life, March 29-April 2, 2010. [Submitted]
• Tate, A. (2010) I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual Worlds, Position Paper for the Architectures Working Group, X10 Workshop on Extensible Virtual Worlds (http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10). Organized by the IBM Academy of Technology and the University of Arkansas. Second Life, March 29-April 2, 2010. [Submitted]
• Wickler, G. and Potter, S. (2010) Standard Operating Procedures: Collaborative Development and Distributed Use, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2010), Seattle, WA, May 2010.
• Others are planned.

A number of other papers have been written for elements associated with OpenVCE, such as the use of I-Rooms.

• Tate, A., Chen-Burger, Y-H., Dalton, J., Potter, S., Richardson, D., Stader, J., Wickler, G., Bankier, I., Walton, C. and Williams, P.G. (2009) I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction, IEEE Intelligent Systems [Accepted for publication, to appear in 2010]

Plans for Next Period (March 2010 onwards)

Work will continue on several work items:

• Continued analysis of the results of VCEE-1 and VCEE-2.
• Finalize the open source virtual worlds assets for Second Life and OpenSim, and promote them to potential users.
• Plan and conduct a workshop (provisionally called VIWS-4) to describe the results of the OpenVCE.net project and its experiments to the WoSCR community.
• Continued support for the http://openvce.net web portal and the VCE region in Second Life and the NewVCE region in the OpenSim-based New World Grid.
• Continued experimentation with advanced collaboration tools and shared media facilities linking the web portal and the virtual world 3D spaces more effectively.
• Planning for the future of OpenVCE and support to the WoSCR community.

Budget Allocation of Linden Dollars to Avatars

This table shows the funds given to the Second Life avatars of individuals associated with the OpenVCE project.

Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge - I-Room - Demonstration Script

1. Arrive outside the I-Room at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/VCE/128/80/22
2. If you have not visited before, or recently, you may be welcomed by a greeter robot visually based on the NASA Personal Satellite Assistant (used with permission). It will offer you an information link and point out a box that can be touched for introductory information.
3. Walk inside and take a seat at the central table.
4. The I-Room building has a layout with 4 work cells surrounding a central collaboration area.  Plenty of wall and floor space allows for a range of screens and active objects. All areas can easily be seen by simple camera movements from the central area. A "back row" of seats allows for observers, and can easily be copied to add more capacity along two more walls. A second floor allows for more space, meeting areas, preparation of posters and screens for use downstairs (like a theatre fly tower) and an observation gallery. The layout offer flexibility for various styles of instruction and collaboration.
5. The main feature of the I-Room is the active link up with external web services, collaboration systems and intelligent systems aids. This includes:
   • I-X helper - scripts inside a conference phone on the central table acts as an intelligent meeting support agent. It links to an external AI planner, workflow and task support system (I-X) which itself can be linked up a wide range of intelligent systems and people via a wide range of communications methods.
   • chat logger - also using I-X communications, this is a flexible logger that seeks permission to log, logging can be disabled and re-enable on an individual basis, and can produce logs in various formats.
   • a number of displays and objects which can be used via avatar chat and via the I-X helper, opening up room control and communications to external intelligent agents and web services.
   • status displays such as twitter feeds.
6. The I-Room and larger I-Zones are used to support collaborative teams and allow them to work together in a range of application areas. I-Rooms have been used for applications as varied as emergency response and homeland security exercises and experiments, games and media rich product design and whisky tasting tutorials.  They have been used by the US defense agencies, EADS (Airbus), Slam Games and Glenkeir Distilleries, and evaluated by companies such as Disney, Kodak and Tata.
7. One use of the I-Room specialises the use of the 4 cells into support for elements of the "OODA" loop (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act) and can be used to support a number of methodologies such as the "Questions-Options-Criteria" (QOC) brainstorming methodology and the <I-N-C-A> (Issues, Nodes, Constraints and Annotations) planning and task support method. Some objects, screens and demonstration equipment in the cells show such potential.
8. This particular I-Room is currently set up for experimentation being conducted by the "Whole of Society Crises Response Community" (WoSCR) which involves international experts in giving input to decision makers and planners when crises occur. The I-Room and "I-Tags" worn by participants link actively to a web portal that supports the community and provides access to their collaboration tools and knowledge at http://openvce.net. This provides links to tools for concept mapping, semantic social network links, AI planning and task support aids, meeting support, meeting instrumentation, etc and are made available though objects in this I-Room during exercises and experiments.
9. More information is available at http://openvce.net/fvwc-2009-iroom including images, demonstration videos and papers on I-Room applications co-authored by the actual user communities, companies and organizations involved. Specific exmaple of the use of the I-Room for training, simulation, tutorials and experiments on collaboration in teams are also described there.

To Do List: Ai Austin

This is an example plan for an agent.  It is offered as one simple example of what can be shown to agents who enter an I-Room. It is artificially constructed to very trivially show how planning aids, and presentation of options in the context of search and constraint management can radically increase the intelligence brought to bear to assist agents in coordinating their task lists and plans.

There is a powerful, yet simple and easily understandable, conceptual model behind the way that plans are presented, and against which agent capabilities are matched. It is the <I-N-C-A> constraint model of synthesized artifacts. Used for plans, it specifies a "set of constraints on the space of behaviour":

I- Issues to be addressed in the form of questions (e.g. using the 7 question types from the gIBIS methodology, Conklin)

N - Nodes to be added (e.g. typically activities to be perrformed in this context)

C - Constraints between node, domain objects and other elements (e.g. temporal, resource or spatial constraints)

A - Annotations (e.g. rationale, notes on alternatives and advice).

An example of a technical way to present a plan in this form is show here, though it is more usually shown graphically, or as a very simplified view, such as a "to do" list.

Issues

• achieve (P=true) at (begin-of Y)?

Activities

• perform X [Actions: refine using SOP-1, refine using SOP-2, Done, N/A]
• perform Y [Actions: Done, N/A]
• perform Z [Actions: Done, N/A]

Constraints

• temporal (before (end-of X) (begin-of Y))   X---> Y
• temporal (before (end-of Z) (calendar date: UT-2010-12-31-23:59:59))

Annotations

• (P=true) will make the performance of Y more robust
• (P=true) is an effect of SOP-1