Notes from Austin Tate:

The inworld facilities I see as being something with a new fresh visual style that is unique and easily extended by others, and contributed to by them in future.

1. Central plaza, news, mix area, pointer to other areas, twitter feeds (bubble pools? using the current open source offerings?)
2. Orientation area, easily tailored, linked to external web content for pre-entry to 3D World orientation, initial avatar setup and starter resources.
3. "Store" and/or Information Centre suitable for displaying information and assets which can be picked up for avatars, buildings, and cloning the OpenVCE assets.
4. Demonstration Pavilion/Galleria/Showcase Area... able to be separated into slices suitable for separate media plots - remembering that this must be done with rectangular areas most easily in Second Life/Opensim... and with more difficulty using with some diagonal/ zig-zags with a 4x4m square element.
5. Event Reception area. Arrival area for people attending events where they would get their event credentials, meeting tags, links to web pages for information on the event (usually a short form url e.g. http://tr.im/sorascs09), and be asked to go through a quick test (see http://tr.im/slchecks - tailored for PC and Mac users key differences) to ensure they are properly set up (can sit, can see text chat and IM (not set busy), can redirect camera from seated position, can received Quicktime video streams, are properly set up for voice without open mic, feedback or over attenuation). A note may be made of avatars failing one or more tests to guide the meeting organizers and propose remedies (such as temporary muting of SL voice from a participant causing feedback).
6. Large amphitheater.. up to limit of sim in chosen VW (say 50-80 avatars) with stage/screens and lecture theatre style seating. Stand alone and extendible versions... adaptable for location to be extended...suggest corner of sim.
7. Extensions of large amphiteatre to add capacity across adjacent sims, also means to relay across multiple sims easily.
8. Smaller meeting room at capacity 20-25 - round table/brainstorming/discussion meeting format - easily themed, coloured, branded, named so you can have say 4 of these on a single sim.
9. Home/offices for nominated individuals, media texture changeable (so if in a block, no multiple levels in SL) to support screens, posters, persistent material, interviews, press contacts, persistent SLurl/OSurl, etc. One region might support about 16 of these for nominated people in the core organisation or key people in the community supported. ideally with great "views", ability to take good looking inworld snapshots of meetings and interviews.
10. Themed "in style" landscaping elements.
11. Web 2.0/social network/blogging/external web app link up stubs.
12. Core scripts, textures, web links, presenter screens, all provided with documentation and in a reusable transferable, copyable, modifiable form.

Suggest all would work in SL and Opensim and be available under the Lesser Gnu Public Licence (LGL).

Use of Vue Assets

It is suggested that some elements of the Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) buildings might be re-used, e.g. "The Venue@Vue".

A "4 sim" large meeting area, based on a single corner meeting space on one sim, supplemented by extensions on the 3 corners of adjacent sims could be useful. See the design sketch as one concept.

Use of I-Room Assets

The "I-Room" collaboration space design might be re-used - possible at scales from 32mx32m with basic small corner rooms at each corner, through a medium sized area with 2 small cells and 2 X 20m cells, and a larger "I-Zone" with 2 of the corner spaces being double height, and large enough for large collaborative shared media spaces.

Clever Zebra Assets

Clever Zebra released a number of buildings, landscape packs and so on and a screen presenter system that can be adpated for use in Second Life and Opensim (Open Source GPLv3 licence). They have been used for some time on Vue (in Second Life) and OpenVue (in Opensim). The distribution is available on XStreetSL (Corporate and Presenter). Clever Zebra also have a corporate version available.

See this image of the OpenVue Welcome Island:

Note the use of the open source Clever Zebra buildings and assets on the sample Linden Labs self hosted region in this blog entry.

VCE-1

VCE-1 by end of July 2009 MUST support a specific WoSCR community workshop called VIWS-1 (Virtual Iterative Workshop Series No. 1) - its the first in what is intended as a series of workshops to build the community. But we see this as an event with max 60 people (1 sim, though we may have an overflow area).
The VCE project by end of 2009 will support that and a second workshop, and afterwards a "Limited Objective Experiment" (VCE-LOE) which would simulate a real emergency and call in people to use a range of intelligent systems tools benign worked on ion the community to support rich analyses and give feedback to the crisis responders.

So.... as a first suggestion.. we would see VCE-1 as necessarily including the following:

• Central plaza, community status and news area
• New user assistance, orientation and help
• Event reception
• Store area
• Auditorium style meeting zone (in corner of sim (NW in our case) - stand alone with stage and one seating area (the stalls? up to capacity of one sim ) designed so that up to 3 extra "audience modules" could be added in a 4 corner sim arrangement. [To include presentation screens for uploaded images, external URL content, streaming video, and if possible easy ways to get from MS Powerpoint to in world displays]
• Round table meeting room for up to 20 people (an I-Room could serve this function in an area called the "I-Zone"). [AIAI to produce]