Kind of Virtual

InXpo software displays on your computer screen a glitzy virtual convention center—a plaza surrounded by gleaming silver faux modernist buildings—including an exhibit hall complete with booths and a Jumbotron—a virtual one, of course. On-screen in the virtual auditorium are those very PowerPoint presentations we’ve all come to know and loathe, er, I mean love. The media center houses white papers, podcasts and e-brochures. And the narrator of the InXpo introductory video coins a new verb when he urges: “Don’t forget to social network in the lounge.”

I’ve attended a virtual forum or two and it’s an interesting experience. Not exactly like a virtual world, but more than a Webinar or a teleconference. You don’t get an avatar in these events, rather you move around in the first person view, still using the cursor to select options. You can hear the dull roar of a conference crowd when you explore the exhibit hall, though, and there are silhouettes of people all about.

You can interact with booth staff ("slaves" to those in the biz), if they are “in” when you visit. You can text chat and you can hear presentations and see presenters’ slides. InXpo even lets you load up on papers in a virtual briefcase and archives the presentations you might have missed. The interaction with other attendees is the big differentiator with these events—you can “attend” a webinar from your very own desk, too. But I’d hardly call the back-and-forth immersive.

You can “social network” and it is a synthetic environment, but a virtual event isn’t likely to produce the kind of collaboration and Eureka! moments that do seem to occur in virtual worlds when they are used for business. Perhaps that’s because virtual events, like real ones, don’t produce serendipitous water-cooler encounters among colleagues working on different pieces of the same larger missions and challenges.

And by the way, what Cognos is presenting at its forum isn’t exactly what I would call virtual government, either. It’s mostly a look at how their dashboard, early-warning business intelligence software can be shoehorned into agencies’ performance management efforts. Inasmuch as theirs is a specialized form of data visualization, I’m all for it, but it’s not the kind of policy-enhancing or public-informing visualization I’m after.

And it’s certainly not the broad implementation of new human-computer interfaces, immersive environments, gaming platforms, mission rehearsal and policy “playing” I envision for the future of government.

I know John Kamensky of IBM’s Center for the Business of Government, the forum keynoter, is a fellow explorer of the broader meaning of “virtual government,” but it looks like he’ll only be addressing performance-based management from the virtual podium on the 15th.