Summit 2: Interesting and Important Research Questions that Virtual Worlds Can Help Answer 

The second two-day summit would be scheduled for March 2008. It is expected that this second meeting would involve a subset of participants from the first summit, particularly those who have been able to identify promising VW research agendas that interest them. The summit will utilize small-group and whole-group discussions; the whole-group segments will be captured on audiotape and graphically, and this transcription record will become part of the record of the summit.

The second summit will assess the long list of potentially interesting and important research questions that emerge from the first summit, as well as any that have been identified in subsequent conversations, with the goal of identifying a prioritized, shorter list of challenges that hold the greatest promise for progress though concerted interdisciplinary collaboration in VWs. In pursuit of this short list, participants will review and assess the methods and technologies currently used and emerging to address those challenges, the methodological and conceptual obstacles to further advancement in traditional (i.e., non-VW) approaches to inquiry, and characteristics of the challenges that might make them particularly well-suited to advancement via conceptual collisions. The summit will be chaired by representative(s) from the Program Committee, with support and facilitation from the core team, and facilitated by a professional facilitator. The product of the meeting will be a list of research questions to be conducted through VW technologies in a subsequent project. This list will be prioritized according to the judgment of the participants as to the potential promise of exploring each in a VW; the issue of how many of these topics/projects to support in the subsequent VW project will be deferred to be determined by the leadership and participants of that project.

The short list will consist of research topics that have scored sufficiently high on the participants’ assessments, and that have each been adopted by a scholar willing to serve as PI for the topic in a suitable VW project. Following this meeting, the core team will appraise the short list of topics identified by the scholars, along with the substantive information about each topic that was surfaced during the scholarly deliberations, in order to develop criteria to select candidate VW technologies for support of the research projects.