Last year Avatar Action Center (AAC) was a fairly new project based in Second Life and dedicated to raising awareness about global sustainability issues when we entered the Netsquared competition, and I'm very pleased to say that we are still at it! In fact, we even recently received fiscal sponsorship from the Tides Center and have become the first group to form in Second Life that has gained 501(c)3 status (at least nobody has disputed this claim in the few months I've been asking around)>

I am behind one of the several projects entered utilizing virtual reality, and I'm feeling compelled to draw some attention to those that are using virtual worlds to engage in creative nonprofit efforts. With the arrival of Second Life a few years ago, virtual reality (VR) has finally gotten a foothold as a technology for not only social networking and gaming, but also training, meetings, marketing, and yes, even nonprofit activities like education, outreach, activism, and fundraising.

Since the cyberpunk writings of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson painted immersive digital landscapes into their stories of virtual adventure, and following the dawn of VRML and QuicktimeVR some dozen years, I have been hoping to see virtual world technology really take a foothold in the ever-evolving set of Internet-based social networking tools.