I just wanted to share my observations from the Net Tuesday/Second Life Mixed Reality Event

What worked:

• TechSoup’s name and word of mouth made this a large event.  The sim was packed and I heard that we maxed at just under 60 participants.  There is already a great deal of interest in hosting a second event (and many other affinity group meetings) in the TS space.

• There was a lot of media coverage via blog and reporters and photographers.  Volunteers liveblogged and recorded in world (meno rich is avatar who recorded).  They also posted their pix to flickr.  The tags used are: net2,techsoup,npsl, secondlife, mixedreality.  The metaverse messenger (SL’s main newspaper) will write an article about the event next week (Tuesday).  One person even recorded the after-party mingling http://blip.tv/file/51926  Video of the event can be seen here: http://worldbridges.info/techsoupvideo/  The photos from the event can be seen at Flickr at the tags mentioned above and here:http://amoration.fotki.com/betterworldmedia/.  Also a member shared this a bit on the Omidyar Network discussion boards for nonprofits in SL:http://www.omidyar.net/group/secondlife/news/16/?page=4
• Via the transcript, I saw a lot of networking between nonprofits that was occurring. 

• This was a great way to connect the NetSquared audience and the TechSoup audience.  There were people there that we would never had access to in the regular TechSoup Community events that showed up, because the topic and platform interested them.

• Volunteers were amazing!  Beth Kafka (Kanter) took over role of project producer, Frank Foley (Tom Maroney) was in world technical lead and procured many technical volunteers, Dore Junot (Salvador Luna) was the RL tech lead and set up all the elements we needed to make this whole event happen, Dolly (Gina Cardazone) helped make the logistics of the entire Net Tuesday fall into place, Lorelei Junot (Lori Bell) the Library Island owner made sure that everything was set up in the island and therefore the event didn’t crash the sim, Jeska Linden (Jeska Dzwigalski) brought the credibility, experience and knowledge of being a Linden (working for Linden Lab) and b/c she was there, people who are notable in SL wanted to check out our event.

• This has revitalized TechSoup and provided us with an emerging technology focus.  We have had a reputation of being too 1.0, so this is a way to engage the more Web 2.0 audience and make the 2.0 technologies fun.

• Volume and word of mouth in such a short amount of time.  There are an average of 1000 visits to the TechSoup space a day, 20 or so NPOs are a part of our directory (only 7-8 have ully filled out their information cards), we have an average of 20 people at our weekly meetings, we have 45 people on our Google group about 75 members of the TechSoup group.  After last night’s events, I expect all these numbers to grow.