Final Project 3.0: A Student Virtual World Conference on the Future of Collaboration

There is currently little research of any kind on enterprise virtual worlds or using these collaborative tool ecosystems for geographically distributed education in organizational studies. In 2013, a group of multidisciplinary graduate students created and executed a conference in a 3D virtual world as a class project. The topics presented in the conference were crowdsourcing and mobile virtual worlds, but the overall experience resulted in learning well beyond those topics. The project team encountered a significant learning curve over planning and executing in person meetings as well as technical challenges that would threaten the success of the project. This paper describes the end-to-end process taken by the team to plan and execute the conference, and shows the challenges, successes, and the lessons learned that can be applied to future conferences in 3D virtual worlds, which promise incredible potential for improving collaboration across businesses.