According to this BBC news article our beloved Civil Service has splashed out the thick end of £20,000 on a virtual home inside Second Life. This is the online virtual world you may have seen cropping up in various odd places like CSI:New York or sundry other moving-picture sources. It’s not really hit the general public, possibly because we currently have no Raymond Baxter figure to tell us all about it with appropriate gravitas and a twinkle in the eye – but nonetheless, the Department of Work and Pensions seem to have got the idea, very quickly… whatever that idea might actually be.

The BBC report quotes the DWP as suggesting that the Second Life setup could help with carbon emissions reduction, presumably by allowing people to “meet” virtually and share sundry 3D structures. This was something I spotted when I first looked at it in 2006, though I must say I now regret the email I wrote saying it was clearly a step-change in technology and a strategic platform, a bit like the Global Positioning System, and it was a serious issue that Europe didn’t have one of these to ourselves.

Of course, the reality has proved rather different, with early promising uses such as streaming video and audio, and the curious world of “machinima” (using virtual systems to re-enact or originate cinema-on-machines, kind of like live storyboarding) being largely kyboshed by agonising growing pains.

By which I mean: spend any time on this thing and you see – it runs like a dog. I know, all together now: “that’s because you only use nasty old PCs, Steve”. Ah, but for this, I have decently fast machinery – I can tell what’s fast and what’s not. And SL is painful. Either it’s the simulators themselves, or it’s an ISP traffic-shaping a consumer connection, or it’s the disaster known as being popular – get more than 100 people in one place in SL and things start to crawl along.

All of which should make the DWP’s multi-thousand-pound project an expensive and pointless white elephant. Add to that the thoroughly dubious morals of a vast segment of the places and people you will find on SL, and it starts to sound like a lose-lose proposition. Except! SL has genuinely fostered an open source community. Even if the most prominent early product of that is the special-purpose front-end for sadomasochists (see This * ), later efforts have included open-source servers for running your own virtual asteroid, if not a full-sized virtual world, on your own local server.

That changes the nature of the DWP investment rather considerably, and should have given the BBC article quite a different spin. Which is why I thought I’d counter it, here…

(* you didn’t really think I’d link to that here, did you?)