Tales from the firepit – The story of a virtual world community

A little while back many of us in eightbar and the wider IBM virtual universe community got to spend time talking to Rita J. King. Rita, or Eureka Dejavu as we all think of her was commissioned to write about how we got to where we are in virtual worlds. The story of a community forming.
The finished article is linked as a PDF from this blog post on Dispatches from the Information Age
It was great too when Rita and Josh came to visit us and we met up in Portsmouth as part of their Dancing Ink Productions world tour. As we always say these virtual worlds are not there to replace real life but add to it. When it means you get to hang out with great people like these it makes it all worth it.
Rita points out how she got to know Grady Booch through doing this piece, a massive figure in software engineering, it was Eureka who introduced me to him at a post virtual worlds conference dinner. To complete the chain a few hundred IBMers were at an award event called the “Corporate Technical Recognition Event” CTRE for short in Phoenix last week. Amongst the lucky award winners was our very own eightbar Daz and here is the picture I took, mainly to show the Peter Kaye lookalike service food in the chef’s hat, but I realized this slightly blurred picture actually also had Grady Booch in it, in the red shirt on the left.
Blurred but fame indeed
You can read more about the event here and here. I should add that this amazing gathering we were lucky enough to be a part of also included Jeff Jonas who was being made a Distinguished Engineer which is a very big role in IBM. So present company excepted it was a massive gathering of some of the most influential technical people in our massive company. People I would never have got to meet if it had not been for virtual worlds either. Having an IBM Fellow of some note (The most important elected position in IBM for us techies), John Cohn come up to me at the bar and say hey it’s you did my ego the power of good I must say!
That’s enough name dropping and self congratulating, this post is about Eureka’s report