Since we announced the end of our project in Second Life, we have received many heartwarming blog posts, comments, tweets, IMs from Second Life friends, residents and virtual observers. Thank you for all the kind words, they mean a lot to us.

Many of you have also expressed interest in hearing about our findings. We are putting the finishing touch to a document we’ll share with you early in October. Before we do, we wanted to spend some time with you, to exchange thoughts and comments on our Second Life experience, duringan open discussion with the team behind the Orange Island project and some guests.

We truly hope you’ll be able to join us Tuesday 29th of September at 11.00am SLT on the Orange Island Main Plaza. For those who can’t make it in-world, a live video stream of the discussion will be available, courtesy of Real Virtualities.

During this final discussion, we’ll welcome three guests who have been regulars on the Island, and who will bring some insight to our personal experience of virtual worlds.

Dusan Writer (Toronto, Canada) – Metanomics
Dusan Writer (Doug Thompson in RL) is the CEO of Remedy Communications. He blogs about the metaverse and issues such as identity, education, visualization, and collaboration. Remedy is also the producer of the Metanomics show, a regular partner of Orange Island. Doug has been a speaker at Orange Island’s Innovation Week and Education Week .

Ima Ideator (Austin, Texas) – GSD&M Idea City
Ima Ideator (Ellen Kolstö in RL) is a Planning Director specializing in digital communities and collaboration at GSD&M Idea City, a national advertising agency (Austin, Texas) that provides in-world research to help guide companies entering Second Life and provide insight into what happens in-world across many active users.

Saffia Widdershins (Oxford, UK) – Prim Perfect
Saffia is the owner of Second Life Prim Perfect Magazine which is considered as the reference in design-themed magazines on the grid. Saffia also producesDesigning Worlds with Treet.TV. In July 2008, she released The Primgraph, a lifestyle magazine aimed at residents and friends of vintage & steampunk sims.In addition to these media enterprises, Saffia has developed a consulting practice to assist nonprofit organizations in creating an effective presence in Second Life. She is also one of the people behind the recent Step UP! campaign – which is seeking to addressing the problem of content theft is Second Life.

This discussion will also feature some of the members on the Orange Island team:

Sarn Aska (Paris, France) – Orange Island
Sarn Aska (Stéphane Adamiak in RL) is the director of the Orange Island project. At Goa (Orange ’s gaming division), he has been involved in developing casualcasual gaming activities for France Telecom & affiliates, including Orange Internet Games Channel (http://jeu.orange.fr). Since 2005, his efforts have focused on community building related services andnew media opportunities.

Piegaro Riel (Paris, France) – Orange Labs
Piegaro Riel (aka Romain Piegay in RL) is part of the Orange Island team within Orange Labs (France Telecom’s R&D department). He additionally leads a collaborative research project aiming to create a flexible and scalable virtual world platform, Solipsis, in partnership with RealXtend.

Yesterday Demain (Paris, France) – extralab
Yesterday Demain (Dan Benzakein in RL) is Orange Island’s project manager. Founder ofextralab, an interactive agency based in Paris, Dan has been in SL since 2004, actively promoting uses of virtual worlds in France. He specializes in content and event design for both online and offline communities.