Keep your eyes on the prize

It's back! The Linden prize, USD$10,000 to the winner who can meet the criteria and deliver on the goal:

"The Linden Prize will award one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world."

Last year this created quite a buzz and I expect it do the same again this year. Blondin has blogged about this, which you can read here. Applications are open now but don't panic thinking you're too late to be considered, you have until January 15th 2010 to submit your application, which should give those serious applicants time to structure a very good proposal.

In addition to the blog post there's a FAQ and an official page. Now last year I know there was a lot of head scratching regarding what this all entailed, but at the end of the day we had not one but two winners. Step forward Virtual Ability Inc. and Studio Wikitecture.

Virtual Ability Inc. specialise in supporting people with disabilities to engage with virtual worlds like Second Life, whereas Studio Wikitecture deal with improving architecture and city planning in the style of other wikis, but by use of virtual worlds like Second Life. So both winners last year were able to show ways of people collaborating via Second Life regarding issues that extend beyond Second Life.

If you want more information about the sort of concepts the judges are looking for then take a look at the finalists page from last year, as I'm nice I'll share that with you, you can read it here. There you can read about the work of last year's ten finalists as well as seeing three special mentions, so with this in mind there should be less head scratching regarding what's expected than there was last year.

Although I have no intention of entering at this stage (I have nothing worthy or noble enough), I am a big fan of this prize. This is all good publicity for Second Life, as we saw recently with the BBC article, people still don't get Second Life and many have some totally unjustified perceptions regarding Second Life. Adding on to that, the people who make the final are generally good causes, with good aims and are using the platform in ways that exemplify the high variety of use cases available to a virtual world. This isn't to say other uses of Second Life aren't good examples of use cases, it just adds to the huge number of use cases for this virtual world.

Now a couple of concerns, I don't want to break the habit of a lifetime here by having a totally positive post, you'd all be disappointed in me if I did that. This prize deserves backing from Linden Lab, this means providing resources. If a microsite and mass emails were good enough for The Modavia Fashion show, which was the promotion of certain inworld businesses at the expense of others, then this prize deserves at least as much backing, indeed I'd say it deserves far more backing. They should be rolling out Mitch Kapor, Philip and M for this.

Another point, after the application stage last year it went quiet and then after the prizes were announced, it went quiet again. There should be links on the main site recapping what happened and linking to whomever wins, as well as a roll call on previous winners. This prize deserves good support.

To those who enter, good luck and best wishes.