As virtual worlds like Second Life, Sony's Home and other environments come online, government agencies across the planet are exploring virtual worlds as places of education, outreach, tourism promotion and more. We at Free Government Information are agnostic about whether this is the best use of government resources and to the extent that virtual environments are proprietary and lock things with Digital Rights Management, don't support Second Life or other platforms as the best ways to access and preserve government information. But the efforts are interesting and virtual environments do seem to have great potential as educational spaces. Which is probably why units of NOAA and NASA are already in Second Life. So we've decided to keep track of the different efforts by government agencies, including State Libraries in Second Life. Click on a link below to be taken to a directory of "virtual spaces" for that level of government. FGI welcomes contributions from any level of government from International Organizations down to local governments. Please let us know what environment the agency is operating in and where, at least roughly, we can find their offices. We'd also like a plain vanilla URL to the organization's regular web page, hopefully announcing its presence in Second Life or other virtual world. Continue reading →

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