Hi!
Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) is probably one of the largest academic conferences held simultaneously in Second Life and OpenSimulator. There are a handful of rather good annual conferences these days (I tend to attend three of them semi-regularly).
This year, my submission to do a presentation on Real Democracy in a Virtual World was accepted. It will be held on Friday, March 20th, 2015, at 5 PM SLT (Europeans: remember that the US has already changed their hour! We Europeans will only catch up again by the end of the month). Attendance is free, you can get landmarks from the website, or search for VWBPE on the Map.
As you might imagine from the title, it is a presentation about the CDS. Unlike McKnight's very pessimistic A Failure of Convivencia: Democracy and Discourse Conflicts in a Virtual Government, which specifically analyses the failed CDS/Al Andaluz merger, I suggest a different approach to analysing the CDS. My presentation is the basis of an article being currently under review for the Journal of Virtual Studies (not yet accepted). So, yes, it's not 'merely an opinion' (I reserve 'opinions' for my own blog 
), but a peer-reviewed scientific article. But obviously the purpose of an academic conference is for the audience to provide feedback and criticism on the presented ideas (scientists are skeptic!), so you're quite welcome to attend
VWBPE holds a very precisely orchestrated conference. I'm more familiar with 'looser' environments where the presenter has some margin to speak more freely and improvise a lot, depending also on the feedback of the audience. Instead, they opt for a fail-proof system, where slides and text chat is used in conjunction with voice. Because voice can fail so often (it's certainly the case with my crazy setup!), which ruins a presentation, the organisation actually prefers text (while a staff member is reading out loud the text chat from a teleprompter, for those who prefer to listen to voice). Therefore the presentations also usually take an hour (text is slower than chat), but I hope to finish it a bit earlier to give an opportunity for the audience to participate as well. Honestly, this is the first academic conference I participate in where I had more than 20 minutes to present my arguments Then again, I understand that text chat makes things way slower...
There is a strict etiquette for participation. Remember, this is an academic conference — a formal affair, as formal as our RA sessions — and you're supposed to comply with those rules. Most are common sense, but for us CDS citizens, used to have a little leeway in the way we participate in our own democratic debates (even those which are more formal), there might be a certain feeling of 'constraint' which might be cumbersome to others. A typical example, if you totally disagree with the speaker, standing out and yelling out loud 'THIS IS SO STUPID! I DISAGREE!!' and throwing tomatoes at the presenter is definitely not acceptable behaviour
I assumed that the CDS, after a decade, and surviving so many 'crisis', would have conveyed to its citizens the advantages of using democracy for overall management and conflict resolution, and that this would go on and on (basically forever, or until SL is shut down 
