July 27, 2007

Portuguese Mediation Center... in Second Life

It is being inaugurated at this moment a Portuguese Mediation Center in Second Life.

University of Aveiro did the buildings, while the New University of Lisbon will staff the audience rooms. A video of the new island will soon be on YouTube. The good part, for me, in this project: it'll be used for students of the New University of Lisbon's law school. All the rest? Well, I guess it's just publicity, I fear it might turn into something else, later on.

The official website: here.

Q/A:

Aluap Beaumont asked if anyone from Linden Labs was contacted for this project, since Robin from LL showed some concerns in the past, even in a Portuguese workshop about SL, about this kind of issues. The answer was no.

I raised a question about how many mediations are their expecting to be able to do in the six month period (I heard about a six month period project, but I don't really know if that means that this center will only be available during 6 months). The answer was "The main purpose of this Centre is the promotion of ADR solutions such as mediation or arbitrations. In Portugal, ADR systems like small claims courts solve around 5500/year for a country of 10M people.", but later they said that "The main focus is the promotion of ADR solutions such as mediation and arbitration. Then, another goal is to get a way of training people in ADR systems. The e-Justice Centre will deal with SL conflicts. Not RL conflicts." If it's only to deal with SL conflicts, they're not going to have the same kind of proportion, for sure, and they'll start from a "zero conflicts solved" scenario, so I'm quite sceptic...

Also to answer another question of mine, the Secretary of Justice Ministry said "The e-Justice Centre is an initiative of portuguese universities and the portuguese Ministry of Justice but can deal with both mediations between portuguese or non-portuguese SL citizens."

Unfortunately the Secretary only wanted to answer three questions from the Second Life public, so many others stayed unanswered. Plus, the answers themselves raise more questions.

There's lots to think about on this issue, and lot's of stuff that can (and should) be discussed regarding to this new center. I'm resting on the issue by now, waiting for the reactions in the upcoming days, and formulate my own thoughts about this myself.

I might come back to this issue soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment