Liana Holmberg - Open Source & Licensing Linden Lab (Makers of Second Life)
Program Manager
Speaking Topic: Second Life: Open Source & Open Standards for the Virtual World

Liana Holmberg is an Open Source Program Manager at Linden Lab, makers of the online virtual world Second Life. This year, she launched the Linden Lab Innovation Awards to recognize excellence in developing the Second Life platform and cofounded the Architecture Working Group to develop open standards for virtual worlds. Prior to working on the open source initiative, Liana served on the Community Affairs team, where she drove critical scaling projects and convened an advisory board of governance experts including eBay’s Colin Rule, online dispute resolution pioneer Ethan Katsh, futurist Paul Saffo, New Politics Institute director Peter Leyden, information ethics professor Jeremy Hunsinger and journalist Julian Dibbell. Liana became a resident of the Second Life world in October 2005, and she joined Linden Lab in January 2006. Liana has pursued a career path that merges her interests in technology, the arts, publishing and education. She was Art Director at the Public Library of Science, the premiere open-access science publisher, where she led efforts to apply Creative Commons licensing to all published visual media. She has also been an editor, alternative news journalist and production manager, and she is a graduate of the Stanford Publishing Course. As an educator, Liana has served at the elementary through university levels, where she developed new classes integrating computer tools into teaching of the core curriculum. Liana holds an M.A. in English with emphasis on creative writing. Long before she ever thought virtual worlds would become a reality-let alone a career-she wrote her undergraduate thesis on William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Abstract

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its residents and inhabited by people from around the globe. In January 2007, Linden Lab released the source code for the Second Life Viewer - a rare thing for a company to do while in a market leader position. It’s been an exciting first year. We’ll review what the open source community has accomplished thus far and look forward to where the virtual world is headed.