I’ve met Rita J. King a few months ago in Second Life, by accident – again, one of the great things about Second Life is that, like in real life, you can find the most spectacular people just around the corner. This happens because Second Life is a shared platform, where many different people are forced to use the same space to produce very different contents. A little bit like in the world most cosmopolitan centers – when people share the same offices, the same supermarkets, the same schools and the same coffee shops, eventually we’ll end up having a higher level of tolerance and cultural diversity.

At the time, I was completely consumed by Babel, Mr. Paulo Casaca’s conferences and, of course, Iraq. And Rita was consumed by a project called Understanding Islam trough Virtual Worlds. Today, we sat for a while in her beautiful island in Second Life, Imagination Age, and spoke about my journey to Iraq, Babel Project, Dancing Ink Productions and Understanding Islam Trough Virtual Worlds.

Rita and I share the same conviction: the world will become a better place in the future if more and more citizens have access to the internet and to virtual worlds. Because, if virtual worlds become a stage for work, dialogue, development and education, then the real world will, for sure, become a better place.

The second conviction we share is that there are millions of citizens around the world who actually want to participate into positive change: they just don’t know how. Information is produced and out there, but too complex and time consuming for people to assimilate it, digest it and, then, actually believe they can make a difference. This again falls into my passion: the deep believe that Second Life and other 3.0 Web tools can be used to make valid content achievable to normal citizens. Rita mentioned the six months she spent investigating post-Katrina corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast and how she saw billions in taxes being spent in such an inconsequent way. I would mention the same, regarding the meeting I had in Iraq (June 2008) with several tribal leaders who referred that most of the money sent by the European Union to support reconstruction was actually used to sponsor political armed militias, responsible for the murderer of thousands of innocent civilians. All this information is out there available to all the ones willing to find it, understand it and create concrete actions against it. The question is: how to explain it in two lines (and a simple language) fundament it in three lines and create mechanisms for “common people” to actively fight against it? And, of course, how to use a game-like platform to do all this?

This has been one of the main challenges of Babel since the very beginning. And we consider that Rita is one of the most exceptional examples of how virtual worlds can actually be used to promote positive change. With her work, Rita has succeed, not only to bring really urgent and valid content to Second Life, but also to present Virtual Worlds to institutions (like the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs), who should really be using Second Life to spread knowledge globally.

“When things happen, we look back and say ´we should have seen it coming´”, Rita said. But the truth is that to see what’s coming, vision is required. The world is definitely changing. Vision is, not only required, but vital and urgent at this stage. Knowledge, awareness and global engagement (or the lack of it) will be key factors to determine the future of areas like Economy, Environment, Health, Human Rights, Politics and Terrorism. The web provides all the necessary tools. Now, we all need to take care of the contents.