Life 1.5: creating a task based reward structure in Second Life to encourage and direct user created content

Tools for end-user oriented content creation and aggregation, like wikis, blogs, forums and recently multi-user-virtual-environments like Second Life, are becoming more and more popular for museum use. Therefore an understanding of the conditions and limitations for their successful and sustainable application becomes increasingly relevant. In this paper we will discuss an organizational model and technical setup that tries to balance the demands of institutional stake-holders in the museum for quality control and agenda setting, while encouraging at the same time more end-users to participate. To this end, our setup interweaves interaction across multiple platforms – terminals in the museum, Web sites and the Second Life environment – in order to create an engaging and rewarding experience for the visitor.