Communities of practice in second life: the case of Eclipse Italian Community

The Eclipse Italian Community recently had its second birthday. It has intent to develop synergies and projects around Open Source and so around a Community of Practice that aims to spread, improve and use Eclipse Platform. Many projects are ongoing actually, but one of most interesting challenges is represented by the communication tools that a Community of Practice can and must use to grow up. At the beginning of this year the Eclipse Italian Community decided to invest its own energies in testing the community activities in Second Life: has been founded the Eclipse-IT-SL project. A new workgroup has been created to study the problematic and the activities linked to this communication paradigm. This paper shows the state of the art of the new project of Eclipse Italian Community in Second Life. The test building is temporary hosted in IBM Eternal City island