As virtual worlds become more open and more a part of business and daily life, they present opportunities to evolve traditional notions of intellectual property -- its value, security, uses and protection -- to interact richly with global community in surprising new ways, and to experiment with identity, trust, reputation and other socially- and economically-valuable constructs no longer non-optionally linked to the physical body.

What does this mean to the architecture of virtual worlds and the systems that interconnect and plug into them? And what does it mean to the system of laws, regulations and common-sense assumptions governing human intercourse in these environments? In this free-ranging two-hour panel discussion, we bring together key architectural thinkers from the domains of law and software to discuss and debate these issues.

John Jainschigg is Executive Director of UBM/ThinkServices Metaverse (formerly CMP Metaverse), and the founder of Life 2.0.

Robert Bloomfield (SL: Beyers Sellers) is a professor of Accounting at Cornell's Johnson School of Management, and host of Metanomics, one of SLCN.TV's most popular shows, focusing on topics in metaverse economy and business.

As Multiverse' Executive Producer and Marketing Director, Corey Bridges oversees business development and developer relations with thousands of game development teams, ranging from garage developers to Fortune 100 companies to Hollywood legends. Prior to co-founding Multiverse, he held high-level marketing and business development positions with Netflix, Netscape, Zone Labs, Borland and The Discovery Channel.

So far virtual worlds have been used mainly for architectural builds and interaction. The next obvious step is making them alive with data, streaming in data and representing it visually. Data visualization in Second Life is growing rapidly: open-source building-block tools are being made available to the community and developers and end-users are creating enterprise and science applications. There is a dataviz wiki and a "Data Visualization" group in Second Life. This panel will provide a live demo of dataviz tools and discuss the challenges and techniques for bringing data into Second Life and turning it into useful representations.

This panel will show some of the most exciting work now being done by private companies, government agencies and independent developers in data visualization: projects as diverse as 3D graphing, realtime display of weather data and dynamic histogram generation in 3D.

Benjamin Stokes (SL: Benjamin Macfound) is a Program Officer at the MacArthur Foundation. He works on the five-year, $50 million initiative that examines how digital media is changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Previously, Benjamin co-founded Games for Change (G4C), the central organization advancing games media for positive social change.

Doing business in emerging virtual worlds demands understanding the behavior and preferences of users. Market Truths, Ltd., is among the first global market-research organizations to undertake disciplined research in Second Life and similar environments in an effort to map and project user behavior and preferences in ways marketers will find immediately applicable, both to go/no-go decisions on metaverse investments and to the design of effective programs in these environments. Dr. Gordon will use as her starting-point recent MT research on media consumption among virtual world users, and reveal some surprising facts about how this audience wants to engage, inform itself, and develop consumer relationships.

Mary Ellen has taught business courses for a variety of educational institutions, and her academic research has been presented at many international conferences, and published in textbooks and peer-reviewed journals including Psychology and Marketing, the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Managerial Issues, the Journal of Marketing Education, and the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Mary Ellen is a member of the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Research Association (with Expert Professional Researcher Certification).

John Lopez, Goedeke Messmer/SL built the 3D prototype browser for VIT and is the CTO at a software company that produces software for the insurance industry. He has also been an independent consultant providing IT solutions for over twenty years.

John Jainschigg (SL: John Zhaoying) is Executive Director of UBM/ThinkServices Metaverse, the metaverse-events business unit of United Business Media-US/ThinkServices, and founder of Life 2.0.

Dr. Burt Kaliski is one of the world's leading experts on the logic and mathematics of encryption. His path to EMC began at the RSA startup that came out of MIT in the 1980s, where he was the company's first full-time scientist and in 1991 helped launch RSA Laboratories. During RSA Laboratories' early days, Dr. Kaliski coordinated the development of the now widely adopted Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS). He later served as chair of the IEEE P1363 working group, which developed a standard, IEEE Std 1363-2000, covering the three main families of public-key cryptography. e was also the general chair of CRYPTO '91 and the program chair of CRYPTO '97 and CHES 2002, and a member of the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. He is now Director of EMC Innovation Network, a global resource for internal evangelization of new science and technology within the far-spanning divisions of EMC Corporation.

Rob Seaver brings extensive experience in communications and online services to Vivox. Before joining industry pioneer Jeff Pulver in launching Vivox, Seaver was head of strategy, chief financial officer, and a member of the management board of Einsteinet AG, where he helped build the company from start-up to Euro 65 million in revenue and 440 employees. As managing director of Madrid-based Jazzya Investments, he planned and executed the launch of new communication and media ventures. Prior to that, he held positions in investment banking at Goldman Sachs International and as an attorney with Sullivan & Cromwell in London. Seaver holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB degree from Harvard College.

Ryan Schultz, Assoc. AIA has spent the last several years researching the concept of 'Integrated Practice,' and what it would mean to open it even further, even if it means open-sourcing architecture and urban planning altogether. He co-founded Studio Wikitecture, a hybrid firm that blends software design with architectural design, which is currently in the early phase of developing a web-based platform. Like Wikipedia, Wikitecture will enable a loose, self-organizing network of building professionals to share and leverage their collective knowledge in the co-conception and co-production of the built environment. Over the last ten years, Ryan has been practicing architecture at the following firms: Kubala Washatko, Perkins+Will, and Valerio Dewalt Train.

She came to Second Life in 2004 from the Sims Online, and opened up a rentals agency beginning with the sims Refugio, Ross, and Ravenglass and expanding to about 17 sims worth of mainland and private island spread over 65 sims. She runs the largest and oldest mainland rentals business inworld in SL and supports the SL Public Land Preserve, various new-user communities and the orientation infohub, Memory Bazaar. She blogs at Second Thoughts, has contributed to the SL Herald and other sites.

After years of building a bio that included so many diverse fields it inspired jokes about what he hasn’t done yet, Nicholas Chase (Chase Marellan) currently serves as President of InterSection Unlimited. He is the author of close to a dozen books on web development topics and is currently co-authoring "Platform Second Life: Developing Real World Applications". He is the developer of ChatBridge, a powerful, scaleable, multiprotocol hosted service that now connects Life 2.0's inworld venues to life20.net.