Reluctantly: time for a protocol for SL research projects?

As someone who has lived a life devoted to research, and loves SL, I am quite troubled how many Universities seem to be sending their students in to SL to do 'research' for dissertations. It's not the effect on residents that I'm sensitive about - we are tough enough to take it, surely - but that it's giving a generation of students quite unsuitable training on what research is for, and how to do it, and risking laziness, exploitation or deception.

I'm thinking there should be a protocol, or guidelines. This should be absolutely minimalist, based on only two principles.

1. It is NOT the role of the many amateur and professional researchers who happen to be SL members to try and perform as the student's faculty committee or supervisor. There are too many differences between national cultural and educational traditions, individual universities, and academic disciplines for there to be an 'acceptable methodology' or generic approach. Let those of us who live this life back off from that. (I tend towards the ethnographic approach, but accept that others dont.).

BUT

2. Those seeking to carry out interviews 'for research purposes' in SL have exactly the same ethical duties as they would doing the same survey any another branch* of RL. I therefore believe that this - like banking - is an exception to the protection of personal identity. A student or other researcher MUST establish bona fides, and that can only be done by revealing (eg in profile) their real name, academic institution, and purpose of the research. That's quite a heavy requirement, and I don't suggest it lightly. But to say 'I am a researcher', use a pseudonym, and give the respondent no opportunity of checking it, would be unthinkable in ANY legitimate real research activity. Unthinkable. And I think students and researchers and their supervisors must be told this.


I'm reluctant to come to this conclusion, but it seems important. What do people think?

(*Unlike Ianthe, I count SL as a 'branch of RL', for this purpose. The research is being done for RL purposes, eg to gain a qualification, advance a career, publish knowledge, not SL ones, and is being conducted under the auspices of an RL University, not an SL club).


Summary:

Research projects are OK, it's not our business to police them, but they must establish bona fides and that means revealing name, University, objectives.

Agree with the professor, from his end.

From our end, i.e. the Residents, I would say, best protocol is to treat the "researcher" as any other nosy stranger, decide whether you want to play along with him, and be on guard against phishing.

I had someone from yankie land do this last year, a quite innocent request to chat with a female friend ended up as an expose in American sexuality and it was so damning and with our full names filled with little snide nasty comments.

Honestly - the profile reckoned she was a pHD student - one call from Linden labs lawyers and the whole thing was withdrawn and she no longer publishes her trash there.

Research?

Bollocks
It was gutter press thrills

You can contact the LL Lawyers in house -just search for them -they are quite good at this.
The BBC asked legit to do research, all us Brits told them were to oput it -the program never aired.

I expect that from Jerry Springers cheap rubbish -not the BBC.

Lord Archie Lukas XIV

Have to agree with the Prof.