Internet Archive: CSC Celebrates its 50th Anniversary in Second Life: Three Questions for Charles Herbek at CSC (capture October 3, 2009)
Working Inworld
CSC Celebrates its 50th Anniversary in Second Life: Three Questions for Charles Herbek at CSC
Posted by Amanda Linden on Sep 8, 2009 7:31:09 AM
Recently, I learned about something very interesting going on in Second Life–CSC is celebrating their 50th anniversary inworld. Their press release on the topic proudly states, “Established in 1959 by two computer scientists with one hundred dollars and a dream, CSC has since grown into a leading global consulting, systems integration and outsourcing organization with more than 92,000 employees in 80 countries.”
Their story is an impressive one and so is their annual revenue at $17 billion U.S. reported in January 2009. Finding a space for such a large distributed workforce to celebrate is an expensive and daunting-if not impossible-proposition in the real world. But, in Second Life, it becomes a piece of virtual cake.
When Charlie Herbek, Senior Manager in the National Public Sector – Defense and internal Second Life champion within CSC, emailed me and wanted to share the details, I had many questions. But, for the sake of this blog post, l’ll share three of them —with his answers, of course. Charlie tells an incredibly interesting and successful Second Life Work story. Enjoy the read.
Amanda: Why did you decide to host your 50th anniversary in Second Life?
Charlie: First, let me say that establishing a virtual presence reinforces our brand attributes by serving as a cost-effective, innovative forum that enables employees worldwide to interact as “One CSC.” Many different virtual world platforms were initially considered, tried, and tested. We chose Second Life because it met our core requirements, when compared to other virtual world technologies. More specifically:
- Scalability: We were able to support a large number of individuals at one time by adding additional servers, or regions. And, each island in Second Life supports more concurrent people than most alternatives
- Interoperability: To extend the inworld experience, we wanted to develop applications and websites that were able to talk to objects in Second Life over the Internet. This is how we are able to integrate web-chat with Second Life to support those employees who could not get into the CSC Islands.
- Branding: We wanted a CSC-branded experience-from the website to the orientation area.
- Ownership: It was important that we legally own the intellectual property (IP rights) to everything that we created, rather than handing those rights over to a hosting provider.
- Privacy: In Second Life, CSC enforces access control levels (ACL) and can restrict non-CSC employees from entering our
privale areas. - Global: The client software comes in many different languages, providing the global solution that we needed.
- Cost: Once we paid for the virtual space and CSC surname, there was no additional cost for creating new accounts. Each employee can upgrade their own account to premium if they want to, but it’s not required.
- Experience: Some CSC employees already had Second Life experience, as it’s one of the most popular virtual environments available.
- Expression: The development team was able to mock-up ideas in a 3D space quickly with the tools built into the Second Life
Viewer software.
Amanda: That’s a great summary of our competitive advantages. (Seriously. You have to vouch for me in comments that I didn’t write that myself.) Ok, so once you chose Second Life and created the CSC 50th Anniversary space, what best practices did you implement to bring employees into SL and make the experience a success?
Charlie: We designed a special CSC-branded website and used the Second Life Reg API, to create a pathway that allowed employees to enter through our corporate Global Pass Security system to grant them permission to access the private location, register in Second Life, and teleport directly to the CSC Welcome Center.
Here, employees learned how to operate within Second Life and received lessons on movement, chat, appearance, camera views, profiles, and inventory. The specially designed passive instruction displays that were placed along the inside wall of the open view Welcome Center also helped get people up-to-speed. Employees enjoyed the experience because they immediately had a populated place to go to meet other employees. We also had CSC employee guides who volunteered their Second Life expertise to augment the passive instruction displays and make the transition to the virtual world as easy as possible.
I have a couple of other tips worth passing along. We designed the space specifically to avoid problems with lag by keeping the number of objects and textures to a minimum and marking several objects as phantom to cut down on the physics load. Water was kept waist deep to avoid the confusion of walking under water in between islands. All chairs had a default setup as “single click” to help employees sit easily. Video screens were set up with touch to start and stop playing media. Signs, with instructions and helpful hints, were placed in multiple locations. Only one-story buildings were used to avoid problems with elevators, teleports, and steep steps.
Amanda: It sounds like you really thoughtfully considered how to make the experience as easy and intuitive as possible. So, what did employees think and how did CSC benefit from the festivities?
Charlie: Before I answer this last question I would like to recognize the contribution of the entire Project team. We could not have accomplished what l’ve talked about without the professional expertise of Second Life SME and long time resident, Mr. Lewis Moten (SL: Dedric Mauriac) as well as Second Life SME Mr. Ben Machin (SL: Mr.Ben Munro). The project team was also supported by an international team of developers, testers, graphic artists, sales and marketing, communications, network operations and security, and system administrators.
The comments that have poured in from the 2000+ employees who attended the 50th Anniversary experience in Second Life were overwhelmingly positive. Here are a few:
- “Great feeling to be connected to all CSC.” Atlanta
- “Great to be able to communicate to other CSC employees thousands of miles away.” Bath, UK
- “I love being part of CSC.” Noida, India
- “I like this. I do remote work and it’s a more personable feeling vs. phone.” Spain
- “I have met people in here that I would otherwise have never known.” New Hampshire
The best metric of success is always adoption and behavior. Because Business Units are now aware of the collaborative capabilities offered by our Second Life presence, and the ease of use for internal operations, they are now holding regular meetings and smaller team events in Second Life. In fact, our efforts in Second Life have reached the C-suite; we’re turning the space into a CSC Employee Enculturization location, under the auspices of the Chief Learning Officer.
Charlie, thanks so much for sharing your story. Looking forward to lively commentary.
Tags: events, enterprise, threequestions, csc, amandalinden, conference
Reflections
December 29, 2025
CSC’s 50th Anniversary in Second Life — Designing a Virtual Celebration That Brought the World Together
On September 8, 2009, Second Life featured something I will always feel proud to have helped bring to life: CSC’s 50th Anniversary celebration held entirely inside a virtual world. At a time when large-scale virtual corporate events were still experimental ideas rather than organizational norms, CSC took a bold step — and I had the privilege of being one of the people guiding the journey.
Initially, the conversation started around building something for Xbox. Instead, I introduced CSC to Second Life and, for added confidence and internal control, built a fully functional demonstration environment in OpenSimulator. This allowed us to show leadership exactly what was possible without handing assets or control over to third parties.
From there, CSC committed — and we built something remarkable.
Building a Celebration Worthy of a Global Company
CSC was turning fifty. They had nearly 92,000 employees across 80 countries. Hosting a real-world celebration of that scale would have been logistically impossible and financially unrealistic. In Second Life, it became not only possible — but powerful.
We created:
- Six replicated private CSC regions (“islands”)
- A fully branded onboarding hub
- A unified corporate identity, including registering CSC as a custom avatar surname accessible only to employees with a federated single-sign-on system.
- A secure environment with access controls to maintain privacy
- A virtual space intentionally engineered to minimize lag and confusion
Because this was a professional environment, my job wasn’t just 3D design — it was anticipating how thousands of non-gamers would behave inside a live virtual world. We tested navigation. We reduced unnecessary textures. We simplified interactions. We made chairs single-click. We set water depth intentionally so people couldn’t accidentally “walk underwater.” We ensured media screens were easy. We marked key elements phantom to reduce physics load.
And we staffed real CSC guides to help new users feel supported from the second they teleported in.
This wasn’t “let’s build something cool.”
It was human-centered virtual world engineering.
Preparing for the Reality of a Global Workforce
One of the biggest questions I had to solve was:
What about employees who want to participate, but can’t install the software?
Different offices had different IT policies. Some countries had bandwidth limitations. Some machines simply weren’t powerful enough. A global celebration could not leave them behind.
So I built a web-based companion platform.
Employees could:
- View live visuals of major in-world areas
- Experience the celebration even without Second Life installed
- Chat from the website into Second Life
- Receive replies from avatars inside the event
- Feel included rather than excluded
This transformed the project from “a neat virtual experiment” into a truly inclusive global event.
People from Atlanta to Spain to India wrote afterward about how connected they felt. Remote workers said it was the first time they’d experienced CSC as a living community rather than just a corporate name.
And the event didn’t just end when the celebration did.
What Happened After the Anniversary
Leadership quickly realized this wasn’t just a novelty party trick.
Teams began holding:
- Business unit meetings
- Leadership forums (aka Leading Edge Forum)
- Training events
- Internal collaboration sessions
The space evolved into a formal tool for employee enculturation under the Chief Learning Officer.
CSC also continued exploring other virtual platforms — but the foundation we built proved that large-scale virtual culture wasn’t just possible; it was valuable.
Credit Where It Belongs
This wasn’t a one-person effort. It was a coordinated effort across:
- Developers
- Designers
- Network & security teams
- Marketing
- Training & communications
- International collaboration partners
Two people worth explicitly naming from the original Second Life article:
- Charles “Charlie” Herbek — Senior Manager and champion of the project
- Ben Machin (SL: Mr. Ben Munro) — a fellow subject-matter expert whose leadership was instrumental
And I was grateful to be recognized in that article as:
“longtime Second Life resident and SME, Mr. Lewis Moten (SL: Dedric Mauriac)”
That meant a lot.
Looking Back — and Forward
Sixteen years later, it’s amazing to look back at how forward-thinking CSC was. Long before Zoom culture, long before remote work became normal, long before pandemic-era virtual events, we were already proving:
- Virtual space can build real community
- People can connect deeply without being physically together
- Good design makes technology welcoming rather than intimidating
- Virtual worlds are powerful — when approached thoughtfully
And personally?
I’m still proud of that work. Proud of the engineering. Proud of the creativity. Proud of the humanity behind it. Proud that we didn’t just build islands…
We built a connection.
