I’m not an architect, but I play one in virtual worlds like Second Life, where gravity and materials costs don’t count, but beauty, information density and usability do. And as such, I live at the crossroads of software and ... well, buildings, which is becoming a very, very busy intersection—one I recommend to anyone who buys, sells, manages or creates real estate or facilities for business.

Two ideas dominate at this crossroads. The first is what you might call (and one group actually does call) Wikitecture, which is a vision of using social virtual worlds and related Web tools to socialize ideas and achieve stakeholder consensus around the myriad stylistic, functional and utilitarian choices required to move an architectural project forward.

The idea of socializing architecture and urban planning has been floating around for a long while—it’s implicit in various forms of utopianism, in the new urbanism of Lewis Mumford and in the work of innovators at the crossroads of computing and building like Christopher Alexander, among many others.

Meanwhile, the need to socialize architecture—particularly in the fraught domain of large-scale public works, where stakeholders may include elected officials, career government personnel, architects and engineers, banks and underwriters, the affected general public, and the broader electorate and tax base, and where billion-dollar projects with 10- and 20-year lifespans are often in play—has never been more clear, nor have the difficulties of achieving (and preserving) reliable (and auditable) concensus among all these groups been more starkly evident. Public meetings, walk-ins and reams of related paperwork form expensive but essential line items in the budgets of A&E firms undertaking projects, and communities funding them. Smaller groups and projects, too—from construction of a co-housing development to building of a next-generation office "hoteling" center—require deep consensus if they hope to achieve acceptance by users.

It took two brilliant architects, however, to stop talking about this and start actually doing it. Ryan Schultz and Jon Brouchoud started Studio Wikitecture a few years back—their goal being to graft social virtual worlds like Second Life and wiki group-editing technology together with ideas from social networking (like the ability for stakeholders to vote components of an emerging design "up" and "down"), creating an open platform (Wiki Tree) that lets groups of professional and non-professional stakeholders collaborate on complex architectural projects. The Wiki Tree system has since been used to design several real-world structures, including a tele-medicine center in Nepal—the collaborative design effort around which Studio Wikitecture won a Founder’s Award from Architecture for Humanity in a competition organized by the Open Architecture Network.

Yesterday, Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, announced that Studio Wikitecture had earned the 2009 Linden Prize for an “innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world.” In our opinion, well-deserved.

So hot tip No. 1—if you’re contemplating an office move, redesign or build and want an incredibly cool, cost-effective, low-friction means to make sure you’re extracting maximum idea horsepower from employees and design contractors, give Studio Wikitecture a call.

The second “big idea”—as the Wikitecture team will confirm—is the notion of open-source architecture: opening up the formal problem-solving process of structural design and project implementation to stakeholder groups or even (depending on the project) crowd-sourced communities; and creating a library of "free great ideas" for overall designs, structural components, materials, vendors and sources that anyone can use. As noted above, the Open Architecture Network is one community dedicated to this proposition, and you should visit and join it on basic principle, even if you aren’t looking for brilliant solutions at any scale for creating affordable, green, humane structures.