I attended the "Program for the Future Conference" this week that was held in California USA and in Second Life (SL)

At the SL site there was a huge screen where you could see and hear what was happening in California and there were systems in place to allow SL visitors to feed back their reactions and ask questions.

This is very exciting for OCTIA as it means its a real possibility that we could use this kind of technology at the conference and allow access to many more participants than are able to physically travel to the conference "real life" location.