The Swedish Embassy in Washington, originally uploaded by hey-helen

The Swedish Embassy in Second Life will be inaugurated in a ceremony on June 1, by Foreign Minister Carl Bildt in a Second Life avatar.

The project includes two islands, and designers hope to capture the feeling of the Stockholm Archipelago. The building itself will be patterned on the House of Sweden, the real-life Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC.

The project is being run by the Swedish Institute, a state-funded organization which spreads information about Sweden around the world. Project Manager Stefan Geens writes in the project blog:

Several people have asked how “official” the embassy will be in Second Life. Here are some typical questions: “Could we consider the Swedish Embassy in SL as an official representation of the Swedish government? Is the embassy going to charge a fee for its services? Who will work at the embassy? Will Swedes abroad be able to use it to do consular business?”

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The short answer is that the virtual embassy in Second Life is not an official embassy, and you can’t do any consular business there, though it is a government project: The Swedish Institute, which is behind the project, is a government agency. One of SI’s mandates is to promote Sweden via public diplomacy using a wide variety of media, and the institute collaborates closely with Swedish embassies and consulates around the world to get its message across.

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The virtual embassy, then, is SI’s public diplomacy transposed into a brand new media — an immersive 3D virtual world.

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