Be The Change

We've Moved!

Be the Change is now part of the new unified Linden blog.  To see just my posts, please go here.

Notes From Second Life Views: Part 4

The fourth session of the Second Life Views 1 panel, led by Ryan Linden, Creative Director, focused on the user experience, and included a look at some new designs for the orientation islands. 

Notes follow after the break.  A final summary for all 4 sessions will follow in a separate blog post.

Notes From Second Life Views: Part 3

The next session I want to post notes from was led by Daniel Linden, Director of Community Affairs.  Daniel's discussion touched on open registration and the problems with alt account creation and the lack of age verification, as well as the new feature for island land sales.  Most of the time was spent on the future of the mainland, and what local control might mean there as a form of Resident-designed governance.  Notes after the break.

Notes From Second Life Views: Part 2

The first session of the day was led by Joe Miller, VP of Platform Development and Technology.  Joe's team includes QA, release management and what we have been referring to as 'maintenance' -- the improvement of features within Second Life that can be done quickly by one developer.

Joe's explained the development process, outlined Linden priorities, and asked for feedback on a variety of testing questions.

Follow through for notes, and please feel free to add you own thoughts in the comments.

Notes From Second Life Views: Part I

The first Second Life Views meeting was a huge success.  We had four discussions, attended by the Panel and various Linden Lab staff.  I'm going to post the notes here over the next few days.  Please feel free to comment, and we'll continue the different discussions in-world, on mail lists, or in the forums as appropriate. 

Kicking Off Second Life Views

Tomorrow is the first meeting of Second Life Views -- a series of bi-monthly meetings with SL Residents to discuss the design and implementation of new features for SL.  Our first agenda ranges across several important areas -- improving the testing process, integrating new users into Second Life, concepts of governance, and a sneak preview into some new avatar animation technology.

I'll be posting notes after the meeting as well as scheduling a town hall to highlight what was discussed and to answer questions about both the discussions and the program.

-- Robin

[UPDATE] Open Registration

Many SL Residents have asked why we opened registration to allow new accounts to be created without payment information, and now that we have, what we are doing to make sure that we enforce the Terms of Service. Especially, there has been much concern about making sure teens are limited to the teen grid and adults remain exclusively on the main grid. In addition, there's the issue of account anonymity and related griefing potential.  At Linden Lab, we have been wrestling with the complexity of these issues and are taking steps to address the concerns.

The View from Boston

I'm sitting at Logan Airport, having spent the last two days at the Identity Mash-Up, sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  The timing and focus on identity and trust building couldn't have been more perfect, given the increasing concern being expressed by Second Life Residents about our recent move to open registration, and what appears to be a corresponding loss of confidence in Linden Lab's ability to screen out griefers and fraudsters, as well as to keep teens and adults in their respective grids.

Abuse Levees Holding

Though you may not believe it, everyone here in the Lab spent a lot of time considering the likely implications of changing the 'verification' stage of registration system before a single line of code was altered.  We'd certainly see a rush of new alt accounts, but that would probably settle out once everyone had one (or two).  Concurrency should definitely increase, along with load on the asset servers.  And how would we handle the increased technical support load?  New accounts are twice as likely (six percent) to request help when compared to existing, active accounts (just three percent).

Second Life Views Planning is Underway

We have a final list of Resident attendees for the first SL Views meeting. The eight Second Life Residents who will be attending are:

Pham Neutra
Oz Spade
Nexus Nash
Catherine Omega
Salazar Jack
Alliez Mysterio
Kex Godel
Stella Costello

I'll post here as we begin to finalize the agenda, so you can let us know what you think.

*Edited to add Stella.  I'm sorry I missed you on the first entry!