Announcing Second Life Views

I think we'll all agree when thinking about Second Life that what began as entertainment has become a development platform supporting creativity, social interaction and entrepreneurship.

The question then, for us at Linden Lab as designers of the platform, is how to include Second Life Residents as partners in shaping the world we all inhabit. Residents actively contribute to the creation of Second Life with the vast variety of content which enriches the grid, along with meaningful experiences, culture and entertainment and smaller communities that add depth and color to the world.

Clearly it's important that we provide tools and methods for bringing this active user base into the decision-making process for long term development and feature design. When you're creating a world with an eye toward real economic value and a sustainable culture you must give the participants some power and responsibility for shaping and leading it.

In other words, we believe Second Life Residents need to be able to initiate ideas and contribute to the social and technological decisions that underlie the foundation of their world, further blurring the line between user and producer. We've been collecting these ideas and feedback through forums, in particular 'Feature Feedback', the Feature Voting Tool, and in-world meetings.

The next step is to start face to face, real life meetings and design discussions.

The Second Life Views program will be a series of meetings at Linden Lab. There'll be eight Residents included in each meeting, chosen based on their participation in Second Life's community, as well as at least one in each group chosen at random.  The Residents will be brought to San Francisco for a day to meet with Linden Lab staff to discuss feature design and policy.  Each group of eight Residents will then become part of a larger advisory group.

The first Views meeting will be held on June 30.

Comments

[Oz Spade]

Will LL be footing the bill for travel?

How will "involvement" and "participation" be gauged? By how much money they supposedly "invested" in SL? Or by how many forum posts they made? Or by how many words they've typed on their blog about SL?

I honestly don't think this is a good idea. You can't guage something like participation of who has spent more time or put more into SL over one person or another.

I think instead more time and effort should be put into enhancing the current community input features we already have. The feature voting, feature suggestion, and feature feedback, they all seem to be a big joke. Why? Because *we* get no feedback on our feedback. Whenever I see a Linden saying "Start a feedback thread on it" or "put it in the feature vote" I cringe, it's like tossing your idea in quicksand. We have these things, they're great ideas, but *you* Linden Lab, are not using them to the full extent you need to be. Invest time and money in them, not some new project which will only further divide and further cause drama among people.

Giving a select few residents face-time only brings out the worst in SL and will honestly result in a large portion of back lash.

This is absolutely the wrong way to go with this.

[Oz Spade]

Also it should be noted that lots of other communities have tried things similar to this and they always fail. Why? Because people are only interested in their own interests and what benefits them, rarely, very rarely, do people honestly think "What would be better for the community?" or "What would people like me also like?". It's impossible for you to choose who would be good as a representive for that aspect of the community.

There.com tried something similar with their Member Advisory Board and in large part its a dismel failure, the people chosen (actualy elected by other users) aren't always the most in touch with what the community needs.

If you want to hear what the selected few people you have want and need. Then you'll definitly succeed, because more likely than not thats all they'll tell you.

No individual can speak for the community at large. Even if they are the "head" of a subset group.

[crucial Armitage]

I think this is a wonderful idea.. It does seem that you will have a large sampling of individuals and hearing others ideas in person can be invaluable and only help the community at large.

[robin]

Initially the first 8 people may not have a complete view of community needs. But over time, as we add another 8 after each meeting, we'll have an increasingly large number of people providing feedback.

Think of it as another way to have a dialog. The more channels for discussion, the better.

[Bedpan Unknown]

All of the prominent SL community participants already have blogs and/or podcasts. It seems like you would save a lot of time and money by just reading/listening to them rather than having those residents recite the exact same statements to your face on your dime.

Also, what about anonymity? For some reason a lot of people in SL are completely anal about hiding the fact that they've lied to their friends and spouses about their gender/age/birthplace. Shoving them into a face-to-face with prominent community members would blow their big dark secret. I guess everyone could walk around shrouded like Cobra Commander; you could make it a themed party!

[James Miller]

I'd like to note that I prefer to sit in aisle seats, in first class if possible. Thanks. :)

[MBW]

It's good to look to the future; but the present also needs tending to. The rate of inflation, i.e. the increasing number $Lindens per U.S. dollar, must be slowed and stablized. Lag is getting very bad. If these issues are not delt with, the quality of life of SL will suffer, and the other things won't matter.

wonderfulspam@cwo.com

[Troy McLuhan]

Did you read Gwyneth Llewelyn's latest post?

http://secondlife.game-host.org/article66visual1layout1.html

The Views Program sounds fine, but LL needs to go further than that. It's time LL had an official Partners Program.

[Apotheus Silverman]

How does one go about expressing their interest in attending a session? Randomly choosing people without at least having a list of interested people beforehand might not be such a good idea.

[epredator potato]

This sounds like a great idea. Of course the geographic problems are what you have solved by creating second life.

You clearly have us all as users, most of who care about the direction and the future of the platform.

Have you considered a standards body so that larger players could help get us to a second life container we can host anywhere?

[Yleri Tokhes]

A question... are Teen Grid residents eligible for this, and if so, where could I sign up? Thank you ^^

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Robin,

Naturally enough, I view this new "Second Life Views" with great interest! It looks like the first, carefully planned step, a move towards a different relationship between residents — let them call "platform users" — and Linden Lab. Hopefully, if this goes well, we can expect more similar things in the future — some of them even bolder.

I'm almost certain that the "gamer community" will closely follow Oz Spade's comment. They will cry "favouritism" and "FIC" as usual; they will always thumb the key of egoism and self-interest. This is unavoidable — since the notion of "for the best of the community" is utopian. We are a community of individuals — each one of us with our different views and opinions. It's impossible that you can have 220,000 people to agree with what is best for Second Life — and Linden Lab as well. For example, a popular measure for all residents would be: drop tier fees. But that wouldn't work for Linden Lab, although it would certainly be a very popular measure that all residents would agree with...

I also think it's a good time (the years 2006/7 will be crucial for the continuing success of SL) to start tackling different problems. The first one is that 300 users from the beta phase have a completely view of the universe than Anshe Chung — and I'm very glad to know there is such a big divergence of opinions. Hopefully, by picking a fair sample of "random" people for those meetings, you'll get both the Oz Spades and the Anshe Chungs together — to wildly disagree on certain things, but both providing a different experience of Second Life.

Personally, I don't trust the "community" — or perhaps I should say, I trust it less and less. What I trust are the people that are active participants in the community — contributing with lots of hours of effort to make a bit of Second Life special. Perhaps it's only special for them, individually; or special for a tiny group; but special nevertheless. These are the ones that are active providers and not mere passive consumers. They're providers of content, of a social environment, of a strong economy, of a cultural and artistical community. And then you have the masses of consumers, the "SL coach potatoes", who just log in to "get entertained". They are paying customers, so they certainly deserve a voice; but how much more important it will be to listen to the ones wishing for an active development of SL!

If I might be so bold as to suggest some thoughts, I'd like to see a hierarchical approach to the Second Life Views meetings. In most of the groups I work with, delegation by commitee works reasonably well — not exceptionally so (again, this is no utopia; it works as well as RL committees, neither better, nor worse), but enough to get things done and consider all valid opinions. I can imagine people getting selected to represent an "active group of residents" to hold a series of in-world meetings to gather feedback. It would be up to them to make a fair job of holding those meetings, listen to concrete ideas from fellow residents, and then bring an agenda for face-to-face discussion with Linden Lab. Residents could pick "one of the eight" based on their personal preferences and attend their preparatory meetings.

Let's imagine this scenario: for the first meeting, you'd get a Land Baron, a Content Baron, an Event Hoster, an educator, someone working on a charity, a programmer/sysadmin, and an artist/musician (plus a randomly selected one). Based on my personal preferences, I could now meet with the one that best represented my views, or the area I'm more interested in, and work on their committee to present a common agenda. If I happened to dislike that particular person (or vice-versa), I'd hope someone different would be picked for the next round of meetings. And then this person would come to you and say: "Robin, I've been talking to these 20 people in-world, and our common agenda is the following..." So it wouldn't be an individual's opinion; it would be a larger group, having a representative.

This could form the skeleton of a future User Group. It can succeed, based mostly on the organisational skills and experience of each participant in running similar things for other companies or communities. From what I've seen, and the people I've met, we're lucky to have very talented and experienced people in those areas, and I've seen how many have worked so successfully in small-scale projects, so I'm sure they'll be able to handle these types of meetings quite well!

I personally view this new programme of yours with much hope and give you all the encouragement to go ahead with it!

[Bloop Cork]

Robin:

This is a bold and visionary step for Linden Labs. It will be a difficult--and frustrating at times--process to effectively host and manage. However, it is an important step toward proactively communicating with your clients and should lead to some significant insights and strategic initiatives.

I would encouraged Linden Labs to not only seek input from long-time, active residents, but also from the RW business community--especially from new residents who are investigating SL as a potential new business platform to conduct RW transactions.

My company for instance, is investigating the SL platform for potential RW business applications. Right now, we are experimenting with one, small store to learn the inner workings of the SL economy and virtual economies in general. Our plans for the 3D Internet, however, are much bigger than virtual stores selling virtual goods. In its current state, the SL platform does not offer the tools or environment that we need to experiment with much larger, RW business initiatives.

If, as you state, a key goal for the long-term development of the SL platform is to create tools that enable "real economic value", then it is crucial for LL to include at least one RW business professional in each group who has a keen understanding of the potential of the 3D Internet and a proven acumen for business.

[Anshe Chung]

I think this is a very bad move. In many ways. It completely contradict the concept and spirit of Second Life as global social space and the promise of removing RL physical barriers / inequality.

This raise some questions :-(

Do now Linden Lab admit that for serious discussions/collaboration the medium they are promote and sell is too limiting?

Will Linden Lab also include Second Life residents with serious physical handicaps and medial conditions in those discussions? How so? I have one friend who can perfectly communicate in SL but who is deaf in RL. How about him and many others?

Will overseas residents be present in the meetings in same proportion as they are present in SL? Who will pay their travel expense of 1000 US$ and more?

Will there be recordings of those meetings and discussion be published for transparency? How to ensure transparency and equal access to information for all residents?

I am sorry, but I feel this is one step in the wrong direction.

[katykiwi Moonflower]

This really seems like the resmod program makes an inworld invasion. I dont understand the Linden Lab penchant for selecting a group of "friends" on which to confer special prestige or benefits. SL may be a platform for member business and content created by members, however, what makes one member more entitled to special prestige or say in an advisory capacity. Each time LL makes a move to confer a special contract, benefit, authority to a "friend" it causes hard feelings. It's divisive. If Linden Lab wants feedback then invite all members to comment via the forums. If Linden Lab wants to a small group of members to provide advice then why not let the membership elect spokespersons.

I really think this plan, like the resmod plan, is a bad one.

[Prokofy Neva]

Robin, this is *barkingly bad* idea, and I say that even if you invite me to be in the first group, put me up in the presidential suite, and send me caviar on toast points and iced Stoli from room service.

I had an inkling you were going to start something like this, as its the natural progression in this elitist approach LL continually takes in addressing the task of world-building - making the establishment of a country seem like building a game's wizard/caretaker fan base or at best, as Gwyn keeps invoking, a corporation establishing an elite users' group.

That's a very insidious analogy, however, this notion of the software company's user group -- it's one that tekkies reach for, but it has little relevance for democratic governance that has to serve the public interest. Favouritism by game devs/software devs of prosumers may be an efficient and justifiable way to leverage savvy users' knowledge to bolster the company and refine its products; but it's in fact death for any larger notion of society because it crushes vital feedback from non-experts and the less-filtered, and even the necessary dissenters.

Everybody's always celebrating everybody else in a prosumers loop, and the "miscreants are filtered out". The line between consumer and producer can easily erase when you constantly make a select few *become* the producers in a secret fashion (residents turn Lindens) and when you create an advisory group like this. All that happens then for the rest of us is that an even brigher red line is drawn around the magic circle where we are not.

In RL, when I deal with my electric company, or my health care group, or my phone company, I don't have to face a phalanx of wizards, leveled-up fans or "the knowledgeable" user-mavens in a users' group on a bulletin board who control knowledge, dole it out, and filter me in or out of their inner circle. That would be ridiculous, unjust, stupid, and inefficient.

Instead, I call the 1-800 number, I go through the menu, I just get customer service, full stop. I call, I get a routine, I get a trained person with a handbook, they deal with my problem. I call their supervisor if they don't. My health care company doesn't give me special discounts on new fiber glass splints because I'm a frequent user with a special discount advance sale. They administer treatment as needed under a standard rate of costs. My electric company doesn't hold focus groups of 8 select high-volume users -- they deliver the electricity, what I do with it is my business. I don't have to ask the telephone guy for his bear, and hope there's enough room for me at his community round table, or hope he picks me to be one of the lucky 8 who can tell him why I think his phone service sucks.

Instead, I deal with him under the rule of law, openly, and with transparency. If it sucks this way, I do this routine. If it sucks another way, I do another routine. Of course, a game/virtual world is a far more complex thing, but then here, the analogy is a RL job in which you're on the program committee, let's say, or the strategic planning committee, or a RL visit to your congressional offices. Congress doesn't make a special users' group; they have to serve *their constituents*. No director of a non-profit would create a strategic plannig group in a large organization made up only of pets and favourites and bless it as a "success" -- and hope to get away with it, and keep his funders and his employees intact.

And yet that's not only what Linden Lab is doing here, it's what all their usual cheerleaders are applauding. It's just plain wrong.

Let's look, too, at the issue of the "eat the dog food". What, you have to meet in real life??? Mon Dieux! The virtual world proved insufficient to organization of an international or at least national meeting in a virtual meeting space??? You couldn't tp and you couldn't Skype???

To be sure, the virtual world's communication tools are one of the very sucky things about it, and that's why the focus group on covenants, as good as it was, and as hard as Lindens worked to make the groups of 8-10 efficient and have transcripts up quickly. For one, there's never any follow-up -- nobody collates the transcripts, nobody takes follow-up points, the group languishes and everyone leaves.

I asked in desperation to one Linden today -- I actually did something I *never, ever do with Lindens* and stalked him on his card. Ok, I said, you have the concierge for the private islands, you have Jeska with all those minders to help newbies, you have Pathfinder dealing with educational groups, you have Wilder shepherding the Suicide Girls around...but what about *the rest of us*? Which Linden is the community manager who is willing to *wait on the rest of us*? And I don't mean to stop a prim bomb attack or restart a dead server, I mean to engage on the more complex issues of communities, land, and the economy.

This Lindens just about laughed in my face and told me I seemed to want a federal government. Well, silly me, if they said there was a country out there with a currency, I thought a government might go with. Of course, it's a curiously overreaching and yet weak federal government that doesn't want the burden of world governance and wants to offload some of the more onerous aspects of customer service on to vetted volunteers.

This series of consulation with the privileged groups of 8, even with the random lottery winner, will be in true Linden form, and won't avoid the usual suspects. Like the ResMods, there will be no surprises.

Already the "community convention" is something most of us had absolutely no input in, and didn't even concede that it should be in SF. Leave aside the problem of simplying having to pick *some* venue to get the job done (that's always the case someone will be unhappy) there's the far more relevant issue of *agenda*. Absolutely no structure, mechanism, procedure, or process was created to take input on the *substance* of the SLCC as to its *agenda items*. It's Fizik Baskerville on getting your brand out, Hamlet on his blog insights, and other topics the same as last year.

Gwyn's idea of having affinity groups arranged by professional ability or skill sounds frankly like something drawn right out of some sort of corporativist ideology -- this sector of society does this, that sector has this role, and the strong executive manipulates these boyars to keep them off balance by knocking heads. These are proven methods for authoritarian rule. I'm not at all surprised that the authoritian country spawned by LL has reached for these old methods, picking the filtered and feted to help them hear what they want to hear, so they can get social legitimacy when the put it out -- like the way p2p was installed without much thought of its side effects.

I agree with Oz that a better use of time and money would be to fix this voting tool up to serve the public better. Put a "NO" vote in it, for starters. Assign a committe that revolves regularly to clean it up just in a routinized matter of informing people who have proposed essentially the same thing to merge -- and create a tool for them to offer to merge, i.e. to make rudimentary parliamentary factions possible through vote bloc mergers.

The voting features have also got to take on more policy issues -- LL shouldn't be fleeing this difficulty and letting policies either creep in the back door through votes ostensibly on features -- or letting them be stepped up by LL suddenly springing stuff on the unsuspecting population.

The entire 8s soundboarding is really a striking and very distressing effort at co-opting further what independent initiative had begun last summer. At least three interest groups/action initiatives sprang up around various issues following the GOMing of GOM, and the removal of telehubs. They in part got undermined by the "community round table process" and the formation of a closed list where the "betters" could moot some of their particularly dreadful ideas like publicizing only the names of perpetrators on the police blotter, and creating a public stocks, but not publicizing (as in the modern real world) the names of the abuse-reporters, the enabling resmods, and the prosecuting Lindens (see my Prop 1355 and vote "yes" to publicize ALL of these names in these cases).

The ResMod system has been a failure and even a horror for the thoughtful onlooker. The revised forums filter and control ever more heavily. The Lindens let us know what they *really* think of unscripted, unfettered expression -- it's now merely "Resident Conversation" not "SL conversation") and "land and economy" is buried under "resident websites" and "bulletin board".

The fact that *six* (*six!!!*) dedicated ResMod columns are now taking up scarce design space on the forums just on the fumblings of ResMods with moving threads hither and yon is indicative of the far deeper problem of the Linden spawning of an unaccountable, irresponsible bureaucratic "new class" to manage the world.

I say "New Class" (Milovan Djilas) very consciously -- like party apparatchiks, these phalanxes of mentors, greeters, live helpers, and resmonds (and now the Ochocracy), do not come from the grassroots, but are appointed after a filtering and vetting process that leaves some mystified (it appears to hinge on the judgement of a sole Linden). This army of 1500 have sallied forth in the land, but for all their vast numbers are barely visible and one finds many of them simply busy ushering newbies who spawn off to their stores, first to get freebies, then later to spend their Lindens.

The idea of creating resident committees by sim or interest group or RL geographical zone -- all that's thrown out the window as too meat-world and all part of that old world that Philip said he was throwing over when he told us last September that "land and money will not be recognized as stake in this world".

Nothing authentically emerging from residents themselves, creating legitimate representatives through their own grassroots processes (not coopted from above) by acclaim, by recognition, or by actual voting or some other procedures, has never been accessed or tried. In part that's because it's too premature for that given the heavily atomized state of society, and the absence of any civil society as such in this fractured and increasingly growing world.

I tried to talk to this Linden today (before reading your idea) about how Lindens could go on walkabouts, or should have focus groups, or do other things to more actively get regular streams of feedback other than these stilted community roundtables (which are just push-media exercises where Lindens merely test the waters for this or that policy they're about to foist on an unwilling public, like removal of dwell, or removal of the tracking facility in a calling card).

He just seemed to laugh, like another Linden had laughed another day, and implied that they had all kinds of information streaming in already and seemed to "know everything" already.

This is a dangerous state of affairs, when a living system denies true feedback, and lives off pre-set loops of information from its own defined routines. There's a lot the Lindens don't know or see in this huge and growing world that they can't tell from the scraping of their server data. I don't care if they can sweep and search every chat and IM 24/7 and aggregate it by demographic.

What to do about this really appalling state of affairs, where the Lindens have finally decided to stop denying there is a FIC or a SIC, and decided to simply invite them over in RL and bless them as Permanent Advisors (wow, what a leveling-up wizard status!)

I think the appropriate thing to do under these circumstances is to refuse to participate until Lindens are willing to stop doing this picking and feting, and are willing to meet with self-organized residents respectfully on equal terms. That means of course the residents have to organize, and not on theme/guild/class princples of corporativism, but democratic and open interest groups that are willing to look at all themes and classes and issues in a shared grid with a centralized asset server.

I personally plan to go on organizing in groups I have helped form like Fair Play, Mainlanders, and Consumer Advocacy, and support others who make similar kinds of groups, to develop agendas to bring forth to the Lindens and the public on some kind of democratic basis suitable for a virtual world -- not requiring the expense of RL time, obtaining leave from work, traveling overseas or cross-country travel, etc. h will inevitably eliminate some people

What's more important than serving on this glorified sounding board for the Lindens is organizing ourselves. It's awfully hard for fans to tear themselves away from the mesmerizing stare of the game gods, but they must if they want evolution and growth to take place *they can call their own* and to stabilize their own world as they make it, if not on these servers, other servers where the owners will create the necessary conditions for virtual civilizations to thrive.

[AJUK Baldwin]

I think thats a fab idea,love to meet up with the LL ppl would be fab as i am from the uk and i spoke to one of the Lindens about the plots that you can custom the amount of prims you want renters to have on a single plot..... so yes would be nice to have a face to face meeting :)
yours
AJUK Baldwin
av born 5/23/2004

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

It's strange to see resistance to having Linden Lab listening to their customers :)

On one thread, people jump at LL for being deaf to customers' expectations; on the other hand, LL is accused of listening to "the wrong people"; and finally, when people accept the idea that LL have to expand the number of people they listen to, everybody fears to be left out! Let's be honest here: it's impossible to have 220,000 customers sitting at a table and discuss 220,000 different opinions! A compromise has to be made somewhere! Listening to "some" is always better to listening to "none"!

I can agree that it would be much better to have in-world meetings (I have a strange feeling when I'm promoting publicly SL and telling that most people can now telecommute to work through SL — even some LL employees — but that meetings with some residents are done "in the flesh" because of some reason or other). Still, that's LL's choice; I think that there will be *always* the case of "selection" — who will be selected, and who won't. In-the-flesh or virtually, the discussion will always be there.

I'm now getting accused of sliding into philosophy about representativity :) There are so many different methods of selecting "a group of people to listen to their opinions". Let's see a few ones:

1) Representative democracy. Let the 220,000 vote upon 8 people to sit on LL's table. Have at least 5,000 or so residents nominate a person to a pool; you'd have 40 or so candidates, and people would vote upon 8 of those. End result: you'd get the most popular people on the table. Not necessarily the ones that have a better view on what LL represents. Basically this would be a simple mob rule, a popularity contest, and a few weeks of furious campaigning to raise votes. Hilarious :)

2) Group-based approach. I think this seems to be Prokofy's idea (he never discussed those with me, and I'm not sure if it's somewhere on his blog). Get a representative for every group with more than X unique users (as opposed to alts), and make X large enough. Then these get voted upon. Advantage: less confusion perhaps, and people are at least representative of the group they're in. Result: expect to have the major club/casino owners on the table.

3) Meritocracy. Get people to nominate themselves on a web site, and fill a 20-page questionnaire to define their profile: what did they do to benefit SL, who do they associate with, what projects have they done to create communities, what is their willingness to work with others to organise things, and so on. This gets a psychological rating, and you can pick the best 8 ones. The result is as good as the psychologists hired to do the test; people, naturally, will dismiss it all as the ultimate exercise in FICness promotion.

4) Plutocracy. Evaluate who puts more money in SL (either L$ or US$); they are the customers that LL cannot fail to please, since they are the ones making the economy worthwhile — and no matter how artificial "money" is, it's one way of evaluating the contribution and participation in SL. And a SL without an economy is as interesting as OpenCroquet. :) Result: all the left-wingers will riot. :) ... and the person on the 9th place of the list will fret.

5) Pure lobby. Get bribed for a place at the meeting :) The end result will be that the ones with more cunning (and money) will be there. Probably even a griefer or two ("we'll shut this grid down if you don't invite ME!"). Should be interesting, but at least one thing would be clear: the ones at the meeting will be the ones that would want to be there *most*.

6) Pick 8 people at random :) It can be done in 5 minutes, without fuss and any hassles. Result: people will complain anyway.

So, at the end of the day, no method is "fair", so picking the one that has the least trouble seems to be the best. People can always meet in-world with the ones being selected to discuss their agendas. With luck, at least *one* of the eight won't be a rock-hearted, soulless egotist, and willing to discuss it openly, in public, and have a workgroup to deal with items for discussion.

Last but not least, I think there is something that should be said: while the local grocery or bar might neither have a "user group" or a "partnership programme", almost definitely a large supermarket chain or a fast food franchise *will* have those two "institutions" under their umbrella. Throwing the idea that "only software houses" have user groups and partnership programmes is an illusion; yes, there are user groups of the power company, and most definitely, the power company has a partnership programme! There is no "elitism" at place there. If you qualify for a partner of the local power company, make sure you join it — it's up to *your company* to join if they wish.

I fail to understand why Linden Lab is supposed to be different! Sure, they might be "metaverse builders", but for doing that, they have to listen to customers, and work with partners — no company is an island. Not these days. As a matter of fact, this move will start to change the way the market looks upon LL as a solid, established software development company and a 3D hosting company. If a 5-person-company knocks at Blizzard's doors and says they wish to become partners of Blizzard to further expand World of Warcraft, they will be laughed at and thrown on the street. They're simply missing the point. By contrast, one should expect to be able to come to LL's SF HQ and knock at Philip's door and say: "Where do I sign to become a LL partner? What requirements do you have for companies partnering with you?" Being prepared to answer those questions is what will make LL detach completely from the "gameworlds" and the MMORPG/entertainment types, and finally embrace corporate business on 3D content hosting. This is something that right now only a very few do — namely, ActiveWorlds, Linden Lab, and Virtual Universes (and soon Multiverse).

Relationships with partners and customers should follow a corporate model — not the "gamemaster talking to their (role)players" approach. That worked while this was a group of 300 enthusiastic young programmers, the early adopters. In 2006, LL will need to deal with the Harvards, the Coca-Colas, the Microsofts, the Wells Fargoes, the Amazons and eBays that are all joining forces on *this* bit of the metaverse. If they're left out of the door — because the "gamemaster" says the company plays by different rules — SL will simply become uninteresting for the corporate culture. They're tired of start-ups with cute technology but an unwillingness to work with customers and partners towards a common goal — they learned that during the dot-com days, where all you needed was an idea and an attitude to Make Money Fast on The Internet Super-Highway (how I hated those slogans!).

So, yes, LL has to behave like the supermarket chain or the fast-food franchise, or the Microsoft (better: the MySQL AB!) of 3D content hosting. There is no place in this "metaverse game" neither for the local grocery with their attitude of "I know all my customers by name", nor for the "gamemaster" of RPGs who "levels up" their players at their whim. 3D content hosting has to evolve beyond those two cultures to embrace corporate culture — or die in the attempt.

[Oakstead]

Getting information like this does seem well... rather old fashioned. Well thought out forum comments and blogs should work better. If Linden Labs want to do a follow up just contact the poster.

Since I am new to Second Life the main observation of this noobie is that SL needs more non-player character activities like more conventional online games. Once the buildings and gardens are made they become dead and sterile. They are nice to look at but nothing is happening. SL should be more than perpetual shopping.

One way to address this is to make your script better so players can add interactive content like they add prim content. I also program and I have lots of ideas for more interactivity but you really make it difficult by limiting the size of scripts to something like 260 code lines. A while ago on the forums you asked for player input on better scripting yet nothing seems to have been done. Time to put that 11 million in new capital to work.

Also add group tools. All good online games have guild tools to aid in group and alliance organization. Eve-Online comes to mind here as a good example.

One last thing. Keep your eye on BigWorld Technology and the first large scale game to use it (Dark on Light to be launched at the end of May). It uses dynamic loading to allocate load between computers on the server cluster. If it works as promised it would be much better server technology than the conventional static loading SL now uses.

[Cocoanut Koala]

It is a bad idea to pick out eight residents you like (or seven, plus a random), and invite them to come be special permanent advisers, over and above all other residents.

This will not "give the participants some power and responsibility for shaping and leading" the world at all.

It gives a few hand-selected and favored participants power and responsibility over determining what happens to everyone else, whether everyone else likes it or not.

Which actually diminishes the power and responsibility of everyone else, and in fact diminishes them as participants in the world.

It is not "giving the people more power and responsibility in the world" - it is choosing who you (LL) want to give power to.

It amounts to picking out some people you already know and trust and officially elevating them to status over everyone else.

As for the random person - why bother? Anyone chosen at random for this is going to be totally overwhelmed and go along with whatever the main group (who will probably all know each other) are saying anyway. Waste of money, and fools nobody.

Better to invest your time and money in the feedback venues you mention that we already have in place - the Feature Feedback, voting tools, and in-world meetings. Those are the honest methodologies, not ones not filled with yes-persons flattered to pieces to have been chosen.

Or even think up more. For example, you could have a forum called, "Lindens Ask, Residents Answer," where you put a question to the populace every week, sometimes along with a poll.

Or hire an outside firm to do focus groups. Or hold more open meetings in the world. Or just keep doing what you have been.

In any case, there is no logical "next step" that consists of picking out seven favorites and inviting them to come have a permanent bigger say over SL than the rest of us. It's divisive, and undemocratic.

Every time you give some residents special perks and privileges like this, you actually dip back farther into the history of civilizations, emulating those which weren't as advanced as our current democracies are. And each time, it damages the world a little more.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Gwyn, it's resistance to having them listen *this way* through their usual feted/elitist sampling soundboard approach and not creating the conditions for people to organize themselves and acclaim or vote for *their own leaders* to say *what they want to say, not what Lindens want to hear*.

You keep harping on the "committee approach" of parliamentarian practice, Gwyn, lecturing us about the inability to have 200,000 people speak coherently and the need for 20 to be sifted out of this...as if we have a parliament already in SL! As we we have procedures and practices for creating legitimate committees! We don't! I'm all for standing committees -- you can't convene 200,000 people. But I'm for the 20 or 200 that take on the committee function necessary in political and social life *being legitimate*. Your concept of these 20 picked by the game gods *is not legitimate and can never be legitimate* and you're distracting from that barking illegitimacy when you keep harping on "the committee approach".

We don't have any representational democracy, no governance institution (little one-sim experiments like Neualtenberg are interesting but do nothing for *the rest of us*). We don't even have a grassroots movement with any kind of loose-knit umbrella organization with recognized leaders. So I'm sorry, to insist that we have no other option than to allow this overreaching, overpowerful executive authority with no checks and balances to cherry pick their pets to then tweak features for our world is absolutely illegitimate.

Very nice handy work in trashing democratic approaches, Gwyn, when they haven't been tried, and they can't be tried with these idiotic feature-voting tools with massive amounts of idiocy, duplication and not even the capacity to vote NO (!!!). You exaggerate and amplify all the known problems of democracy (worst system except all the others) very deftly, but you refuse to confront what it means to put in corporativist, authoritarian models -- illegitimacy, lack of feedback, failure, rebellion.

I'm going to discount silly things like meritocracy (that's not about nominating yourself, btw, but being recognized as meritorious) or bribery, and also point out that those with real stake, like Anshe Chung, will get the ear of Linden Lab other ways, even if they don't get feted in Frisco. So I'm not worried about Adam Zaius or FlipperPA Peregrine having plenty of face time with whom they need to have face time with, with or without this process. This process is for *the rest of us outside that magic circle*. All the Lindens are doing is institutionalizing a second-tier FIC/SIC sort of arrangement to get some of the most clamorous critics of the FIC to back off.

The group approach is very imperfect, but without better tools or more evolution, it's all we've got. I'd be happier if there were more sim associations or theme associations really grappling with the problems of life on sims, but people only do what they need to do, and one thing they don't need to do online after a day of work is to come sit in a boring planning meeting.

I'd be for carrying out little town or communitiy meetings all over SL for this purpose, however, like "committees of correspondence", and try to get some leaders drafted that way. If people know there's a concrete goal, which is to get someone to send to SF very soon, they may show up (of course trying to organize democracy in virtual worlds always butts up against the problem of people simplying not logging in, or logging off). Honestly, it's not rocket science. Let all the existing groups out there come forward with their own leaders. I have no doubt that the Elves, Furries, Goreans, or Live Music Enthusiasts can draft their own leaders without Lindens feting them -- if anything Linden picking will only incite anger in these communities. I don't especially like this thematic approach -- you end up with CPSU style set-asides like "the scientists" and "the stamp-collectors" which leads you back to fascistic corporativism again, but it's better than the game-god beauty pageant system they're proposing now.

What if LL were to finally take groups seriously, look in their GROUPS list and see what they got (we're unable to pull out that info because we can't get more than 100 to read out of their data base, and we have to sort of know what to type in to even get an inkling of what the groups are). Let them see 200 groups with the largest numbers of people in them. They might be Angry Ant or Club Cherry Charming or Ravenglass Rentals or Thinkers or the Law Society -- they don't have to go merely by raw numbers, they can try to take some reasonable sampling, see which groups actually hold events or sustain activities regularly inworld.

These groups -- groups self-organized, by theme, by sim, by RP, by content (e.g. there's a lively group of people who buy simulated babies) would tell them what *really goes down on these servers*. It may not be the picture they'd like, but at least they'd have more legitimacy in claiming this is sampling the customers' opinion.

Cocoanut has summed up the depth of the problem here: "It gives a few hand-selected and favored participants power and responsibility over determining what happens to everyone else, whether everyone else likes it or not."

[Prokofy Neva]

>Relationships with partners and customers should follow a corporate model — not the "gamemaster talking to their (role)players" approach.

I'm all for the Lindens junking the MMORPG approach. But if their 2600 servers have MMORPG-style people all over it -- groups of furries, elves, etc. who spend the lion's share of time on these servers doing that kind of theme-related socializing, then that's a handy way to get at customer opinion.

I also think you're confusing the need for a game company or any company to have partners, let's say a range of types or relationships from outsourced jobs to contracted jobs to joint ventures -- and also needing a way to sample their customers' opinion. You're drawing all your models from the software/gaming world even though you claim they need to depart from gaming. As I've noted, the world of utilities, services, and worthy causes also provide models, and if LL is going to claim to be more than just software development, more than just a game, but have a world or worlds in which everything from business to non-profit to health to education to politics can be achieved within it, they can no longer justify behaving the elitist "users' group" approach.

[kaia Ennui]

I see the pros and cons to this which have already been mentioned so I wont waste space reiterating.

One thing that perplexes me is why this needs to be done in LL offices? I mean LL created SL as the ultimate virtual world where anything is possible. It is the future, right? I see that and am rooting for it to be so. Isn't it sort of contradictory of that mentality and even backward to make it so people need to physically attend such meetings? I'm not following the reasoning for this approach at all. Wouldn't in world make much more sense and make the attendance more plausible.

That said, if you are footing the bill, I'm there. :P

[Ordinal Malaprop]

I have to agree with above commenters that I think that this is a terribly, terribly bad idea.

Quite apart from the geographical limitations, we are talking here about a *regression* from the idea of mass participation. The project picks seven or so people quite deliberately, and apparently with one or more picked at random, and talks to them face-to-face.

This is absolutely a recipe for hearing the opinions that one wants to hear. No meaningful consultation exercise can *ever* take place on the basis of picking people to participate in it. This is why no company or other group in the world would ever consider such a thing to be part of a credible "feedback" process.

I am utterly opposed to this and think it would be a huge retrograde step.

[Shaun Altman]

I would like to give a BIG THUMBS UP to this program! This is an excellent first step towards self governance within the Second Life platform. In addition, it is so important, going forward, that residents who use the platform (for whatever reasons) can come together with Linden Lab in a constructive environment and help guide development decisions in directions which make sense for the platform as a whole.

I am confident that a much better Second Life, which many more residents will be able to use for many more reasons than we can even imagine today, will emerge as a direct result of this bold and exciting first step.