Jump to content

Contact with a Linden Lab member/employee


You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1127 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.  There are meetings with certain Lindens concerning their specialist interests.  You can see the schedule here.  They will not address a grievance or anything that should be reported via the Abuse Report system.  If it's about something like a billing matter then you can start with the Help pages.  I can't really offer any further advice as your question is so vague.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.  There are meetings with certain Lindens concerning their specialist interests.  You can see the schedule here.  They will not address a grievance or anything that should be reported via the Abuse Report system.  If it's about something like a billing matter then you can start with the Help pages.  I can't really offer any further advice as your question is so vague.

I didn't know anything about these meetings...very usefull, thank you!

My questions are about education, cause I am educator and I want to conduct seminars and lessons/courses for adults in SL. I have created content in topic Second Life Education and Nonprofits with more details. Also, I thought to ask general if there is a way to contact with a Linden Lab member/employee (except emails). 

Thank you for your help!

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Sylviaangel Faintree said:

My questions are about education, cause I am educator and I want to conduct seminars and lessons/courses for adults in SL. I have created content in topic Second Life Education and Nonprofits with more details. Also, I thought to ask general if there is a way to contact with a Linden Lab member/employee (except emails). 

Until almost 2010, Linden Lab had employees assigned to coordinating with educators. When the Lab changed its pricing policy for educational institutions, a vast majority of those institutions left SL and the Lab either reassigned their support staff or let them go. I think Claudia Linden was the last person in that role. That doesn't mean that they have no interest in education; it just means that it's not a large enough market to justify dedicated support.  

As an historical note, I did a large-scale study to see who was in education in SL and what they were doing.  At that time (2007) , 52 colleges and universities owned regions or had a regular institutional presence in world (that is, they were teaching or doing some sort of research or public outreach).  Many others -- I can't recall numbers after all these years -- were represented by a single faculty or staff member who was doing something educational on his/her own, without any support from the home institution.

As I've told people many times, I came to SL on a dare, having been told by a colleague that SL was the next big platform for virtual education.  I doubted it and I came to see for myself. As it turned out, I was right, but I stayed anyway.  What my own study showed was that the greatest potential was probably in tutorials and Continuing Education (including things that  are often called Extension in the Land Grant universities), and that traditional classroom teaching was not a good fit.  Libraries were possibly the last major wing of academia to make a serious presence in SL.  Stanford, the University of California in San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Drexel, and several others had regular curricula. Some remain today.  The Community Virtual Library, established in SL in 2006 with some support from grants and the ALA, is celebrating its 15th year in 2021 -- significantly smaller than it was at one point with a sprawling archipelago of regions, but still active.

I have been retired from academics for 15 years myself and no longer have useful connections with that world in either RL or SL, but my view from a distance is that the potential is still there for adult and community education. The challenges will continue to be institutional support (staffing and money) from campuses and program continuity. I doubt that Linden Lab will ever again make education a corporate priority, but they do welcome the contribution that education makes to their public image and they are certainly friendly. There's a limit to the impact you can make as a lone educator.  Still, as Jesse Jackson used to say, "I am only one man, but because I am one man I can do something to change the world."

Edited by Rolig Loon
  • Like 6
Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Until almost 2010, Linden Lab had employees assigned to coordinating with educators. When the Lab changed its pricing policy for educational institutions, a vast majority of those institutions left SL and the Lab either reassigned their support staff or let them go. I think Claudia Linden was the last person in that role. That doesn't mean that they have no interest in education; it just means that it's not a large enough market to justify dedicated support.  

As an historical note, I did a large-scale study to see who was in education in SL and what they were doing.  At that time, 52 colleges and universities owned regions or had a regular institutional presence in world (that is, they were teaching or doing some sort of research or public outreach).  Many others -- I can't recall numbers after all these years -- were represented by a single faculty or staff member who was doing something educational on his/her own, without any support from the home institution.

As I've told people many times, I came to SL on a dare, having been told by a colleague that SL was the next big platform for virtual education.  I doubted it and I came to see for myself. As it turned out, I was right, but I stayed anyway.  What my own study showed was that the greatest potential was probably in tutorials and Continuing Education (including things that  are often called Extension in the Land Grant universities), and that traditional classroom teaching was not a good fit.  Libraries were possibly the last major wing of academia to make a serious presence in SL.  Stanford, the University of California in San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Drexel, and several others had regular curricula. Some remain today.  The Community Virtual Library, established in SL in 2006 with some support from grants and the ALA, is celebrating its 15th year in 2021 -- significantly smaller than it was at one point with a sprawling archipelago of regions, but still active.

I have been retired from academics for 15 years myself and no longer have useful connections with that world in either RL or SL, but my view from a distance is that the potential is still there for adult and community education. The challenges will continue to be institutional support (staffing and money) from campuses and program continuity. I doubt that Linden Lab will ever again make education a corporate priority, but they do welcome the contribution that education makes to their public image and they are certainly friendly. There's a limit to the impact you can make as a lone educator.  Still, as Jesse Jackson used to say, "I am only one man, but because I am one man I can do something to change the world."

Hello Rolig,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write me this wonderful text with your own summary of recent years. All these informations are so usefull, because I spent so much time to understand what is happening right now in Sl, regarding education. In my opinion, SL has incredible potential that can be exploited in many areas. In addition, with regard to education, on the occasion of Coronavirus and its implications, I believe that Linden Lab deserves to be involved in education again.

From my point of view, a person with a vision is enough to change the world. So, all Ι need right now is the way to start creating my vision... then, no one knows the future!😉

Thank you for your time!

Edited by Sylviaangel Faintree
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Until almost 2010, Linden Lab had employees assigned to coordinating with educators. When the Lab changed its pricing policy for educational institutions, a vast majority of those institutions left SL and the Lab either reassigned their support staff or let them go. I think Claudia Linden was the last person in that role. That doesn't mean that they have no interest in education; it just means that it's not a large enough market to justify dedicated support.  

As an historical note, I did a large-scale study to see who was in education in SL and what they were doing.  At that time (2007) , 52 colleges and universities owned regions or had a regular institutional presence in world (that is, they were teaching or doing some sort of research or public outreach).  Many others -- I can't recall numbers after all these years -- were represented by a single faculty or staff member who was doing something educational on his/her own, without any support from the home institution.

As I've told people many times, I came to SL on a dare, having been told by a colleague that SL was the next big platform for virtual education.  I doubted it and I came to see for myself. As it turned out, I was right, but I stayed anyway.  What my own study showed was that the greatest potential was probably in tutorials and Continuing Education (including things that  are often called Extension in the Land Grant universities), and that traditional classroom teaching was not a good fit.  Libraries were possibly the last major wing of academia to make a serious presence in SL.  Stanford, the University of California in San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Drexel, and several others had regular curricula. Some remain today.  The Community Virtual Library, established in SL in 2006 with some support from grants and the ALA, is celebrating its 15th year in 2021 -- significantly smaller than it was at one point with a sprawling archipelago of regions, but still active.

I have been retired from academics for 15 years myself and no longer have useful connections with that world in either RL or SL, but my view from a distance is that the potential is still there for adult and community education. The challenges will continue to be institutional support (staffing and money) from campuses and program continuity. I doubt that Linden Lab will ever again make education a corporate priority, but they do welcome the contribution that education makes to their public image and they are certainly friendly. There's a limit to the impact you can make as a lone educator.  Still, as Jesse Jackson used to say, "I am only one man, but because I am one man I can do something to change the world."

I have a list server of RL sims, i.e. sims with RL things on them organized by country. There were certain universities that were in SL for years and years. And more seem to have disappeared in the last few years, although I thought I'd see them still there with COVID. It's too expensive and doesn't work for the purpose needed, I guess. I wish more of them would do what one US tech school did which was take a mere 4096, which is really all you need, put builds on the ground and in the sky, and have classes there. It's ridiculous to pay for an entire sim and pay ridiculous amounts for RL-style builds when you can get a pre-fab on $60 Happy Weekend and some free furniture and call it a day. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I have a list server of RL sims, i.e. sims with RL things on them organized by country. There were certain universities that were in SL for years and years. And more seem to have disappeared in the last few years, although I thought I'd see them still there with COVID. It's too expensive and doesn't work for the purpose needed, I guess. I wish more of them would do what one US tech school did which was take a mere 4096, which is really all you need, put builds on the ground and in the sky, and have classes there. It's ridiculous to pay for an entire sim and pay ridiculous amounts for RL-style builds when you can get a pre-fab on $60 Happy Weekend and some free furniture and call it a day. 

Hello Prokofy,

Thank you for the advice. The truth is that you don't have to pay a lot of money, there is always a better and cheaper way. The problem is that most of the time you need someone to guide you to the best solution.
The choice that you suggest seems good to me. But in this case, I guess I need to rent some land, right? I would appreciate if you could give me more information and advice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/24/2021 at 7:33 AM, Sylviaangel Faintree said:

Hello Prokofy,

Thank you for the advice. The truth is that you don't have to pay a lot of money, there is always a better and cheaper way. The problem is that most of the time you need someone to guide you to the best solution.
The choice that you suggest seems good to me. But in this case, I guess I need to rent some land, right? I would appreciate if you could give me more information and advice.

I'm all for renting, and renting on the Mainland, because that's my little business. Renting saves you considerable amounts of cash, gives you more flexibility (you can refund or just leave it isn't working out for you or you lose your budget), and in a group you can have most of the powers you need to run the facility properly. On an island, you'll have the additional feature of having your own group giving you nearly total control -- except the risk of no-show landlords and landlords who bail from their own tier in the middle of the night, returning your stuff including no-copy items that get lost and no-transfer deeded items that get destroyed on return. This risk isn't as huge as you imagine from reading the forums, but it's a real risk factor, which in my view is in fact mitigated on the Mainland which is cheaper and has more die-hard agents not as interested in turning a profit.

BUT in your case, with any kind of educational project where you might have to bring in people from RL with no clue about SL, it's ramp-up difficulties, it's cultures, it's, er, affordances, which might include dragons fornicating as they did on that professor's Democracy Island in the weeds, or griefer team-tag on the IBM server simulations,  you should own your land. You should learn personally as project leader to run your land and not hire griefer alts who leave your autoreturn on telling you that if there is an invited group land it doesn't matter. Watch it matter on a rogue 3rd party viewer upon which eject doesn't work.

Of course owning is only a rental in the larger sense but LL has been in business for 18 years or more and I think it's more stable than Facebook or Twitter, odd as that may seem. Twitter is lurching toward telling you it's going to double its profits and now offers a chance for you to monetarize your tweets and make people pay to see your threads. To which I can only shrug and say @jack we had that 17 years ago in SL. And we had it with prim hair and teleportation and today we have it with mesh hands and BOM.

And to those who think monetarizing Twitter is going to be this fabulous thing that cleans up the sewer of Twitter and gets Twitter out of hock with its investors, guess again, private island silos, where people incubate conspiracy theories, and open source open sims with no autoturn, in fact lead to 4chan and Anonymous and QAnon in RL, as we learned in *Second* Life -- again, 17 years ago. That's a long time in Internet dog years. None of these horrors are anything like the stories in the media by lazy journos who never log in here for more than the 17 minutes they have to file their blog for some property of giant media corporations that will fire them next week and hire someone for less pay. Etc. I run a Mainland rentals with build on. No one believes that it possible, especially for me, a target of griefing. But it is because it is vastly, vastly exaggerated and 99% of the time people live in peace and are decent, and for the other 1% there's eject/ban/autoreturn. LL now bans day-olds and removes anchored grief prims in 12-24 hours or less in my personal experience.

So, bottom line, still, in SL, own your land, pay $22 a month US plus an annualized premium account which won't exactly pay for itself with the fluctuation of the LindEX, but which basically, for your $300L per week stipend or $1200L per month will offset by more than 50% the cost of the annualized premium of $99 ( believe that's what it is now, go check their web page for the latest figures). If spending US $22 plus per month is some kind of dent in your family's groceries, then go and get the US $12 rental on the Mainland or $15 on the island or whatever, it's a buyer's market. 

But YOU need to control your land: autoreturn, ban, object entry, script usage by everyone or group, etc. etc. Make the group perms right and the land follows the group, don't do it the other way. Go study my group land tutorial in Ross at the Memory Bazaar and read the tales of Viking explorers disappearing in fire and flames and living in sorrow because they didn't set their perms right.

Group land just makes it easier for students to join and rez prims and be made as helpers to do things like ban people or remove non-group prims or whatever. Don't make a sandbox. Why do you need a sandbox? Let's not be children here. You yourself have a sandbox of your choice out in the Linden sticks on the premium account, just avoid the ones set to weapons. I like ones that sound like capitals of Kosovo or whatever. The whole plot itself is your sandbox, like life, so don't make bricks-and-mortars replicas that already exist in SL, plan for an avian creatures' world and make perches, not houses.

1406 prims on the 4096 really is all you should need to hold a class. Buy extra prim land on that sim because in a group you can use prims from any other lot on that sim so it doesn't have to be contiguous. Buy abandoned land for $1/m from the Lindens by filing a ticket, or go on the auctions and you can get land as cheap as $0.5/meter if no one else bids. I personally want to stay off the auctions until certain features are improved and I'm not interested in fighting land barons to buy land on a sim where I live and work and they don't, but it's an avenue you need to research on the web site. I have other threads as do others with the Buyer Beware for land purchase: stay on the sim and look at FPS and TD statistics for that sim in the advanced menu and move on if they aren't at 99 and 45; take off "volume" detection and look to see if there are any hidden "donut holes" within the parcel that the unscrupulous seller might extort you to buy; see if your neighbours have a pension for plywood and big cars and horse barns and porch swings where they sit with their shotguns and stills because that's going to all affect lag. Don't assume Firestorm's render is going to get rid of the view of that giant spinning sign about greatness because you may have to derender each prim, they may change the prim daily to annoy, and your visitor each has to individually de-render. Don't let derender solve the problems you could solve by flying to the next sim, there are 5000 on the Mainland alone.

Study their claim dates and if they are yesterday, fly away. If they are in 2007 and don't look like they show up, be careful, their land may be seized. An entire sim of abandoned land may stay like looking like the Far Away build by the IBM guy for years on end -- I have land on sims where "my" fields on a view I did not buy and which even Governor Linden herself abandoned (yes, there are such pieces) -- have aged and the original Linden trees chopped down have re-seeded and are growing (LOL) for five-ten-or more years. At any minute that may change, however, especially if waterfront. It may be requested from the ticket system by anyone at any time, it may be put to auction (whereupon it turns purple) or it may be flipped and sold the next day and have a Vore club on it. In that way, it's like real life, where my "yacht", a water restaurant that existed for 30 years and had a nice Captain's bar was ruined in Hurricane Sandy and my "office," an Afghan restaurant run by brothers for 40 years still holding allegiance to the King who then handed it over to a nephew who removed the boulani kadu from the menu and ruined our lives forever and lost all the customers whereupon he sold it to some yuppie pop-up "open table" type deal, making everybody sit with millennials elbow-to-elbow at one giant table, whereupon it was shuttered the first week of COVID and is now boarded up and covered with graffiti. OK, then.

Don't put RL replica buildings in which avatars collide, can't sit down, and hate. Make a seating area that doesn't look like a build from the Soviet Union of Architects' stadium build no 909 circa 1966 in Lugansk. Well, keep studying.

 

Edited by Prokofy Neva
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm all for renting, and renting on the Mainland, because that's my little business. Renting saves you considerable amounts of cash, gives you more flexibility (you can refund or just leave it isn't working out for you or you lose your budget), and in a group you can have most of the powers you need to run the facility properly. On an island, you'll have the additional feature of having your own group giving you nearly total control -- except the risk of no-show landlords and landlords who bail from their own tier in the middle of the night, returning your stuff including no-copy items that get lost and no-transfer deeded items that get destroyed on return. This risk isn't as huge as you imagine from reading the forums, but it's a real risk factor, which in my view is in fact mitigated on the Mainland which is cheaper and has more die-hard agents not as interested in turning a profit.

BUT in your case, with any kind of educational project where you might have to bring in people from RL with no clue about SL, it's ramp-up difficulties, it's cultures, it's, er, affordances, which might include dragons fornicating as they did on that professor's Democracy Island in the weeds, or griefer team-tag on the IBM server simulations,  you should own your land. You should learn personally as project leader to run your land and not hire griefer alts who leave your autoreturn on telling you that if there is an invited group land it doesn't matter. Watch it matter on a rogue 3rd party viewer upon which eject doesn't work.

Of course owning is only a rental in the larger sense but LL has been in business for 18 years or more and I think it's more stable than Facebook or Twitter, odd as that may seem. Twitter is lurching toward telling you it's going to double its profits and now offers a chance for you to monetarize your tweets and make people pay to see your threads. To which I can only shrug and say @jack we had that 17 years ago in SL. And we had it with prim hair and teleportation and today we have it with mesh hands and BOM.

And to those who think monetarizing Twitter is going to be this fabulous thing that cleans up the sewer of Twitter and gets Twitter out of hock with its investors, guess again, private island silos, where people incubate conspiracy theories, and open source open sims with no autoturn, in fact lead to 4chan and Anonymous and QAnon in RL, as we learned in *Second* Life -- again, 17 years ago. That's a long time in Internet dog years. None of these horrors are anything like the stories in the media by lazy journos who never log in here for more than the 17 minutes they have to file their blog for some property of giant media corporations that will fire them next week and hire someone for less pay. Etc. I run a Mainland rentals with build on. No one believes that it possible, especially for me, a target of griefing. But it is because it is vastly, vastly exaggerated and 99% of the time people live in peace and are decent, and for the other 1% there's eject/ban/autoreturn. LL now bans day-olds and removes anchored grief prims in 12-24 hours or less in my personal experience.

So, bottom line, still, in SL, own your land, pay $22 a month US plus an annualized premium account which won't exactly pay for itself with the fluctuation of the LindEX, but which basically, for your $300L per week stipend or $1200L per month will offset by more than 50% the cost of the annualized premium of $99 ( believe that's what it is now, go check their web page for the latest figures). If spending US $22 plus per month is some kind of dent in your family's groceries, then go and get the US $12 rental on the Mainland or $15 on the island or whatever, it's a buyer's market. 

But YOU need to control your land: autoreturn, ban, object entry, script usage by everyone or group, etc. etc. Make the group perms right and the land follows the group, don't do it the other way. Go study my group land tutorial in Ross at the Memory Bazaar and read the tales of Viking explorers disappearing in fire and flames and living in sorrow because they didn't set their perms right.

Group land just makes it easier for students to join and rez prims and be made as helpers to do things like ban people or remove non-group prims or whatever. Don't make a sandbox. Why do you need a sandbox? Let's not be children here. You yourself have a sandbox of your choice out in the Linden sticks on the premium account, just avoid the ones set to weapons. I like ones that sound like capitals of Kosovo or whatever. The whole plot itself is your sandbox, like life, so don't make bricks-and-mortars replicas that already exist in SL, plan for an avian creatures' world and make perches, not houses.

1406 prims on the 4096 really is all you should need to hold a class. Buy extra prim land on that sim because in a group you can use prims from any other lot on that sim so it doesn't have to be contiguous. Buy abandoned land for $1/m from the Lindens by filing a ticket, or go on the auctions and you can get land as cheap as $0.5/meter if no one else bids. I personally want to stay off the auctions until certain features are improved and I'm not interested in fighting land barons to buy land on a sim where I live and work and they don't, but it's an avenue you need to research on the web site. I have other threads as do others with the Buyer Beware for land purchase: stay on the sim and look at FPS and TD statistics for that sim in the advanced menu and move on if they aren't at 99 and 45; take off "volume" detection and look to see if there are any hidden "donut holes" within the parcel that the unscrupulous seller might extort you to buy; see if your neighbours have a pension for plywood and big cars and horse barns and porch swings where they sit with their shotguns and stills because that's going to all affect lag. Don't assume Firestorm's render is going to get rid of the view of that giant spinning sign about greatness because you may have to derender each prim, they may change the prim daily to annoy, and your visitor each has to individually de-render. Don't let derender solve the problems you could solve by flying to the next sim, there are 5000 on the Mainland alone.

Study their claim dates and if they are yesterday, fly away. If they are in 2007 and don't look like they show up, be careful, their land may be seized. An entire sim of abandoned land may stay like looking like the Far Away build by the IBM guy for years on end -- I have land on sims where "my" fields on a view I did not buy and which even Governor Linden herself abandoned (yes, there are such pieces) -- have aged and the original Linden trees chopped down have re-seeded and are growing (LOL) for five-ten-or more years. At any minute that may change, however, especially if waterfront. It may be requested from the ticket system by anyone at any time, it may be put to auction (whereupon it turns purple) or it may be flipped and sold the next day and have a Vore club on it. In that way, it's like real life, where my "yacht", a water restaurant that existed for 30 years and had a nice Captain's bar was ruined in Hurricane Sandy and my "office," an Afghan restaurant run by brothers for 40 years still holding allegiance to the King who then handed it over to a nephew who removed the boulani kadu from the menu and ruined our lives forever and lost all the customers whereupon he sold it to some yuppie pop-up "open table" type deal, making everybody sit with millennials elbow-to-elbow at one giant table, whereupon it was shuttered the first week of COVID and is now boarded up and covered with graffiti. OK, then.

Don't put RL replica buildings in which avatars collide, can't sit down, and hate. Make a seating area that doesn't look like a build from the Soviet Union of Architects' stadium build no 909 circa 1966 in Lugansk. Well, keep studying.

 

Hello Prokofy,

Thank you so much for the detailed description of the rental. I will definitely work harder to be sure of my choices and what really suits me. I will watch videos and search for relevant information in the forum, etc., because I have never been involved in renting a land, so I feel lost...
In the future, I may bother you with some more questions.

Thanks for your time! ☺️

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1127 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...