I was recently taken to task over my suggestion that Linden Lab’s communications are poor because I don’t go to user group meetings. I used to go to a lot of office hours when I was a lad in Second Life and after they were changed into user groups, I went to a few of them. User group meetings are not vastly different to office hours, even back in the day some office hours had agendas, such as Bridie’s bug triage meetings, whereas despite Jack’s best efforts, agendas never really took off with Jack’s meetings. However the point that I don’t go to user group meetings and therefore miss out on discussions is a fair one, discussions with Lindens do happen at user group meetings.
The thing here is that there are just four user group meetings officially listed:
- Content Creation/Mesh Import – Discussion on content creation, currently focused on mesh import.
- Server/Sim/Scripting – Simulator issues and technology.
- Open Development – Open source policies, resources for contributors, and progressing contributions through the Snowstorm process; for open source contributors.
- Server Beta – Anything pertaining to server changes and public beta testing.
There used to be something like four a day covering a wide variety of topics, now we get around five a week (Open Development is scheduled for Monday and Wednesday). However leaving that aside, these meetings are useful, user groups provide a high level of richness, although they are poor in terms of reach. The minutes are usually updated on the wiki for each user group, so if you can’t attend the meetings when they happen, you can catch up via minutes of chat logs.
However finding out about the existence of user group meetings isn’t exactly straight forward and surely something can be done about this. I know where the wiki is, but when you look at the main second Life website, it’s really not obvious that user groups even exist, let alone that there’s a wiki.
The community dropdown gives no indication that there’s a wiki. There’s no link to it there, despite the fact that there’s a community resources portal on the wiki!
The Help dropdown doesn’t list the wiki either. However one can stumble across the wiki, if you’re a developer and you follow the developer link from the main website at the bottom of pages:
This takes you to the developer portal of the wiki and from there it’s not difficult to find your way to the main wiki. This has links to bloody useful resources, such as the LSL Portal for scripting. Maybe I’m missing something here, but if I were a new resident, how would I find out about the existence of, what are in some cases, excellent resources on the wiki?
My view on user groups is that there aren’t enough of them, for example, there should be one for merchants. Blondin’s community meetings have never been replaced, nor Jack’s land meetings, these were popular meetings. Linden Lab obviously don’t feel they are beneficial, but really, to those who attended them, they largely were. The existing ones are full of good information, however as I said earlier, user groups simply don’t have the reach of a blog post or forum post, they can’t by their very nature of taking place inworld.
Reach could be extended by forum posts informing people about user groups, similar to how the server team do an excellent job of communicating server deployments in the server forum. Those forum posts are really useful.
The wiki itself, should be more easily found, there are excellent resources on the wiki, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make it loud and clear that the wiki exists.