You’d Better Find a Way out, Hey Kick Down The Door, It’s a Lab Chat and You’ve Been Caught

Linden Lab blogged yesterday; Introducing Lab Chat – A New Q&A Show in Second Life :

In the spirit of the open Q&A sessions held at inworld events like the VWBPE conference and the Meet the Lindens series, we’re pleased to participate in a new Resident-driven initiative called “Lab Chat.”

Lab Chat is an opportunity for you to ask Lindens your questions during a live taping that will be recorded and archived for everyone to view.

The first Lab Chat will be Thursday, November 19th, at 10:30am SLT at the Linden Endowment for the Arts Theatre – with guest Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab.

Now this won’t be a session where anybody from the audience can ask any question they want and get an answer. Questions will be curated. The Lab chat production team will pick questions from a forum thread. That’s the link to the forum thread if you have any questions you want to ask, go post them and see if they get picked. Please also pay attention to this part of the blog post :

so be sure to get your questions into the thread no later than Friday November 13th, 2015. Authors of selected questions will be invited to ask their question live at the inworld show. Time permitting – additional questions from the audience will be answered.

Questions are already appearing in that thread ranging from questions about abuse reports, technical questions, community gateways, Marketplace issues and much more. Ebbe won’t be in a position to answer all of them so don’t be disappointed if your question isn’t answered. However you have a far better chance of your question being answered if you visit the forum thread and post a question.

Now if you’re wondering who the Lab Chat production team are, well they are not Lindens, they are residents. Named so far are :

• Draxtor Despres
• Gentle Heron
• Elrik Merlin
• Petlove Petshop
• Inara Pey
• Aisling Sinclair
• Devin Vaughan
• Saffia Widdershins
• Jo Yardley

Inara Pey and Jo Yardley have both posted blog posts about Lab Chat, so you can find more information about their roles and involvement on the following posts :

• Inara Pey – Announcing Lab Chat – a new Q&A show in Second Life
• Jo Yardley – Lab Chat, a talk show with and about Linden Lab is coming!

I should also add that the Lab Chat logo was designed by Marianne McCann. The format at play here, with people taking questions to ask Lindens isn’t new. I can recall this happening years ago where Robin Linden was taking the questions and then asking suitable questions to another Linden on the stage. This is a tad more organised than that as the questions won’t be a surprise to Ebbe.

Some people won’t like this approach, but it should mean that Ebbe is able to answer the questions fully. Think of this as more of an old fashioned readers letters section in the local newspaper, where lots of people wrote in but only a few got published. About a month ago, Motherboard actually replaced comments on their website with letters to the editor, so this might be the way of the future.

One trick that does seem to be being missed here though is in terms of the broadcast. I touched upon this recently, Linden Lab have their own channel on YouTube Gaming, wouldn’t this be an ideal opportunity to give it a whirl as a live broadcast?

The broadcast will be published after the event, so if you can’t make it, you’ll have time to catch up on it, but I do feel this is something that could be broadcast live too.

Overall, I like this approach from Linden Lab, people want to talk to the Lindens, they want answers to their questions, this approach should allow both questions and answers to be constructive. I’m looking forward to what transpires here.