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.
Continue reading “User Groups And Wiki Need Greater Visibility”