It only seems appropriate that I take Flat Ebbe back to my home in 18th-Century France. I know that he's been run off his feet this week as a result of Strawberry Singh's Flat Ebbe Linden Meme and so I figured that a quick tour through the Age of Enlightenment might make for a bit of a respite and perhaps some, well, enlightenment.

After touring the French Gardens outside the Petit Trianon , we paused for refreshments in The French Pavilion while I pondered the advice that I could/would/should offer this new Linden Lab CEO.

It's not like I'm a stranger to offering advice, solicited or not, to CEOs. My real life (RL) resume is pitted with examples but as I said in Adventures w Flat Rod: Rod Humble Crept into My Life with regard to Second Life (SL): I'm just one among the many and for the most part I'm very content with our at-arm's-length relationship.

I hauled Flat Rod around because it was a lot of fun mixed in with a little bit of empowerment: I suspect that I want Rodvik to see what I see, the beauty, creativity and the community of Second Life. It's not and has never been a game to me. It's something unique, something worth tending & nurturing.

What three pieces of advice will really help a new CEO go forth to "tend & nurture" while still keeping an eye on the bottom line? Thank goodness Berry didn't ask for more than three because this could easily turn into The Song that Doesn't End! So here goes ...

Read more ...

This meme really was a lot of fun. I encourage you to do one of your own and/or post your comments & ideas here.

What three pieces of advice would you give to the new LL CEO?

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Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

updated by @tatiana-dokuchic: 25 May 2017 01:21:12PM

Congrats

Land prices are certainly an issue. My own community has lost members to Inworldz, a less satisfying platform from an aesthetic perspective (I did some exploration there a few months ago to find out) but much more affordable.

I think this is an issue of particular importance when a community is trying to maintain a reasonable amount of land, water - and in the case of SF sims, vacuum - for common and public use. There is a limit to the number of investors who are both willing and able to pay for the pleasure of others as well as their own, and some mechanism should be available to ease the burden of payment on those who are willing to support the community's pleasure.

We have seen some discussion in this forum about educational subsidies. However, not all sims that are doing meaningful historical work have educational organizations as sponsors. I believe there should be some form of financial relief for communities that recreate the scenes of history and provide access to historical learning in the way that a museum or library would, as long as they are willing to give the respectful public access to the venues. To go along with this, of course, we would need an "educational interest" tab on the places search and the ability to enter our educational venues into the database from which it draws. The same principle should be applied to sim communities that are creating in other areas of educational interest, of course.

On another theme of education: I was drawn initially to SL because my university's distance learning unit was considering it as a platform for group discussions within distance courses. We ended up dropping the idea rather quickly when SL updated itself past the capacity of the graphics in our lab computers, and indeed, the iMAC in my office can barely handle it now. I think that SL would be a more popular educational platform if capacity was less of an issue. I understand that the new "cloud" system may help with this issue, but institutions that tried and dismissed SL three or four years ago will need to be informed and we all should be provided with inservice on using SL successfully as an educational tool without disadvantaging students whose personal computers may not be very good by current standards.

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Antiquity Hedgewitch

I wonder if SL Go could be a solution, Tiamat.

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Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

From what I can see, Ebbe is actually making progress on my first two points. It seems that Lindens are now being allowed back inworld and are being encouraged to do so. It also seems like he is taking a closer look at Educational initiatives.

I saw many calls for SL to broaden their marketing to include more than just "kids in bikinis" or vampires so we'll have to wait and see how that goes.

As for the financial breaks on land pricing, it's such a complicated issue. You have to have the statistics in order to do a proper analysis and so far LL hasn't been very good at that. We can only hope that they start running the numbers and gradually implementing changes.

Of course, SL RP is of concern to many ofour groups here and we've had a number of discussions about the difficulties & challenges of managing a RP community. Changing the "Culture of Free" in SL on the SLU forum is a very interesting read (all sixteen pages of it - lol).

This discussion helped to reinforce my own thoughts on the feasibility of SL RP. People often start a RP community with the idea that they can "build it and they will come". Most of these communities only survive for a brief time. Some bow out gracefully while others implode spectacularly leaving casualties in their wake.

I think that it's important to note that LL land pricing changes won't help these types of "vanity projects". It really requires clear thinking, a good business plan, and endless effort to make a go of these communities.

As a side note, I don't use the phrase "vanity projects" as a pejorative term. After all, I'm the proud owner/creator of the Petit Trianon my very own vanity project. It's just that I don't expect LL or anyone else to be throwing money at me to keep it going just because I personally think it's a grand idea.

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Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

Worth exploring. Thanks for the link, Tatiana.

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Antiquity Hedgewitch

Education happens in a variety of ways, Shalimar. Reading a book is one way of delivering it, but it's far from the only way, and for many learners and many kinds of learning needs, a book is not the most effective way. A good educator is always ready to use a wide range of sources, representations, demonstrations and communicative interfaces.

For visual learners, virtual representations can be powerful learning platforms, and SL gives us an exciting set of tools for creating them. You might want to visit the virtual representation of Machu Picchu, sponsored in SL by a university in Peru, to see how archaeological studies can be enriched by a virtual environment. Other fields benefit from virtual tools as well.

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Antiquity Hedgewitch

The Kansas to Cairo Project is one of my favourite examples of educators using SL.

Of course I have a huge bias but I think SL is brilliant for exploring architectural concepts

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Proprietress of Tatiana's Tea Room ~ Owner of the Provence Coeur Estate ~ Webmistress of this site

Exciting, Tatiana! I'm going to share this one with my program's instructors.

I really need to start watching Machinima on a regular basis instead of by mere happenstance.

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Antiquity Hedgewitch