Wherefort art thou, oh Governance Team?

Please note: we will be suspending all GTeam office hours for the rest of 2008 and restarting sometime next year. Please watch this space for the new office hours.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_Hours/GTeam

It's now March.

After the new forum is rolled out in October.

Right. The "New and Improved" forum. That'll be coming along any day now.

As soon as they run out of "Bigger and Scarier" things to do.

I do wonder why they shuttered the meetings. I believe they're the only LL team without at least one member holding office hours -- and likely the one most in need of them.

supose we made them mad, Mari? took their toys and went home?

Well, they shut down right after their top members starting abusing their power and shutting down people's businesses. Seeing as how the people in charge of the gteam were the ones abusing their power and were the ones handling the abuse complaints (stupid policy) I suppose they decided they could handle office hours without those pesky residents too

For quite a while the GTeam held meetings twice a week (Wednesday and Saturday), due to the level of interest and volume of questions. As the volume subsided meetings were reduced to once a week, then twice a month.

Even then, the last few GTeam meetings were fairly uneventful, with a large portion of the time spent in idle chat between the GTeam and participants (not concerning abuse issues directly) and each other - as we'd really run out of abuse-related topics to discuss that hadn't already been hashed over several times. That, or folks that had never been to a meeting before would drop by to ask why they or a friend had been suspended (the GTeam won't discuss particular incidents) or to request that a gambling device be 'verified legal' (the GTeam won't do that either).

Given that, it wasn't all that surprising that they'd suspended operations over the holidays. As to why they haven't started them up again... I don't know, of course. I suspect, however, that they might not have seen all that much demand from the residents from the beginning of the year to start the weekly sessions once again - perhaps if there's a high volume of interest expressed in this thread they might notice .

I keep getting two thoughts in my head about this...

"You don't talk to the G-Team. The G-Team talks to *you*"

"Oh don't worry. If the G-Team wants to have a word with you, They Will Find You."

Seriously though, there are lots of good reasons to have office hours, even if some weeks there's nothing pressing to discuss. It's probably not fair to say that nobody is asking for meetings, if there's no way to actually get at them to tell them. Maybe they can count the number of hits to their office-hour page, but if the page just says "Closed for business" then how do they know people want to see them?

Personally there's an issue I'd like to follow up with them about - roughly 2 years ago they announced via the blog about a new thing called Estate Level Governance. They said that they were building some new tools, and had a number of regions in a pilot project to work on this. Then they said nothing ever again. So every 6 months or so I like to prod them a bit to find out how this project is coming. Until they officially state that it's dead and gone, I can only assume that it's still in the works somewhere and maybe the pilot regions are still evaluating it.

So, hopefully the G-Team will open up shop again inworld, at some point. Sooner or later. Someday.

-Atashi

This is especially disconcerting with the announcement of the new "adult" continent.

Er.. Did you ever go to one of the gteam meetings and try to get clarification on policy?

I'm sure they're great people in RL but it doesn't surprise me that attendance dropped off..

Is it sad that my first thought was, "Because someone went looking for clarification on a policy and the G-team finally got fed up with trying to parse out what the heck the higher ups are wanting vs saying?"