Philip Rosedale podcast on Linden organizational style

Some of you might find this podcast with Philip Rosedale on how Linden Lab works, of interest. http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4112.html

The text mentioned "The Love Machine"
This obonimable device used to feature in my forum sig at one stage. My interest was piqued.


FFS!!!

Two minutes into 45 minutes, Phil says (EAOE)
"If you think about it , at a higher level, Second Life always struck me as essentially a recreation of the world from the atoms up, but with foresight, which is rather nifty..."

Foresight??
What the fuck happened to hindsight???



I'll listen to the rest of the 40 minutes later.

"Hey Sling. I love this track"
"Sorry. I'm dancing to Phil. I'm Philosopining"

There's some interesting stuff in there about how Phil experiences in-world voice meetings. It is completely unlike my experience with voice, but if it works like that for the Lindens, it's not surprising they find the technology so appealing.

It's an interesting insight into the culture of LL, both into how it originated and into how it continues.

There are a number of things in there that feed my prejudices.

One thing is Phil's approach to the management of the project.
His analogy is the ability of a single human mind to encompass all of the "design scale" of a project. A single mind can explain the Ipod. A single mind can not explain all of a NASA project like the Saturn V.
Do I get the feeling that he sees LL as an engineering project, and not as a social project?
The social considerations are limited to how to get LL employees to work together in order to achieve a successful engineering project.

Inside that engineering project, the best course for the subjects in there to deal with things like intellectual property theft is a "Better Business Bureau" approach?

What's missing from the approach is that the the social goal can actually be encompassed in a single mind. The complex engineering is simply a way to enable a basically simple social goal.
NASA is complex, but Jack Kennedy had a very simple goal for it that could be understood completely by anybody.



The Love Machine is described in a way that could actually make sense. They take the nett profit for a period and convert that into virtual money. The 'money' is handed out equally to employees. People give it via the Love Machine to individuals or projects as a metric for acclaim. It appears that the transactions are not transparent. The gifting/voting is anonymous - at least for now. The anonymity would be the saving grace of the thing.


My gut feeling is that we are subjects to be studied in an engineering project , and not in a social project.

The social side is being left to us, the subjects, to deal with.
Our "Better Business Bureau" is meant to deal with theft, but it isn't given any power. What does it do? Does it wait at welcome centres and warn the noobs - but without breaking the TOS by naming names?

Going by what Phil says, they use it primarily for internal meetings.
This would explain a lot about a lot.