SLCC 2006 Feedback Survey (Even if you didn't attend)

My much better half Jennyfur has compiled a wonderful web survey that anyone who wants to have their opinions heard can fill out, regardless of whether you attended SLCC 2006 or now:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=368902507169

This includes a vote for where to hold it next year, questions about the RL Convention, the in-world Convention, and much more! Fill out as much or as little as you wish.

Regards,

-Flip

Whoever made that survey doesn't appear to understand what was going on inworld.

32. If you attended events at the SLCC convention sims, which events did you attend?

Live Music and DJs

Mitch Kapor's Keynote

RL Businesses in SL Panel

Mainland Communities Panel

Sex and Relationships in SL Panel

Media in SL Panel

Marketing and Branding Panel

Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondreka's Keynote Speech

Secondcast SLCC Deconstruction & Q&A

All of the Above

35. Did you have any technical difficulties in getting the video stream to work properly either on the convention land or on your own land?

Yes

No

Not Applicable

If yes, were you able to get it working eventually

36. Do you think the mixed reality portion of the SLCC is crucial to its success in which you are able to view and interact with the SLCC on site from remote locations?

Yes

No

Other (please specify)


These questions are all jokes. There were no inworld events, and the media wasn't even streaming on the convention sims. The idea that it was "mixed reality" this year was a joke, since we were just sitting in world, while watching a live feed on quicktime.

There was at least one in-world event that worked; I know cause I was at it. It was at Lewis Nerd's "The Venue" and it went off without a hitch. Even with 17-20 people there I could view the convention.

coco

P.S. Reading over your post - oh, I thought you meant you couldn't find a place to see it.

There is no need to be rude and condescending. We put together the survey to get as much feedback in a variety of areas and on a variety of topics.

We had the in-world convention streamed to the SLCC on-site when we could (meaning when presenters weren't showing powerpoints or other demos) not to mention many people who were logged in to SL via laptop at the convention. I don't think it was really that much different than last year other then the fact that we didn't have any pre-con events. We had the screen up at the NYLS and that was about it as far as the Mixed reality portion of it went. I know some questions were relayed from in-world and/or the IRC channel to the convention in SF this year in real-time.

The *events* I listed were the particular panels and keynotes. Since we did not have other events going on we were curious as to the interest of these panels and stuff being streamed in world. There also was the live music event which I believe was more of a mixed reality event than the main speakers on Saturday.

I know that there were technical issues and we did the best we could on the fly to handle those problems -- hence why it was easier for some people to view the convention via quicktime.

Regards,
Jennyfur

Thats good to hear. Its extremely hard to troubleshoot problems such as those that arose with the stream. I am not even going to pretend that I know how it all works, but I know that there are so many variables at play and so many technological snafus that can go wrong.

We have had many nice responses so far to the survey and have received a lot of wonderful ideas, suggestions and constructive criticism. Thanks!!!

(PS I apologize for Question 38 not making any sense, I didn't realize that I should have made it an essay question and not a multiple choice until I took the survey myself. So just use the comments box to respond as I don't know if I can change it without messing up the survey)

Vote For Toronto!

It would have been nice to get an email copy of the answers I provided in the survey. Do you think that's possible?

We went over this on a previous thread. Yes lewis had the stream going. However he was NOT in any way shape or form affiliated with the SLCC planning group. He saw a need for inworld streaming and picked it up, since the SLCC coordinators failed to do so.

If they were "technical issues" i'd be less rude. However it wasn't technical issues, as much as completly ignoring the inworld side of the convention. All day saturday and sunday all that was required was for 1 person from the convention team to set the media stream to the inworld sims. But that never happened. There was simply no reason for that to not happen, instead we had to sit there all day and tell people to open the stream in quicktime, and explain to them that we know there's a big stadium, with a stage, and big screen monitors set up, but no, you can't view the video from SL.

The inworld side of the conference this year was a huge failure. The fact that people believe that Lewis' event was an "official event" just goes to prove that.



The reason this question is rediculious, is that there were no events held at the SLCC sims. You couldn't even stream the video from them. There was no inworld presence from the convention either. If you had asked "If you attended events at Lewis's Theater, which events did you attend?" it would be a valid question.

I honestly don't think that the centralized in-world SLCC is scalable with the population growth and I don't think LL thinks it is either. To be honest, the in-world part was almost an after thought, using the model we had last year we had done considerable planning early on, only to find that we needed to scrap most of the plans we had. Last year we had four flat square sims (not to mention a population of 80,000) and much more room to work with. This year we had 4 sims that we could not terraform that contained gardens, waterfalls and mountains and we further restricted by the fact that each sim was semi circular so that they could form a large circular island. Not to mention that the population is now somewhere around 500,000. We knew and LL knew that the sims would not be able to accomodate everyone who wanted to attend.

Going forward, the only way we are going to be able to handle the SLCC in world will be either to decentralize and have multiple hosts or to find a land baron to sponsor us by providing say 20 sims for it.

We did the best we could with the resources we had available. It takes more than one person at the convention to keep the stream and servers working. We had a few people on-site and a few more offsite handling all of the problems that arose. Of course, we are sorry that there were problems in the first place, but it is not as easy of a job as you might think it to be.

I'm not sure. I didn't see that as an option in the survey set up, but I will do a double check.

Jennyfur I'm not saying anything bad about the build itself, I really liked the big stadium (the roundtable chairs that would move to make room for someone else when you sat in them were awesome). What i'm complaining about is that nobody took the time to set up the stream on the sims. It would have taken literally 60 seconds, and about 8 clicks, to most of us that were there all day saturday, we felt completly ignored. I'm not talking about you guys trying to keep the stream up and running, or anything like that. I'm just saying that someone should have taken the minute to go around and copy paste the url into the media boxes on the land. I mean, Lewis managed to do it without any sort of problem, and he's not a "techy".

I am sorry for coming off like a total bitch, but I don't think we should all go around saying how awesome the event was, when there were some huuuuge issues.

No worries, I think Flipper can speak more about the tech issues with the streams and such as that was one of the many things he was juggling with. I'm sure if it was as easy as a few clicks it would surely have been done. I don't think it was a case of ignoring the in-world aspect I think it was a case of choosing the lesser of two sucky choices 1) hook up a video stream in world that wasn't working very well or 2) have people watch the convention through quicktime which was more reliable, but less interactive.

That's the thing though, it was working fine for streaming in world. Lewis proved it, all he had to do was put the url into his media page. Also as most people know, the SL Streaming video is handled 100% client side, so it wouldn't have been any burden on the sims, and since we were all watching it in quicktime anyway, there would have been no extra bandwith being used up on the video stream. (This was the kinda stuff we were discussing while the real event was going on).

Awesome Survey I tried to provide as much personal feed back as i could in hopes of making next years convention even a bigger success then this years convention was.

hugs to all the organizers

Crucial

Apparently you didn't attend.

On Friday, the intention was never to stream video; it was to have the musicians on stage interacting with the crowd (which happened) with an audio only stream (which happened).

On Saturday, the original intention was to video stream. Instead we included the audio stream on the four sims and encouraged people to use the external quicktime stream because of the bug with estate sims, causing sim performance to be pretty horrible and avoid the problem of trying to start up hundreds of streams each time a sim crashed and everyone relogged. We also encouraged people to have tons of external parties, and we had hosts for every minute of the in-world event on the SLCC sims (thanks folks!). We agree this wasn't an ideal situation, but given the estate performance bug, it was a call that had to be made.

My hunch is that next year we won't even have centralized sims; we'll have a build we give out to people (like we did this year) to host their own parties. It simply doesn't scale well having a central location as the event grows bigger and bigger.

Regards,

-Flip

Just to reiterate: there was a problem that only affected estate sims and not that mainland - that's why the call was made. It seemed to work out well for everyone. Of course I would have preferred to stream in world, and it wasn't a question of setting it up; with those sims being unreliable, it probably would have killed the entire stream for everyone with so many people trying to reconnect simultaneously, which is much more taxing on the streaming server than once the stream is up and running for a single client.

Regards,

-Flip

I enjoyed hosting the stream in my theatre... and the traffic of 7351 the next day was nice too, if only we still got paid

It was great to talk with other residents at the theatre, although we did feel more spectators than participants. Amongst us, however, we had a great time.

The 'official' hosted sims were incredibly laggy and unstable when I visited there beforehand, in fact I even called a Linden over because it was so bad, and she was going to get a gridmonkey on it, anticipating the load. From what I hear, they couldn't fix it.

Like the 3rd anniversary party, people doing these 'official builds' tend to go completely overboard with scripting and textures, which in themselves may be very impressive constructions, but are completely impractical when the sim is full of avatars.

What I would like to see would be for those on the panels to actually be logged in-world and sitting at a table as their avatars, on the stage at the SLCC in-world build, at the same time as their real-world people at the real event, and for the in-world build to be shown on the big screen behind the panel, with the real stream behind the in-world panel - if that makes sense.

Add to that a way to officially ask questions in-world (similar to how Town Halls work) filtered through a set person, and you could have a great multi-immersive experience.

After all, the community is not just the few who have a high enough disposable income to fly to a particular venue... there are many more of us who contribute much but were unable to attend for whatever reason. I hope to attend next year, if the time and venue are convenient.

So when does the planning for 2007 start? I'm sure many of us would like to be involved in some way.

Lewis

Next year needs more FIC perks. If you want me to show up, you're going to have to pick me up in a limo, baby.

Erm, one thing about this survey - it's not actually private. If you view the comments from some of the questions and click on the numbers by the side of the comments, you can get to a person's complete survey response including their name if they included it.

I'm a bit suprised about that as I'd expect things to be kept in confidence.

A significant (non-survey) conclusion one may draw from Flip's comments about stream and in-world performance is that SL is incapable of supporting a mixed reality event with several hundred participants on both sides in a single RL location and a single SL location. That's rather pathetic, I think, but not news.

As for Powerpoint and other media presentations at the conference, Sonic Foundry's MediaSite Live is one example of an app that supports mixed media along with video for this sort of thing, along with archiving. Since SL can't really handle the event, anyway, one could just give up on SL participation and go to the "Web conference" mode for SLCC, which is a shame, but puts remote people in much better touch with the conference.

SL is a good venue for in-world crowds of up to 100, as we've seen at live music shows at Clovers Auditorium and such. The core design of SL precludes anything much more than that, since there only four sims on a corner (unless, I suppose, they put some monster machines under some sims with huge dedicated bandwidth). It seems we kind of gave up on SL for this SLCC, and I think it should be explicitly abandoned in the future, in favor of high-bandwidth multimedia streaming using Internet applications that work.

If by "roundtable chairs" you mean those absurd rotating bleachers like people had at one event (or anything similar), it is a known thing that those will kill the fps at an event.

People, if you want a lot of people at your event, don't use those things.

coco

Well, I realize that soon we aren't supposed to discuss these things outloud anymore, except on relatively obscure third-party sites and in our "networking" (translated: How close are YOU to a Linden?), but I'm going to speak to this anyway.

What? You think any in-world experience of SLCC - say, that which I experienced while watching it at Lewis's - should be abandoned?

Well, I'm not sure why you are even saying such a thing, since I watched the thing perfectly well at Lewis's.

I hope this is a minority view.

However, I will say that would be a fitting move.

Rather like they moved farther away from their customers when they announced getting rid of the forums. Any method to further closet the LL movers and shakers and the Lindens from the riff-raff (i.e., 99 percent of their customers) would probably be hailed as an excellent idea by LL.

coco

Essentially, Second Life is community led. Without us, it is nothing - whether it's a game, a platform, a country, the future of the internet or whatever else you want to call it - without the people who use it, it's just a bunch of servers in a datacentre somewhere.

I took the initiative and hosted a video feed at my club because I wanted to give something to the community to do, knowing that it's quite possible that the lag would kill the 'official' sims - finding out later that they weren't working on the audio stream was unconnected to my desire to run them.

It doesn't really matter how many corporations come into SL in the thought of easy advertising; with nobody to sell it to in-world, then they won't stay long.

Corporations aren't important. We are. Let's never forget that. Let's hope Linden Lab don't either.

Lewis