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

damnit!! lewis either use the friggin american system or make me some crazy bell bottoms that have, fudge what do you call it when it moves thingy, and i'll be ok with it

Already completed.


Granted... I just wonder how you'll be able to with the death of a centralised forum though. Anyway, let me know somehow, I'd be glad to help if I can.


Naturally... I just hope it's not Vegas, out of all the places I really never want to go, that's one of them.



Maybe that's something to bring up with Linden Lab before progressing too much further. If there are technical issues, they can start working on them, and if they need to buy some "super servers" dedicated to high capacity events (not just the SLCC but useable by anyone throughout the year), they can start saving up their small change too.

Lewis

surveys are crap, that is all i have to say... i have spoken, let it be so

Is your main objective these days to simply raise your posting count before the forums die, VW ?

Flipper explained the problem that arose with the estate tools and the streaming media problem in his original response.

Scalability is a problem and one we seriously have to look at if we continue to have the convention in world as well. Four sims does not support the growing population. If we don't account for scalability the SLCC will continue to become more and more exclusive both in world and out.

I was surprised at how many people had found out about the SLCC via the forums. I think the easiest way to disseminate information would be an opt-in mailing list so that we could distribute updates. Of course, we could always incorporate forums into the SLCC website itself.




There are a few contenders for top billing. Choosing the final winner will come down to a couple things, such as regional residents willing to be on the organization team and cost of convention space.



Indeed this is something we will be discussing before moving forward.

Actually, I beg to differ, so far we have received some excellent feedback and suggestions. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as crap.

Personally I think the SLCC should integrate more fully first and second life - otherwise it just becomes another game players gathering. Surely progress should consist of the line between real and virtual becoming fuzzier and fuzzier?

One bit that really struck me watching the video feed was strangely enough inbetween sessions. One resident, who was at the SLCC, was sitting in my theatre watching the video feed and discussing it with us. Whilst his avatar was sitting with us in-world, the human wandered over to where the camera was, and waved at us sitting in the theatre. Perhaps just a very tiny - and irrelevant - thing, but I just feel that there must be ways to improve the in-world presence to make it much more accessible to those who were, for whatever reason, unable to reach the meatspace event.

My guess is that SLCC attendence and interest will always remain a minority percentage, however many hundred thousand accounts are open. 450 or so attended the real event, I'm not sure how many visited the SLCC sims and watched it at various locations in-world.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have an in-world only discussion panel, viewed on a big screen at the meatspace event, for example?

SLCC 2007 : Blurring the Boundaries between real and virtual. Isn't that catchy? Feel free to use it.

Lewis

I've explained it in detail earlier in the thread. It's not actually a bug with the video streaming, but there was a bug with estates causing their time dilation to be all over the map, crash, and so forth. The problem with this is, if the sims crashed, and hundreds of people tried to reconnect their stream simultaneously, it would take the entire video streaming server down, as this is an computationally expensive proposition. The Lindens considered this estate problem big enough that they sent an email to EVERYONE on the concierge list. I'd call that a fairly major issue.

Of course we wanted to stream the video - that's why we took the time to build screens and spec it out as a requirement in our build. It was simply not possible to do on the estates, thus the decision.

Please read my earlier comments for more details on why this simply wasn't possible.

Regards,

-Flip (ARGH, logged in as Jenn)

Dare I ask the obvious question....

What steps are being taken to ensure that this survey is actually seen by the community? For example, hosting the survey on an obscure website sure isn't helping (the likelihood of any particular community member seeing this survey is somewhere around 'between little to none') so what's being done to get it the appropriate level of 'eyeballs'?

Suggestions for example:
- What is being done in-world to support the survey? Are there survey link signs throughout SL, especially in community areas like the Welcome Areas, popular locations, infohubs?
- What is the plan for community-invted events where community members can express their opinions on the matter? Will there be multiple events scheduled to maximize the availability of receiving community feedback?
- What other methods are being taken to raise the visibility of the next convention...advertising on third-party SL-related sites, arranging to place signposts in high-popularity areas, etc?


- Newfie
(Who despite appearances hopes there will be an SLCC in 2007...even if there wasn't one this year)

The SLCC kiosks could be replaced by a survey kiosk..as I saw SLCC kiosks in a lot of places throughout the world. Could the survey offered accordingly?

GOD NO not a mailing list.

I hate reading mail from a mailing list. Much easier to read on a website.


What happened? I thought sure I remembered you or Flipper saying you would not be running this next year.

coco

An email from the Lindens about time dilation problems ? Fantastic. Why didn't we all get it ? This problem has been everywhere for several weeks - I have been interested and monitoring it. It seems connected to big sudden leaps in "Image time". People have mentioned "memory leaks". But in my experience sims crawl on and recover rather than crash.

I have seen no evidence dilation (or crashing) has been worse on private estates, and would be most interested to see this email. A technical difference this significant between the two sorts of sim is interesting news. The evidence is for all to see in the numerous dilation graphs available here. These include mainland and private sims, and show no such difference, and relatively few actual crashes in either. What a pity the four SLCC sims were not logged so that we could look back and see the truth about how they coped.

From what I saw they did very well, in the two or three hours I spent there I think I saw one of them crash once, and no reason to believe they would go down simultaneously.

Time dilation held up well, although it seemed impossible to convince people to spread out, and they kept concentrating in one or two sims of the four. But since no one of them could have held more than about 40 people before becoming unenterable, no crash would have caused more than about 40 reconnections, so the "hundreds of people" seems a totally unfounded fear. And don't you have to click "Play" after a disconnect ? If so this would spread reconnections a little more as people would take different times to realise and respond.

True, many people gave up and left when they found the video screens dead with no explanation. We didn't therefore get anywhere near capacity. If people had found the screens working as they expected, my guess is all four sims would have filled.

There were many of us waiting in hope - basically because I never heard anyone show us the courtesy of admitting the screens would not be switched on. We just got vague statements of "technical difficulties" so no-one knew whether to wait or give up.

The maximum I counted in the four sims was, if I remember, 87 people, with about 35 in the fullest sim.

I still say that it would have been only courteous to residents, sponsors and builders to switch the screens on and TRY. The feared disaster seems pretty hypothetical to me.

And to make a decision NOT to try, and tell no-one until long afterwards, seems pretty unbelievable to me, and the technical justification for the decision still seems very shaky.

I guess if we could see the Linden email which caused the "its too dangerous to try" decision to be made, then we might drop our scepticism about the decision itself, but it would hardly justify not bothering to inform us all clearly at the time.

I'm still feeling grumpy, I'm afraid - as you see.

But if you think I'm just a whinger, I hearby volunteer next year to set up the arena screens, test them thoroughly two days before (using alternate video sources), monitor their correct performance throughout the day, and post immediate huge easily readable notices keeping everyone at the arena informed if problems develop. In fact, I'll put the status messages directly on the screens themselves. Even an unexpected message takes three minutes in photoshop, two minutes to upload, and one minute to slap on a prim.

Even faster with an inworld text display board.

I'll also organise ten alternate viewing locations if you like. It really isn't difficult.

What is important is that whoever takes this responsibility has it clearly delegated to them, and is not present at the conference in RL, with all the resulting distractions, and certainly must not be trying to help organise other aspects of the conference at the same time. No-one could do both without things going wrong almost inevitably.

I remember them saying it too, on numerous occasions. Then again, I didn't believe them then either. Their track record for actually doing what they say they'll do (or in this case dont do) is not exactly the greatest. Saying one thing and then doing the opposite is their (or at least one of 'they') basic personality traits.

In the meantime, I'll be more than happy to donate my time and scripting abilities to get the proper in-world stuff in place to aid community involvement. No point in waiting until the damage is done by the SLC planning committee, far better to prevent it from happening in the first place.


- Newfie

Don't know whether this has been mentioned before, but...

Um, that's not a yes or no question. There is a "comment" option I suppose.

We'll probably still be involved to some extent though our roles may change. Currently, we are just continuing with wrapping up stuff from the current SLCC such as the survey, thank you's etc. Other than that we really haven't decided what our "official" roles will be and that is another task added to the post-SLCC06 wrap up.

Yah I know I fucked up that one. It should have been an essay text box instead of yes or no.

I suppose you have never once changed your mind in your life?

While we are looking to bring new people they have to be the right people. We get a lot of people who want to be involved, but when push comes to shove they don't want to actually do anything. I think we will probably move to a different process of recruiting organizers and volunteers and have more clearly defined job roles and responsibilities.

I forgot to mention I mean more of an announcement mailing list. We used that for some extent during the current convention for disseminating information to all registrants.

Irregardless, these events truly are a major undertaking, and I bet you guys need a breather for a bit . Thanks again Jennyfur, and Flipper, and the rest of the gang for putting together an overall great event!

My my, going to try to refuse me from contributing this year? Are you *really* sure you want to try to block me from helping, after all your bitching and whining about it last year? You wont have that excuse this year to complain then, you know!


By the way, I know how you change your mind. You say whatever suits your fancy to shut up those that disagree with you, and then immediately do whatever it is that you think are in your own petty self-interests.

Offended by that assessment? Then prove me wrong. So far all I've see is a two-faced hypocrite that can't even stand up for her own words. I'm here ready to prove my words, how about you?


- Newfie

Look Newfie, no matter what I ever say or ever do even if it is exactly what you want you will find some fault in it and crucify me for it. So please forgive me if I no longer care.

Thats a decent idea though I am not sure that people would instinctively know to look there for a survey.

So far, we've posted the survey (here obviously ) The SL IRC Channel (its been the topic header for a few days now), SL Universe, Second Citizen, Second Lifers (Live Journal Community) Second Space (My Space Group) and Second Life (another My Space Group).

I asked Linden Lab if it could be included in their newsletter or anywhere else that would be appropriate.

We will also be posting it on the SLCC website (though the traffic is minimal) and I think sending the link out to the registration list.

Anyone is free to link or post it where they see fit. Dissemination of information to the entire mass population of SL is one of the greatest difficulties because there really is no centralized means of doing so used by a large percentage of the population.

Regards,
Jennyfur

Why does the amount of registered accounts have to with how many people are participating in viewing the SLCC? The current system that LL has in place will not handle that amount of users online at once. When I entered the sim to view the SLCC video and realized it wasnt beign streamed I left. Yea I had some issues with lag but I figured if I found a seat and sat still the lagg would almost disappear.

If you guys was concerned about the amount of people connecting to the video server at once then you should have had the event host announce that the feed is down and have everybody hit stop so when the feed came back online it would not end up disconnecting and/or crashing. But to completely decide to nix the entire thing was a huge mistake.

To echo somebody elses statement about wanting somebody to post a transcript of what was happening would have been really appreciated. Also maybe have some of the events recorded and hosted on the net for viewing after the fact so you can still see and hear what happened first hand.

So far what I have concluded from these posts its not so much the big huge things as much as the little things that pissed people off. And honestly this is too much planning for just two (2) people to cordinate before and during the event. Maybe you guys should accept defeat on this subject and bow out now and start recuirting some help for next years event. Seems that their is people in world that is willing to help out with in world issues and Im sure there are some people willing to deal with the Real world issues.

Hmmm .. don't know what this is about - looks like some history here.

I don't really know how overall these conventions are organised, who initiates them, who does the hardwork in RL, whether they are paid, if so by whom etc etc. It can be very hard to find out.

What I do know is that often it is the personal drive of just a couple, or even one person who forces such a thing into existence. I also know that it is unwise to fail to appreciate the rarity of the qualities they display in doing this. Unwise because they may be very hard to replace, and because there may be many willing to criticise, but very very few willing and capable to replace them.

I know nothing of how SLCC comes about. It may be Flip/Jen is such a person, it may be not. My criticisms have related only to what happened inworld. By all accounts everything else ran superbly and I guess it involved a huge amount of work.

These special people often err in trying to do too much themselves, and if things go askew this is almost always the cause. Delegation is often the hardest and most-delayed skill we learn - partly because we can easily get our fingers burned.

My guess is, Flip doesn't really want to admit it (maybe because of enemies like Newfie around) but on the day, things went wrong in world at the worst possible moment, without anybody otherwise uncommitted who was ready and equipped to sort them. At a moment of maximum stress in RL something had to give - and after all it was only the immersive side of the inworld experience, wasn't it ? 80% of people were probably smart enough to get the stream direct, after all. It's not as though there was no other way.

All my whinging is simply to ensure that next time the inworld side is genuinely delegated to someone whose SOLE RESPONSIBILITY and enthusiasm is towards creating immersion, and who is tasked with making the inworld experience the best it can be. An enthusiast for the dual reality concept who makes sure his half is flawless and runs like clockwork. With no possibility of distraction, and having to make difficult prioritizing choices on the fly. Someone willing to stand up and be judged on what the inworld participants experienced, and on that alone. Residents, sponsors, and other contributors.

I am not angling to be that person, though I would be happy to take on a crisply defined part of it which suited my talents if I am needed.

If I am ranting on about all this, it really is because I was hugely disappointed. Maybe it was childish of me, I don't quite understand why I cared so much. I really got enthusiastic about that surreal organic build. I really wanted to sit and see it work. I really shifted round my RL schedule to try to be there.

It seemed to me that what I had so looked forward to was tossed aside like so much trivial dross, and that my disappointment was totally disrespected both then, and perhaps even still. "Immersion - what does that matter you Ninny".

Yes I know it's childish of me, I know it's not even totally fair, but I was really hurt. As though my feelings for SL had been spat upon.

The same way I can't help feeling about the Linden's closing the forums and not even having the guts to lay out the real reasons. "New direction for the Forums" was it ? Big blow to my faith in them. Same curious feeling I have been spat upon.

So there you go - thats the truth - I'm just a damn idealistic Ninny. Best to just ignore me till I get over it.