Do you prefer audio or text townhalls?

What do you think? I prefer the text mode town halls, and hope we have at least some of them in the future.

i think this is positively painful as audio only. it's probably more bearable if you're inworld and present. except I cant do inworld.

Audio is cool and stuff, but it wont let you roll back, and if your connection isnt that good you might miss things, and some people may have voices that become unintelligible when broadcasted and all that stuff. (and theres the international ppl that reads better than listen)

Specially theres need for a third party program and you wont do it with SL. But audio is cool.

My university uses an overzelous firewall - I can use only a select number of ports
This makes listening live out of the question, unless someone knows of some way to redirect the stream through 80.

==Chris

Audio prevents morons from trying to take center stage by yelling out inane crap that they think is "lols".

Perhaps.. But instead it allows people to waste question time with "Hey Phil, how you doing, loved you in Lethal Weapon 3" kinda stuff.. Think about how many audio questions actually got heard and how long they took compared to text questions...

Townhalls have to be moderated and screened in such a way that they don't serve as a way for attention-starved adolescents to get "camera time" to show off for their fifteen minutes of fame.

It's like the people behind the reporter in a newscast who jump and scream and yell "HI MOM!".

SL is too big for a community meeting now, since it's much larger than a "town", and the anonymity of it causes people to view it as a stage where they can act like jerkoffs and have a bunch of their giggling buddies see them on the other side of the screen.

Much prefer audio. I can build and listen at the same time. They just need a more reliable stream and they'll be off to the races.

Maybe it's too early to judge audio town halls? I mean... we've only had one audio version so far. Might want to wait until we've had a few of them in order to make a good judgment as to whether it's very viable.

As for this particular town hall... I found it somewhat awkward. Lots of dead silence, stuttering when talking, things like that. Needs a bit more organization or planning. It answered a few questions, but not 100% smoothly.

A year and a half or to two years or so ago, I think, there was a combo sort of town hall. People IM'd questions in and Philip did a voice broadcast, at first doing a "state of the state" type thing then responding to the IM'd questions... I wonder why that hasn't happened again. It would seem that that would solve the issue of controlling attention-seekers and getting questions into a queue for answering.

I prefer an audio town hall meeting with text transcript I can refer to for points missed or simply to revisit specific topic discussions. I haven't been able to attend a town hall in over a year and I used to make it to all of them when I first started. It was wonderful to listen to the meeting and hear fellow residents call in while making dinner.

I'm sure in time the stream and manner in which the calls are taken will smooth out along with whatever other technical difficulties they experienced. It's far preferable for me to hear a telecast even in its imperfect state than miss the event enitrely and reading a very long chat log later.

I think having multiple means of receiving town hall information is very valuable. It allows people the option of going with how they learn best - text, voice, or both.

The telecast also reminded me of just how small our world is with people calling in from around the world and that the avatars we see in SL and enter into discussions with here in the forums really are people.

angel

audio all the way you can get a much better idea of the meaning of a statement when you can actually hear the voice making the statement.

So who shall decide what is 'inane'? What is moronic? Who are attention starved?
You know if someone has a question, my philosophy is to let them have at it. Why does that scare you so much?

Given the number of hearing impaired people I know (and work with) IRL and know or know of in SL I have a preference for text - they have a need for it although it would be interesting to know what they thought of the dual service that we got yesterday. The dual service will probably be of interest to other groups - dyslexic users of SL (and yes we have them too) will probably prefer the audio stream after all.

Speaking personally - if there's audio and text I'll pay attention to the text and ignore the audio, so text only is fine by me personally.

BUT, Phil is clearly more comfortable talking than writing - for his town halls there might be an advantage to having audio + transcript.

Phil did mention he'd answered far more questions this time than last. I'm still unconvinced this is the way to go in general. I remember a techie town hall (sorry I can't remember who with now, Cory maybe?) where all the presubmitted questions (at least those with submitted a little while before the TH started) had prepared answered cut and pasted. It was a massive info-dump and there were a few questions repeated because people blinked and missed the answers. It did, however, answer far, far more questions than either of Phil's last two, probably more than them added together! It won't be appropriate for everything I'm sure, but Phil's 'preamble' could all have been written in such a fashion, cut and pasted at a speed closer to typing speed (and saved poor Robin, although her psychic typing was impressive and makes me suspect that Phil was riffing from a script in part) and it would make things flow at the town hall for those that hate voice or cannot use it for whatever reason.

Given that I would probably quit using SL if voice chat became common, you can imagine what I think of audio town halls.

I frequently visit Second Life from the school computer lab. That is a setting where audio participation is totally out of the question; turning on the sound on the computer would be rude to all the other people around me. People at an office who are visiting SL during work breaks would have the same problem.

Another problem with voice chat is that some SL residents are maintaining complete anonymity; that is, they do not want their RL identity to be divulged in any way in Second Life. Voice chat makes that impossible, as your real voice is being sent to other people.

I like the audio town hall. I like both actually, but the audio town hall makes more sense in my mind. I feel the phone ins are perhaps a waste of time however due to the "Hey, how's it going? I was um, wondering.... if.... um.. " moments that an ill prepared individual can experience. Speech really is the fastest way to communicate information to another party. I'm glad that they provided at least an attempt at a real time transcription of the questions, and I look forward to the actual transcription later.

I do agree though that they need more work with the broadcasting. When they offloaded some of the listeners to a seperate stream things picked up quite considerably, so next time it should be much better if they just go with that from the outset.

This shouldn't be an either/or issue.

There's never a good reason to limit any official event in SL to just audio or just text; I'm sure not only are there residents who prefer not to use sound, but there are probably residents who are deaf. Having an audio-only townhall would unfairly limit their access to the official information coming from Linden Labs.

I wouldn't say that speech is the fastest way to communicate information at all. If I spoke as fast as I typed, you wouldn't be able to understand me. Moreover, in technological terms, voice is obviously slower, since it takes longer to transmit - no matter how good your voice software is, or how fast your connection is. IRL, voice is easier - that's why outside of middle school people don't pass notes. But in SL and other technologically-driven venues, there a huge number of reasons why text is easier.

Personally, I haven't seen any real benefits to audio, as the technology currently stands, and I see a lot of problems. While their are problems with the text Town Hall as well, I think having a better text Town Hall is a more reasonable answer than switching to a whole new technology. If annoying comments are the biggest problem in text Town Halls, then it's got vastly fewer problems than audio, it seems to me.

I agree.

I answered this poll out loud.

There is so much worthless crosstalk at town halls (even after Lindens ask people to knock it off) that it becomes hard to read. There are just too damn many people speaking out of turn, and the text scrolls so fast that it can be hard to pick out what Philip is trying to say. With audio, I can simply ignore all the retarded shit people apparently cannot stop themselves from typing, and hear only the voice of the person I actually went to listen to. This, for me, is waaaaaaaaaaay better than having to actively filter a giant chatlog with a signal to noise ratio of 1:10.

You're in the minority. Speech is usually way faster than typing. Hence shorthand, etc. Turn on the text display on your TV sometime and watch the news, which is transcribed live, and you will see all sorts of errors, because it is tremendously hard to type accurately as fast as people speak.

I am deaf. I prefer text, obviously.

Whoa, are you really deaf? (Not flaming, just curious)

Nopes. Not me. I just like to pretend to be deaf...it's a real hoot.









(Yes. I am deaf. No offense taken, I am used to that question...like 10 times a day usually. lol)