Olmy Seraph's proposals for town halls

Olmy Seraph posted the following in the Hotline to Linden Thread

Town Hall suggestions
I see we have a town hall with Cory Linden tomorrow. Last week's town hall with Philip was problematic - while we appreciate Philip taking the time on his vacation for the event, few people felt their questions were addressed adequately or Philip had enough information to provide good answers. I have a few suggestions for making town halls a more valuable experience and easier to run.

1) Return to the practice of pre-submitting questions. Open a thread and let residents post questions there. (If we had some sort of karma moderation (a la Slashdot) in forums we could even have other residents vote on which questions they would like to see asked, but that's just pie in the sky today.) Or let people IM to Jeska ahead of time. This will let residents who can't attend in person submit questions, and will also give Jeska time to screen and select questions rather than having to respond to an IM barrage in real time. More importantly, it will give the speaker time to research the question and provide a more meaningful answer than "send me an email about this". Live question submission should continue, but ideally pre-submitted questions should be at least 1/2 of the ones used.

2) Make the main in-person event (in Brampton?) by invitation only. Invite people who have submitted selected questions or have significantly contributed to conversations on the issues being addressed. In the past the "studio audience" has been mostly a bunch of yahoos and hecklers, causing LL to filter their comments from the repeater broadcast. It would be nice however to have an audience who would engage the speaker in cogent conversation. In the last town hall, Philip misunderstood or needed clarification for several questions - if the appropriate resident had been present at the main event location s/he could have responded and raised the level of the conversation, making it a more valuable exchange of information for everyone.

3) Encourage Lindens to visit major repeater locations. I was lucky enough to be at a repeater where Robin came to listen at last week's town hall. It substantially improved the experience for everyone there. Thanks again, Robin, for coming and hanging with us.

4) Work out some simple convention for the moderator and speaker to communicate when it is time for a new question. Last week there were times when Jeska had posed two new questions to Philip while he was still working on an old one. Perhaps splitting the IM monkey job to another Linden would free up the moderator to concentrate on managing the event and smooth out the question flow.

==============================================

I would like to say, in response, that if the only people invited to a town hall were to be those who have put forward suggestions or, as you say, "contributed to conversations on the issues being addressed" it would deny 90 percent of the population who do not read or participate in forums.

Totally agree about the hacklers and yahoos - maybe we could get round that by people with questions to IM Jeska or whoever, and no-one else's voice could be heard. I don't know if that is doable but it would allow anyone and everyone to attend and to be able to have their say.

Agree with your paragraph 4. Even reading the transcript was confusing.

Alexa

Not a bad idea. But the problem I see with it is, a tiny percentage of SL'er read the forums. Perhaps is an announcement and email address were put for in-world, this would be the way to go. Another possibilty would be to have the IMs go to a person that weeds through them and chooses the ones that will go to Philip, or another speaker, and the remaining questions get personally responded to by other liasons that aren't directly involved with the TownHall. That way, questions that have already been answered by LL a dozen times, don't take time from the Speaker.



Invitation only will just cause hard feelings. It should be first come, first serve, like all other events. Repeaters are a great way to listen and discuss without the hassles of folks being asses at the main event location. In fact, it wouldn't hurt my feeling if Philip spoke (typed) his responses from an area that was inaccessible by any SL residents. Then afterwards, if he had the time, he could show up to a specified spot to chat with residents.



They already do this. At one time or another, i think we had 6 Lindens show up at our location, with three or four of them staying for the entire townhall, and a few of them stayed afterwards to ask and answer questions and visit with us.



A good idea. Could be as easy as Philip saying, "Next". I don't envy Jeska's task of trying to wade through all the IMs and time it to get as many in as possible. Plus I think she just wanted to make sure Philip didn't get too long-winded.

I think David brings up some good "caution" points on the proposed changes. I am bumping this thread because I think it WOULD be useful for LL to rethink how it does the town halls.

I also appreciate that Philip, Robin and team take the time to communicate with SL members, but the mechanics can be improved now that SL has scaled to its present size.

Presubmitted questions are a good idea.

The face-to-face concept is cute and all, but when someone is addressing the entire grid, there's no reason for anybody to "attend." Everybody can submit questions and clarifications, via IM to the facilitator, and everybody can listen to the speaker on repeaters. The "meeting" can be conducted from one of the Lindens' private sims in a lag free environment so that the repeater pickups work seamlessly.

Jeska has opened a thread in Feature Feedback to solicit questions for tomorrow's town hall: /20/74/44358/1.html . Thanks Jeska!

My suggestion for making the in-person event invitation only was not so much to exclude people but to allow folks who's questions were going to be discussed to be there to provide clarification and perhaps follow-up questions. If it also keeps the conversation more focused with less heckling, all the better. But the main point is to avoid the speaker having to punt on the question because s/he doesn't understand it. If there are still seats open after questioners have been invited, open them up I guess. Or not. I think I'd rather the speaker wasn't all distracted by random people and could concentrate on the questions.

I'm glad this is getting discussed. I know there are a few different ways to improve things, and I'm happy to see brainstorming around the issues.