Desperate Cry

Hi. I'm Squagmire Stravinsky.

I run scripting classes for free in SL, without receiving any kind of linden support. I run a free central library project in SL called 'infoNet'. I'm head of the SL Educational Senate, and push for more educational events and resources for those that want to learn in SL. I do all of this in my own time, and I do it unpaid. I have never used GoM to convert a single L$ into RL currency.

I have clawed at the infrastructure of SL, to try and keep education in SL. But I have watched my efforts die in vein, as any hope for an open and sharing SL die... Piece after piece. Slowly, and painfully.

I enjoy clubs, and I like tringo... But SL could be so much more. This is an educators last desperate cry for help. The small caring community that was SL has died. We have a crowded mega-city full of people only interested in themselves. As someone that cares, I'm being drained dry.

I've had over 60 people volounteer to help me. But when the work fell, there was no-one to catch.

I'm trying to make SL a better place for all, and this is my last desperate cry.
If this cry lands on deaf ears, I will know where the community stands and will promptly pack my bags and leave SL.

So ... what are you asking for?

I can help with some aspects if my skills (textures, building, limited script editing) are congruent with what you need. Just let me know, I am more than willing to help, especially with educational endeavors.

i'm not sure what you're asking for but here are some links to some threads in the sl forums that are talking about classes, teaching, and helping people:
/120/87/44276/1.html
/3/d1/49013/1.html
/110/5e/48869/1.html
/120/35/47698/1.html
maybe you can contact some of these people for information and/or help. or you could work with them.

I've heard there are not always enough students to fill the classes... I can offer my help as an eager student since I have much to learn.

you can get linden support for educational classes. they will pay you 500L for a half hour truly educational class. i think i am right here.

marilyn

I can relate, really. I feel that from about 1.5-forward, Second Life shifted from a community of builders to a community of consumers - and as a result, you're seeing a lot more blanket advertising for massive interests than classes.

It's tough. A part of this I blame on the defiled Events browser, for failing to keep the club/tringo/mature events off the list of those not interested in it. As a result, simply finding an educational event has become difficult.

But I feel it will get better. A large focus of my efforts, particularly in the content creation forums, as well as minor correspondence with the Lindens - is to make Second Life a better, more attractive place for real-world artists and professionals. Those forums are a start, since people ask questions daily.

I'm also working on a tool to bring more power to the Second Life building system, vis a vis external editing and better imports into Second Life. I have not had the time I'd like to devote to the project, but if you're interested in what that may entail, feel free to send me an IM.

And... that's pretty much where I stand. I feel massive consumerism at the expense of everything else is a phase - and like anything, that won't last forever. I feel it will shift into something much like the internet is today - a large mesh of competing ideas, where everyone can find their niche.

I humbly apologize that it is what it is now, but again, that's simply human nature. If you're interested in learning some of the "tools of the trade" to get your stuff out there or get more people interested, please feel free to send me an IM or stop by Game Dev 3. Chances are I'll be there.

As head of the SL educational senate, I'm in contact with most educational groups in SL. This includes:

1. The Learning Center
   
2. SL Historical Society
   
3. Touchstone
   
4. Brainiacs
   
5. Poetry Guild
   
6. YadNi s CRAZY TECHS Research GROUP
   
7. SL Public Library
   
8. Linden Labs
   

There has never ever been a lack of interest of classes. I have never run an intro to scripting class with less than 20 people in attendance, no matter what time of day I schedule the class. Most educators will agree with me that there are infact more students now than ever.

A lack of educational events is causing classes to be overcrowded. There are too many students and not enough teachers. The learning center, just like a lot of orginisations are in desperate need of teachers.


The infoNet project is the idea of creating a free centralised public library in SL. The purpose of the library is to store everything from free scripts and objects, to news, fiction and even player blogs. This project needs anyone that has time to give, and the will to finish what they start. Scripters, Builders, News Reporters, Random Wanderers, Fiction Writers, Teachers, Students, Artists, Designers, and anyone else with a clue.

I have had over 60 people volounteer to help with both teaching and the infoNet during the past several months, and most havn't pulled through. I'd like to thank those that have contributed in some way for their time in this dark hour. But the honest truth, is that most have fallen on their word.

I used to enjoy days of helping new players wandering into the sandbox, asking for help. An army of people would raise their hand and rush over, should a someone ask. In these times, there is a lack of interest in helping people make their day just a bit easier. The nice community members in SL are a dying breed...

This is my last desperate cry for the good people left out there, to stand up for the community we've lost.

As a first step, I think we need to quit defining our differences and acknowledge that there is a place for all of us. If you reject that, it's your own issue.

You are desparate coming here. Contact me inworld and I will do the same.

I'd say Jeffrey Gomez has hit the nail on the head...a shift to a consumer driven SL.
Well, it's a business in a highly competitve MMO market and who knows who's pushing the marketing buttons. It may be just a transitional phase, mb not.

A recent article on New World Notes is an example (imo) of this push, touting the benefits of "better living though retail" as the path forward to a new world order!
Not quite an infomercial, but close considering some of the comments imo.

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/06/business_model_.html#comments

To be very clear - I'm not against business, innovation, or money making in RL/SL at all and in fact I have my own projects under development both commercial and non-commercial...some bleeding edge and some closer to reality.
I did not see anything innovative in the business model presented, as I'm sure it already exists in places like Avalon and Taco, but kudo's to timeless for approaching business development in a structured fashion.

[projection 2010 - SL virtual walmart - evil marketing dweebs invent virtual RFID tracker tech that monitors product use by consumers (ie: silicon buying units) and feeds back real time to product development, sales and marketing]

However, I repost my comments in the previously mentioned article as I think they are relevant to this discussion ie: how to build a vibrant, diverse, virtual community beyond a "consume, be silent, die" model, compensation models for effort needed to do this, creation of value, and definitions of value beyond simplistic definitions of building bank accounts as the way to create a viable community...

Time is money...but what is money?

>>Retail as a way to build a better world

I think there is a fundemental flaw in this, as with a lot of SL that just translates RL concepts into SL.

The real potential value of SL is in creating paradigms of social value/"wealth" creation that would be immpossible to do in the RL because of time/space constraints. I think I read somewhere that this was one of Philip Linden's key drivers for creating SL (apart from fulfilling the VC exit strategy).

Perhaps we need to think about the role of money and what role it actually plays in creating a so-called "better world".

An interesting read in this regard:

"What is money? And how well does it work to solve society’s ills? Bernard Lietaer, author of the upcoming book Access to Human Wealth: Money beyond Greed and Scarcity (Access Books, 2003), has made a life’s work of exploring these questions. Lietaer has been involved in the world of money systems for more than 25 years, and his experience in monetary matters ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro), and served as president of the Electronic Payment System in his native Belgium. He also co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency funds."

http://www.nexuspub.com/articles/2003/july2003/interview.htm

See Also: /120/63/49007/1.html (Subsidies thread)

Correct. A large part of the problem isn't the fact people are "out of their niche" or "have different ideas," but rather the fact ideas off the beaten path fall prey to lack of incentives. I've seen residents be generally ugly with one another, to the degree I hide out in only a handful of sims.


Such is the case here.


I disagree that "the nice people are a dying breed," but rather the majority of them have (intelligently) decided to make a few Lindens for their efforts or have hidden away from the mainstream. This makes it very difficult to find support for just about anything "new" or "genuinely interesting" that hasn't been done over and become popular.

This form of hiding is very much a problem in and of itself, and happens to be a practice I myself follow. By virtue of many chasing the dollar as a call and a creed, several of us just here for the heck of it have become disaffected or outright cynical.


It just doesn't need to be that way.


The only real recourse is to build our own community, and therein lies the irony. That incents us to do the very thing we hate - force SL to be about money. To own land is to place huge financial backing into the world... and incent us to recoup our expenses.


Noticing a pattern here?


The underlying irony is this: To create a community of free minded, generous people in Second Life, someone has to take a financial fall and catter to the expenses. Compounding the problem is SL's growing lack of appeal to content creators, as things become less about what we can "do" and more about how much we can "make."

I feel it will get better. The metaverse concept is still in grasp, but to get there, the Lindens need to "push" us more to achieve as a community, not as a market. I feel the greatest means of doing this is to host more building contests and more artistic ventures until the server code for SL is released.

Because when that happens, all hell will break loose. And in the end, it might serve to be the push we need.

It's true, the creator/consumer ratio has changed, but what I find facinating is that we saw SL go from a dozen well-attended classes a day to none in a matter of weeks. Fortunately things are slowly turning around, but attendance is still pretty inconsistent.

There are still plenty of people who want to learn, so what gives? I really have to agree that it's largely due to the state of the Find menu. I'm sorry to say, but it's simply not well designed for what most users need. At the very least there should be many more categorization options and that settings should be retained from session to session.

If I never want to see a slave auction or a Slingo game, but I DO want to see other mature events, or Tringo, or advanced texturing classes, then I should be able to easily specify those sorts of things. There should be very few restrictions on what qualifies as an event and what doesn't, simply because we should be able to pick and choose what WE think an event should be. If I believe that someone's garage sale qualifies, that should be MY call, not Linden's. Jeffrey's right -- it's ridiculous to think that with as diverse a userbase as Second Life's, that anyone could presume to believe that there must be a singular way of doing things.

Fortunately, I have high hopes for a technical solution to what is effectively a technical problem, its social effects notwithstanding. With the scheduled integration of Mozilla, we should get a measure of user interface customization far beyond anything the Lindens have come up with in-house. Taken to extremes, AJAX interfaces such as Google Maps would be possible. Imagine being able to have a scrollable timeline view, showing both SL time and your local time, with visual representations of events, able to quickly select by category, topic, duration, host, group, similarity to past events you attended, and so on... even comparisons to other users' public interests. None of this is difficult to do on the web.

Unfortunately, it's scheduled for 1.8, and we won't know what measure of integration we'll see until then. Until we do, I don't see the effects changing. The Find menu is crippled, and it affects us all.

There really isn't much to find anymore in terms of classes. After meeting with Squagmire today, I have discovered that the The Learning Center, which previously had a full and active teaching staff as well as a large support group, has dwindled to two teachers and one support person in a very short period of time. (I guess you can change that to two support people, Squagmire?) I've volunteered to help on the organizational side to, hopefully, free up Squagmire for teaching and technical support of the infonet system. My first focus will be restoring the class schedule to a respectable size. Anyone who is willing to take on teaching a class please post here or contact me inworld. The more volunteers we have, the less of a burden it will be on any one individual or group of individuals.

The nice community is NOT a dying breed. There are lots of people working to help in their own way, and in their own time schedule. We are a diverse lot and communication/distribution of ideas is very tough right now. Some stuff is on the forums, some sluniverse, some in HAND, some in InfoNet I guess, some completely word of mouth... I think LL has to step in and become a little more active in how educational opportunities/assets are passed on to new users.

Case in point -- I'm part of Touchstone and have built and continue to build free educational tools, but haven't even HEARD of any educational senate.

There are some serious structural problems at work here. Cat's post was helpful, at least discussing potential future solutions. See jesse linden's thread in event discussion -- at least LL is thinking about them, even if they do not sound like they have a workable plan as of yet.

I'm not saying the situation is ideal right now, nor saying your frustration is not valid, but there are plenty of good, helpful people in SL, and we WILL get through this.

The events planning group that Robin Linden started and which anyong can join is working on making better categories, and the last she said was that the game devs say this isn't going to be that huge a chore to program but it needs refinement. There are players and Lindens grappling with the "defilement" issue.

My solution would be to have you charge money for your lessons. I know I'd pay them because I pay for work. Others would pay, too. There's an attitude against this, but that's what is killing you. You are working for free, getting nowhere, and feeling exploited.

You've also run up against the wall of too many select scripters chasing too few consumers who have a need for new, paid scripters or even free scripts. The world has lots of scripts that people can get for free or buy. New people coming in don't immediately feel a need for any learning of scripting precisely because your buddies in this field gave away all the free scripts already. It's a market glutted with freebies, sapping initiative. No one needs to learn to script to save money on the costs of scripts -- that's the thing that gets people to learning to build, for example.

If you don't want to charge, if you don't want to get over this hump of the glutted market, then what happened to the Lindens' educational grants? Don't they give those out? Aren't you eminently qualified to get them?

And are you not the very same person who was working on some kind of scripted events listing device or something? And didn't I ask if you would make this not just nonprofit but also sell it for businesses to use, too? And didn't you say you didn't want to do this?

I'm sure if you beat the bushes now hard enough you will find the volunteers willing to play under the old subbotnik rules or working for free.

But you could consider even a modest fee that puts a value on your work and gives you a sense of accomplishment. If you took money, I'd have had you fixing a door script this evening or paid you to teach me to fix the door script. But you didn't...and I couldn't....

Learn to read. That wouldn't help you to attack the "scripterati" though would it? Is this were I am supposed to get warm fuzzies over this supposedly benign term that carries no negative connotation?

What we need is more intermediate/advanced classes. Whenever I look at classes on scripting or building they are always the beginners ones.

Well, I see it's more a social problem (alternative compensation mechanisms to attract skilled long-term committed teachers) hampered by the technical problems you identify.

Hello Squagmire,

I recently joined your class. It was extremely helpful for me to get started in LSL as I needed to break down the language barrier (by which I mean English). I remained silent for most of the two hours you spent for us, for fear of slowing down the class, but I want you to know that I'm very thankful. I, for one, would have gladly paid some tuition

I wish there was some special way to pay respect for people like you other than the normal rating system or donation box, which would get you support and possibly some inside knowledge from LL.

However, I have run into more than a few people who were willing to give me tips and pointers, stick around with me for when I have questions and generally be patient with me. And they are not even mentors or instructors. Just some normal, relatively young (in SL) residents with skills in scripting and building. So, the caring community is not dying, or so I suppose. It's just that we are too small, young and too far from the crowded centre of the world for your eyes to see.

But then, not everybody is as lucky as I have been. That is why I appreciate your effort to "organise" the helping spirit and the wealth of knowledge even more.

Here's a common mistake a newbie (me) is likely to make--- s/he looks for the knowledge in-world. I thought there'd be something like the Ivory Tower in scripting and texturing too. It took me long to realise that I sholud be looking into the forum, wiki and other sites for those matters. It would be great if InfoNet prevails. LL should seriously aid such a project in every possible way as it would make it easier for SL to flourish. They host the forum and wiki so why not InfoNet?

Again, thank you Squagmire. I know sometimes "thank you" is not enough but hey, I'm only 2 weeks old I'll try to do what I can.

Squagmire, I understand what you are saying. Sometimes attempting something as new and big as you are doing is difficult, especially when you don't have a cadre of people there to understand what you are doing or to help in all the various aspects of a project that big. It gets depressing. Too much, too big, no support. And, I know that you are not talking about financial support. You are talking about the kind that is there to bounce ideas around, unknot problems, move forward. I run into that a lot, especially in trying to establish ShockProof.

My efforts to keep my head above water in SL sometimes fail too. However, there will be people who will come through for you. Do not quit. If I can help in some small way, I would love to. Right now, my memberships in ShockProof, Touchstone, and Brigadoon are a bit time consuming but there is enough overlap with what you are seeming to want to do, that I may be able to help. IM me, ok?

Do not quit. Your expertise is valuable. Your idea is valuable. And, your willingness to reach out and ask for help is valuable.

Soj

I believe that part of the problem stems from the fact that creative people tend to be hermits and anti-social.

For example, I've been tempted to try and run an advance LSL class several times. I'm a pretty good teacher and I have some idea for study materials... unfortunatly, I am not really intrested in getting any IMs about scripting issues and problems after class, during my free time. Just the concept of having to deal with someone's scripting problems for days after class is acting as a turn off for me.

So instead I ended up trying to help by releasing open-source scripts that people can use to learn from. Not a perfect solution, but its better then sitting and doing nothing.

This is not just me though.. if you'll look around, you will notice that most of the scripters in SL are pretty anti-social, and at most prefer to stick to their own personal circle of friends. The same can be said about many of our talented artist in textures, modeling, animation, etc'.

This is not -the- problem, but its definetly part of it.

Funny you mention that. I'm actually very outgoing an social in SL.

But when I'm scripting...

Let's be honest. Hacking out hundreds of lines of code is hard enough without distractions. There are some days I get NOTHING done because a few friends come over. Let's be honest. Scripting is not like writing fiction or prose, since it's design is not linear. One distraction and I could be rereading dozens of lines of code.

You know. An offline coding kit that allows test compiles would be ever so nice, LL... How about a mini server in the client for testing code?


Luckily, I have Botany to help run interferance and allow me some time to work, but scripting, no matter how good I am at it, is NOT the primary reason I came to SL.

I'm a bit dissapointed that the classifieds don't even list "Education" as a potential category. How could one use it for education? Example could perhaps be "Teachers needed." or "Private tutor wanted.", those may be more for "Wanted" ads, but at this point I think you'll get all kinds of ads mixed in with Classifieds anyway.

Thats just one observation I had.

We all know of the issues that teaching in classes can present, with being busy and with griefers. The problem is waiting for the features. But would that even help?

The Find menu itself needs a major over-haul.

A central education information center, in that one can go and find out the possible ways to be educated in SL, in one central spot (or several simultaneously updated locatoins), would help everyone greatly.

In the way that potential teachers, students, and other education groups, could find out about eachother.

I think this is what Squag is trying to do in some form, however its just starting out so inevitably there will be those who find out randomly.

I don't think I have enough patients or skill to teach a class, but hopefully I can help in my own way with content.