Town Halls: Good and Bad

I'm noticing a lot of town halls of late, and while I can't attend them directly anymore (as they're held during my night class), I've been watching and taking part in them for some time.

As such, I will ask:


How can these town halls be improved?



Please discuss the pros and cons of this form of feedback, as I feel they are one of the best ways we can be heard.



I'll start with what I recently posted to the Linden Hotline:

/invalid_link.html



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Keep discussion civil, or I'm going to break out my Bat of the Gnerph.

I think we need a Town Hall Gestapo.

Someone to kick people in the teeth (or at the least Freeze/Kick/Eject them from the locale) when they blather over the speaker, rez every useless piece of crap from their inventories, and play every sound file they've ever heard.

Town Halls have turned into Stupidity On Parade, and every time I make the mistake of attending one, I'm perplexed as to why the Lindens don't just nuke SL from orbit.

listening to townhalls from repeaters isn't so bad. the repeaters only repeat a linden.

That's what I've started doing. Much better.

lol
the last meeting I attempted to attend crashed, and was infected by the lag monster. I much prefer the repeaters- fast and easy with no extra garbage.

also lets thank the Lindens for all their hard work in bringing us more town halls and more opportunities to help SL grow!

THANKS!

Now, they just need an "image repeater" to go alongside the text repeater. It would repeat the posted example textures, or screenshots taken at appropriate times by the MC Linden. Then no one need to be in the originating sim. And that would give the Lindens more leway in crushing those with poor impulse control or megalomania.

I really enjoy the Town Halls the way they are. I think the less restricitve nature of it, allows each Linden to present in a way they feel natural doing. It's fun to listen somewhere like Pathfinders place where there are other Lindens to talk to.

The Town Halls are a breath of fresh air, in a time when most companies are less connected to thier customers than ever.

Jonquille,

You really need to learn to form an opinion and say what you really think.

Townhall = good.
Asshats = bad.

I'd love to see then scheduled when I could make one. With the meetings scheduled in the middle of the day it seems only those that dont have real life day jobs can make them. Evenings would be nice.

But then Europe can't attend. Today's 3pm meeting was 11pm in the UK, midnight in Germany, 1am in Finland...

Someone did this the other day when I couldn't get in on the official TH. They basically ran a video stream live from their PC.

Some folks have also discussed the merits of streaming video as a "face to face" chat with the Lindens.

Thoughts?

Hence the reason they should vary the times - have one mid day US, then one mid evening US to cover both groups as best as possible. Granted, with the question submission process in advance, it is not that urgent to actually be at a town hall, though it is nice to be able to ask dynamic questions based upon what has already been answered. Regardless, someone is always going to complain about the time of these no matter when they schedule them.

Yeah, a video stream of the town halls would be a rather obvious example of their technology.

It's too bad they can't seem to swing it.

I think James Linden's town hall today was one of the best I've listened in on. His pacing was good, he gave sufficient detail, he used lots of short lines instead of few really long lines, he answered the questions that were asked instead of misunderstanding them and answering something unrelated, and most importantly he was obviously excited about sharing useful information with us. He even said he'd write suggestions down so he could work on them, instead of telling us to go create a feature voting proposal. I was very satisfied by the whole thing.

But most other town halls fall far short of James' performance. Most Lindens don't seem to get that doing a town hall in SL is not the same thing as Dubya going campaigning. Presidential candidates have town halls as a publicity stunt. I thought a SL town hall was meant to involve actual communication. Cory's most recent town hall was ridiculously annoying. He started by copy/pasting answers to questions posted in the forum, and at such a rate that no one could read them and keep up. Therefore people kept asking questions that he'd already answered, to which he responded, "see infodump. next." Philip has a bad habit of avoiding answering complicated questions by telling people to email him. And usually no one will stop to ask for clarification for a question.

I think town halls are good to reach people who don't read the forums. But they shouldn't take the same form as forum Q&A. You're in world, live, and can have an actual conversation with people. Ask for clarification on questions. Ask for suggestions. Get the audience involved.

I'm assuming Jeska or whoever is moderating doesn't do well with 50 IMs all at the same time. I'm actually amazed at how good Jeska is at responding to my occasional IM, queueing up questions, etc. But it would sure be nice if things were a bit more interactive. Perhaps one thing LL could do is ask each repeater site to appoint a liason to help channel useful feedback to the moderator. I don't know if that would help much, but it might be worth trying.

I'm working on coming out of my shell.

I thought James' town hall was excellent. I enjoy the technical ones most, because I get geeked up over the same things LL's geeks get geeked up over. I'm also glad that the Lindens are doing these every fortnight now; the regular schedule takes some of the shinyness off the town halls, and allows there to be more meat and less fat.

Overall, still, its hit or miss. The ones with Philip are getting especially difficult since it seems to attract about 10 times as many people as any other kind of town hall... the Rosedale groupie squadron! My favorite one, however, is still the one where Philip used liveaudio and it was streamed on parcels throughout the world. While there were some technical issues, hearing a human voice really added to the quality or the experience. We just need a court reporter to transcribe! I volunteer Jeska.

/me runs and hides!

Regards,

-Flip

I appreciate the town halls. I particularly appreciate the question threads so that the speaker can be prepared to run down a short list of things of know people are waiting to hear. Usually I just read the transcripts after the fact. Those, coupled with the Hotline, have very much clarified things for me over the past few months.

Maintain these channels of communication LL. It's good for the community.

Thanks for the suggestions, the Town Hall is a work in progress and we are constantly looking for ways to refine the format.

I'll be sure to also answer this in the Hotline question you linked to, but the 'rule' you quoted about posting questions to the forums (1. Only one question per Resident) refers to the posting of pre-questions in the forums, I've posted the complete set of "rules" below:


These rules were posted because some Residents posting multiple questions to the forum pre-question thread and it didn't seem fair to those who would be in the audience during the Town Hall. I'll be sure to qualify this the next time we post a call for pre-questions in the forums, along with a better disclaimer that questions posted in the forums will be answered in a 'as time allows' ability.

Also, I wanted to share the method of question 'selection' The method of question selection is simple - I post them in the order that they appear in my IM window during the Town Hall. So if you ask one question, it's asked and then 40 minutes later you're 'next' in the window, another one of your questions will be asked. I've found, particularly in the more technically focused Town Halls, there are often not very many questions towards the end of the Town Hall, so it is possible for those who continue to submit questions to have more than one answered. I'm more than open to suggestions for encouraging more people to ask questions if anyone has suggestions, let me know.

Please note I do remove off-topic or irrelevant questions, or those which may have been already asked. For example, asking the Marketing Director about the possibility of including XML/Perl and MySQL frontends in the in-world browser might result in me prompting you for a more 'on-topic' question, as that type of question is more suited for the developer who's working on the project.

The Town Halls give you the ability to pick the brain of Lindens in a very transparent way and I'd love to work to make it as useful as possible for the entire community.

Thanks for that clarification, Jeska, and thanks for helping me refine my question yesterday. You're doing very well!

-Flip

this is why ll and sl are so great. (even as much as i criticize )

agree w Olmy and Flip - this last one was excellent.

and even though i'm not concerned with the early questions thing, i'm still stumped by the answer given...

LOMA...yea I hear ya!

Csven, I'm sorry if that was at all unclear, all that means is the guidelines Jeffrey pulled that quote from (about one question per person) were in reference to posting questions in advance in the forums - not in the overall Town Hall meeting itself.

Thanks Jeska. It's just a minor concern of mine, since I know other residents on those threads want to be heard far more than I.

My goal is not to stifle the creativity of these questions (which are quite good), but rather to make sure every resident is heard in a timely way.

"Posting" multiple questions to these town hall threads is okay, and in my opinion should be encouraged. However, when it comes time to address them in the actual town hall, the "best" questions should be chosen from residents in a singular fashion.

I bring this up because the recent town hall used several of my questions, and while I appreciate it personally, I know from reading the forum thread that other residents had some excellent ideas that were not brought up. While I try to make questions that I feel are beneficial, others deserve the same amount of exposure.

Thanks. Continue discussion.