Disciplinary Action / Town Hall Transcript

Bring back the Soap Box. I recall some townhall / meeting events from some while ago when, after the properly-sent-in questions had been answered, a nice scripted Soapbox was provided which let people join a queue to be able to talk / make a point / ask a question and BE the centre of attention for just a little bit.

That or yes, ditch the attempt to hold them as in-world events. Take questions in advance by email / IM / Notecard drop on a scripted mailbox, get Phil and the associated other Lindens to answer them by voice; either do it live on the Linden Radio stream or podcast it, or both.

Shaun, it's a pity that your questions weren't answered and that you were uh "banned" for "disturbing the peace" (or whatever the reason), but remember: it's not only about content, but form as well.

There are rules of engagement on Town Hall meetings, and everyone knows them in advance. It can be IMing Jeska with questions; it can be joining a group chat and asking the questions there; it can be asking the questions in advance on the forums; it can even be signing up for Skype and waiting on the queue until it's your turn to speak. Whatever the rules are, they tend to be simple, and everyone knows them in advance.

LL is not always too keen in enforcing those rules, though, and everyone (specially the ones "near to the stage" in Pooley) tends to find ways to break them. It's not that the questions are good or bad; it's not that LL wants to avoid them or not (speaking strictly for myself, I've seen lots of questions answered that were quite worrying to LL; I have added one or two myself ). No, actually, it's about form and not content.

In this case, there are rules (very simple ones) to attend the TH meetings. If you abide by them, one of several things can happen:

1. Your question might get answered
   
2. Your question might get "evaded" by LL (ie. they'll avoid answering it directly)
   
3. Your question might never make the queue

All that is part of the process.

If you do break the "rules of engagement", there are, again, several options:

1. Your question might get answered (it happens seldom, but sometimes it does)
   
2. Your question might be simply ignored (the most usual case)
   
3. You might get kicked out for "disturbing the peace" (or whatever the given reason was

Once someone stops respecting the few rules, no matter how good or important their motives are, that someone shouldn't expect a "special treatment". Again, content is not more important than form: both are important.

In this case, I very seriously don't believe that LL tried to "evade" Shaun's question at all. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if any of the Lindens would reply, now that the TH is over — either by a direct email from Lawrence, or by posting the answer on one of the many possible forum threads. As strange as it might sound, the answer might be simply "we don't know the answer" and they might be very honest about it. LL is not omniscient, the last time I've checked But they're usually willing to learn, and more often than not willing to admit publicly or in private that they haven't got answers on everything.

Does it sound like preaching "All Hail The Omniscient and Omnipotent Lindens?" Certainly not. So many people are unable to see people behind the avatars, that it has become a cliché ("SL is made of PEOPLE"; well, Linden Lab is also made of people, not demigods with ultimate omniscient and omnipotent powers. Yes, they do make mistakes! Who knows — they might even tried to kick the person sitting next to you and due to the lag (yes, Lindens have lag, too!) kick the wrong person out. I've seen it happening before — although they usually also apologise afterwards

Don't read too much into it.

is it a democracy, or dictatorship....?

As far as I know, Britain is still in the real world. Have you ever watched the feeds from Parliament. I do quite often, and it's great fun. Boos, catcalls, and often the member who gets to ask the question is the one who talks the loudest or most persistently. I have yet to see any member "forcibly removed". I wish things were more like that here in the US.

And typing during a town hall meeting in SL shouldn't be a problem at all. Unlike RL, if the attendees miss something they wanted to "hear" they can just open the chat history!

I don't know about disruptions but I am willing to bet that if Shaun was all pro-LL on this and yelling things like "LL is great" and "Phillip is my hero", he would not have been kicked and banned from the rest of the meeting. This is the thin grey line when it comes to people in authority having absolute power. This is also a fine example of why a proposal for fines in another thread is such a monumentally bad idea.

Hehe Freyr, that post of yours has made me smile It's not only in the UK; around here in Portugal we have the same tradition as well, and it goes back to at least a century and a half or so, since we still have many transcripts from that time. Parliamentarians are indeed (often) an unruly mob

While I can't speak for the UK's Parliament, of course, there are still "rules of engagement" — it's not totally a "free for all" in the sense that you can do whatever it pleases you when you're "in session". There are still formalities, and members of Parliament are fond of pushing the limits to how far they can overstep the rules — and yes, they can be fined (in several possible ways, according to the number of warnings they get) or even get sued if they engage in overly libellous statements (which they usually manage to avoid — remember, most of them are pros ).

Linden Town Halls are actually quite lively — and from the few that I was able to attend "live" (as opposed to listening to the radio repeaters), this has always been the case. Still, there are some limits. The only issue is knowing who sets those limits, and how they should be enforced

It is a big meeting with a lot of people. How do you organize this amount of people? Let them all shout questions at the speaker? How very retarded a way that would be to organize a meeting of this size.

The process was, join the Town Hall group, post question through that, and then the questions would be fed to the presenter in an organized way so everyone had a chance to participate and get questions answered.

So, instead of shouting out like you did this time, try it the other way next time.

Has it ever occured to you that the world doesn't revolve around you, or do you just keep up with the endless ME ME ME garbage for giggles?

I'm really sorry you live in a decaying socialist nannystate that's 9 hours ahead of LLs clock, but learn to deal. No one takes you seriously because all you ever do is expound about how right you are and how anything anyone does contrary to this makes them fools, or is economic suicide, or whatever your current gripe is. If you don't like LLs policys and customer outreach I recommend going elsewhere like a civilized human being and not forcing us to listen to your broken record diatribes.

There's a link to a chat log of it on my home page, hon.

http://www.yourfreespace.net/users/merlyn-bailly/menu.html

Thank you, Gwyneth, for this long and interesting lecture on town hall rules.... In response, I will repeat a post which I made on page one of this thread. I believe that the response is applicable here as well.

I never said that I didn't get it. I said that it happened. I then speculated as to why it happened to me specifically as opposed to everyone who was questioning or commenting. Finally, I asked for someone to send me a transcript. I hope that this summary has helped you to understand my post better.

Thanks for the link Merlyn.