Suggestion to Reduce Workload

To relivant parties in Linden Lab,

Since removal of the forums was cited as being due to the workload involved, and due to the public outcry about said removal, my thoughts have turned to how to reduce LL's workload without hampering the community.

Ideas and suggestions are mine and of a few close friends and do not reflect the view of the community as a whole.

1) Remove the Police Blotter. Reasons:: Not all incidents are placed on the blotter (LL policies on certain incidents), which in turn frustrates some Residents when they don't see thier particular incident posted. In keeping with the privacy ideal of this, why post any at all? It may gardner a bit of publicity from those outside of SL, but actually creates more angst than balm within the community in my opinion. In addition, I imagine there are many, many workhours put into just keeping up the list and updating the blotter webpage. Hours that could be used elsewhere.

2) Turning over in-world projects to Residents within a Linden Sponsored Group. Lindens could created closed groups (open enrollment here would just invite too much trouble) for various volunteers within the community to help with certain projects. Example: Group "SLDoT" Charter "SL Department of Transportation. Created and empowered to maintain and expand our world's roadways." This, of course, would have to wait until v1.12 and the improved group controls, and would have to have a Linden in charge of the group (Mainly to create it and eject unwanteds and "hire" new additions). The biggest part of this to implement would be changing all the coresponding lands to Group Land.

3) Ask for help. Linden Lab has always quoted as saying this is "our" world. Meaning LL and us Residents. Let's get away from the we verses them ideal. Let us help you. We have an incredibly diverse pool of resources within our Resident base. Builders, scriptors, designers, QA, troobleshooters, admin, PR, and the list goes on and on and on. From the very begining (at least when I joined) LL has stated that this isn't a game where you "level up". We bring in RL skills into SL. Utilise those skills. Some may not, or may not without being paid, but there are a vast majority that would be happy, even proud, to help create, mend, stabilise, and advance our world.

Let's "Be the Change" together.

~Jessy

Hey Jessy!

Thanx for yer suggestions:

(1) I'm torn on this one (like William Wallace in Braveheart o.O) because I've heard so many conflicting opinions about it, including suggestions to make it more useful by having archives, more abuse report stats by category, and other data. An argument against removing it is that the abuse report process is already so mysterious--I do know we have a project to scale and improve the system, and that speculation results in "more angst than balm" (I love that!) as you said.

On the whole tho, the Police Blotter feed is automatic, and generated from internal discipline notes that need to be entered anyway. So it isn't so much of a workload as it is a duplication of internal data that could be streamlined--for example, you know where it shows the region? Well, there's one big region list to scroll through and no current intelligent autocomplete. (It can't be done manually because the region the abuse happened in can be different from the region it was reported in.) That's a PAIN!

(2) YES VERY GOOD IDEA. We've infact been going towards this. Second Life's 3rd Birthday party was the work of a lot of many superfantastic, wonderfulicious volunteers. Other events like Burning Life and the Winter Festival will continue to head into this direction, and this weekend's SLCC has a lot of volunteer input and *tremendous* contributions I can't recognize enough in words.

I know a lot have asked me and Guy about expanding the roads--we may have to think that one out some more, but any recommendations on that, let Guy know, he's the expert! (guy@lindenlab.com

(3) I ask for help whenever I can get it. A lot of the feedback I get which is most useful happens to be aggregated info from really astute Resis. Like, okay, I'll name names in a good way... ANGEL FLUFFY and the whole FEATURE VOTING SYSTEM. I can think of so many examples and we are most blessed to have so many savvy Residents in the community. I also think of experience they've had elsewhere, like I know some of our top scripters do game development for other companies.

We've also been more agile lately about getting Resident help to report exploits and security flaws, like Brent Linden blogged:

http://blog.secondlife.com/author/brent/

so this is a YES and something you will see continue to grow, Lindens asking Resis for help!