Question for Robin and Philip

Hi Torley, with the greatest of respect to you and your RSI I'll address the bulk of this message to Robin and Philip since I'm almost certain your answer to me would be to refer it on to them anyway. So:

Dear Robin and Philip,

I'd like to ask a bit about your decision making processes at Linden Lab. There seems to be a curious mismatch of your actions, let alone your words.

Think back to the introduction of p2p: That was floated and discussed in the fora, mulled over and finally implemented. The decision was ultimately yours and taken by you, but there was discussion.

The currently frequently mentioned, and eagerly awaited, changes to group structures were led from a discussion document that seemed to be internally generated, but there were a series of discussions with residents (including me) about the things that we felt needed to be included in the changes. We have yet to see which of them make it, but the current "leak" from Kelly seems like a compromise between that internal document and the discussions that I saw and read about. Again discussion before decision.

The change to unverified basic accounts was launched without discussion and notice. Since you've moved to a position where you are not making money directly from the new signs-up it's not clear it's a purely business decision, or at least it's not one that directly affects how you generate income. Each and every change to SL brings it storm of protests of course, there is a surprising number of conservative residents in such a 'new adopter'-centric technology. But this change seems to be leading to a rather predictable increase in incidents of griefing, at least in some places even if it isn't appreciable across the whole grid. It seems to be directly linked to the alteration in ban line heights to try and help the residents control griefing - a change that because of the linking of the ban lines and the buy pass lines has made some areas of SL virtually impassable without a vehicle, patience or a lot of work with the map to find routes around the suddenly inaccessible parts of the grid. Isn't it ironic that you've generated a change that increases access and as a response to one of the rather predictable changes in SL to that initial change you've introduced a second change that markedly blocks access for new and old alike to large parts of the world that were open before, at least for flying overflying.

I hope, but to be honest no longer exactly trust, that there will be a series of smaller (from our perspective, however big from an internal coding point of view) changes such that people who are actively banned are actually banned, places that run access lists are still overflyable so the world becomes open once more. I would also hope that since enrollment has got so easy there will be proper tools in place for finding, exterminating and blocking access for griefers and their alts, or actual enforcement of the current tools in a suitably clear fashion that we all see justice being done.

We, mostly at least, accept that LL has to make the decisions it needs to make for its business future. Sometimes those decisions will be unpopular, and if you're honest you'll admit that sometimes they'll be wrong too. Some of us feel that on occasion you as a group don't make the hard decisions, but we don't see the whole picture behind those decisions. We also mostly accept that there is information that you won't or can't give us, privacy laws, confidentiality and business decisions, plus the details of the automated anti-griefing processes are all things we can accept won't get discussed, even if we might disagree sometimes with where those lines are drawn. (The dicsussion about the Grey Goo fence seems to have led to a compromise that leaves legitimate users happy, but blocks goo attacks successfully - but it is an anti-griefing tool.) Sometimes there will be a need for rapid changes too - stopping new basic stipends to try and stop the slide on the LindeX being one such to many people's mind, certainly one that had that feeling.

So, back to the question. Why do some decisions that are about changes to the in-world environment get discussed and some that still seem to be something other than business decisions not get discussed? Openness and transparency aren't "when you want it" choices - each time the decisions are made in other ways it makes people less confident that it is "Our World, Our Imagination" and reinforces the perception that it's yours.

This is a great question Eloise, and not an easy one to answer. I think it boils down to the difference between a business decision and a feature development decision. In the case of the P2P teleporting and group tools projects, we were looking at feature design and it was important to have a dialog with residents to understand how people were using the tools and where the best improvements might be implemented. In the case of open registration, we saw it as a business decision related to enabling broader access to Second Life rather than a feature change requiring Resident feedback.

That said, we *do* want to make sure we respond to Resident concerns about increased griefing. I'm also looking at how we can make the Police Blotter more transparent (see Prokofy's comment on Philip's blog post) and considering the ideas being presented as ways to address the concerns about teen access to mature content on the main grid. I will be happy to discuss these ideas, and will schedule time over the next couple of weeks to do that. I'll post these times under discussion in the Events Calendar. We also have a Community Roundtable meeting scheduled for July 6 at 4PM where we can talk about these issues.