Mentor Spam

Gwyn,

That was an awesome presentation. Great for newbie Mentors. When will you start preseting it?

When Char was in charge of the volenteer groups, before LiveHelp and the Greeters existed, she wouldn't let ANYONE use the Mentor Group Chat for ANYTHING. She asked people to IM individules for help, and not the whole group under ANY circumstances.

Well ok then, but he game was more and more controlable then no? Now we have how mnay players 100,000+............... Now we have how any mentors 550+ 135+ greeters and 135+ live helpers? My point is MAYBE we need a second linden to help jeska run these group to stop the spamming of the groups. But please don`t forget newbie mentors etc need help adjusting to these groups too? Not just screamed about for making a requisted for a problem they don`t know about.There also been times some have of the helpers have been getting speical treatment, over other helpers in the group. This is has caused a number of problems in the groups as well. In general we need a reshapin of these groups, adding heads without order causes disorder.

It was more controllable because EVERY Mentor added, was added in person, by Char. And she gave them some dos and don'ts..

The only thing that seems to stop Mentors being added to the pool is age and Linden wrapsheet.. You needed to know things back then. I've met Mentors who don't know how to bring up chat history or raise the sun..

And I see that as well at times, but game was smaller with a diff idea on how th egame ws being played. Now we are larger and more complex, with a whole alot of problems which we did not have before. Grant you thre are alot of people thats should not be in these groups but we do need to train and help guid them to be part of the groups as wel. Remeber we don`t get paid for this. I give alot of my game time to the groups infact to much. But I stil get hated from members of the helper groups based on their own BS.

We have more Mentors than we need, especially with the greeter system in place. The automatic volunteer application thing was a bad idea in my opinion.

The questions going to the Mentor group chat should be going to Live Help.

Well more then we need? how many do you think we need? Franky speaking we need what we have. We are not small and larger now. The liver helper group is much worse with nobody by lindens replying these days. You know how many time I called out for on LH with nothing in a reply? Or I am the only one in the chat?

Then we need more LiveHelpers, and euro times, which I've noticed. But we don't need to volume of Mentors we have, in my mind..

Thanks, Mera & Shoshana Actually, I did give that presentation in-world, but only two people showed up; I guess I have to look for more suitable times...

That presentation is all about common sense and the way old netiquette rules, just re-interpreted under the context of Second Life...

... as to the other issues presented here, it remains to say that a Second Life with 20,000 users and 50 Mentors is not the same thing as a SL with 166,000 users and 1300 volunteers. The mere scale of the changes mean that we have to put everything into perspective; now the group needs organisation, a purpose, and boring things like quality control. But it's a necessity of growth; we can't avoid it.

50 people can be tutored "personally" and can be "coached" to act responsibly, consistently, and presenting a common image to the new users: we're volunteers, we love SL, we wish you to get interested in this world quickly and effortlessly... but when your group grows well beyond manageability, this "common image" is utopic. Different people will act according to their own standards. There is no way to avoid this to happen — except through organisation.

Organisation can always come from "top-down" or sometimes "bottom-up". Due to the nature of SL, and the encouragement of LL to have users self-organise, there are strong reasons that the "bottom-up" approach might work. Volunteers are now not only thinking about how to help new users, but they are organising others to become successfull and self-fullfilled volunteers as well. Call them Meta-Volunteers — their purpose goes beyond helping new users, but helping volunteers as well.

The Group IM channel — a way to help each other, thus getting better and faster help to the newbies who need it — is one of those mechanisms. There are others; Help Island comes to mind; the volunteers now meeting regularly (even if "unofficially"; people exchanging emails, notecards, landmarks, posting on forums, discussing among themselves (and not often with the Lindens as well). These are the marks of reaching a certain plateau: from now on, "organised volunteering" is the way that can make the group work. The alternative is sadly unfair for the new users (ie. chaotic helping, without giving new users any reasonable expectation of getting a volunteer that can actually help them out) — they deserve the best volunteer help they can get in-world!

Organising a volunteer group is not something "weird" or "alien". Literally millions of people are RL volunteers for some NGO or similar institution; they contribute with know-how, time, skills, and a fair amount of patience to accomplish a goal. Each of those volunteers has different amounts of "availability" — some have more time than others, some have more skills. As so many NGOs have found out, getting an operation running smoothly is not impossible. It just requires a certain experience in dealing with large groups of wildly different backgrounds and expertise, and the notion that you cannot demand from them more than what they're willing to give. So in a sense it's very different from "running a company" (where you have exactly the team with the required skills you need for your goals, and can know with a certain degree of precision what they're doing and how much time they take to accomplish certain tasks), but it's also similar: it needs structure, guidelines, training/refreshment courses, documentation, and very, very good communication. Also, it needs people with a background in doing this sort of thing; it's not exactly "obvious" how you can put an organisation like this operational (ie. it's like rocket science — you need certain specific skills to build rockets; even good amateurs will never place a satellite in orbit ).

Fortunately for us, there are lots of people in SL that have the required background and set of skills to create this type of organisation, and using a "bottom-up" approach — not something that comes from the Lindens "above" and is "enforced", but rather the other way down: people with the required organisation skills coming together and self-organising the group.

What this means is that "people" (in the sense of individual people) are not so important, but their roles in the group are. A good common example: one of the Mentors gave me once around 200 notecards (on different topics) to help me out with the newbies. Who "made" her the official "notecard-carrier"? The answer, under a bottom-up approach to self-organisation, is "no one". I'm glad I got the notecards; I'm happy someone had the time to collect them and sort them out in folders neatly; now I've got a powerful tool which I didn't have before! Should I complain about this Mentor's "role" and question it? Rather the contrary; I'm so happy she invested her time in sorting notecards into folders, so that all of us can benefit.

Another common example are the tutorials written by so many talented, professional teachers/trainers. Who "appointed" them the "official tutorial writers"? But why do we need to question the "authority" of them? The important part is that the tutorials are here and can be used by the newbies (if you can write better tutorials, instead of "bickering" and grumbling about people self-appointing themselves as "official tutorial writers" — well, create your own tutorials instead, and let all benefit from them!). The same applies to NCI; or even to TeaZer's island; or to the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives, the Particle Laboratory, or whatever example you might care to give. No one "appointed" those people to their tasks; they did it on their own, and by doing it, benefitted all the group, merely by existing.

The same thing happened (or is happening) to newer things, like getting the Help Island organised, or developing better communication between volunteers. Again, no one is "appointing" no one else; what is happening is that people with certain skills (ie. building, scripting, writing notecards, writing tutorials — and, lately, getting better communication, organising group meetings, or planning common standards of helping out newbies) are now contributing those very skills not only to better help newbies, but, more important than that, to empower existing volunteers with organisation and tools to make them better able to teach newbies. This is a dramatic change; and one that is crucial at this juncture, when we have 1,300 volunteers (even if 98% of those hardly care about the group), and no "structure" in place to deal with them.

People in this thread have shown a certain resistance to this approach. I can only ask what past experience you have had as volunteers in RL — either participating at one volunteer organisation, or helping to organise them (and yes, even co-developing open source software is a "volunteer organisation" — volunteering is not only about fighting poverty, helping stray cats, or firefighting — there are much more mundane, non-social activities that classify under the broad subject of "volunteering". Although many volunteer organisations are different (obviously), one thing they share is a way to deal efficiently with the non-productive "bickering" among members. There is sadly no other way to make a volunteer organisation work: either each and every member recognizes its role and place in the organisation (and of course all are different, and have different skills, approaches, and available time! ... but their goal must be the same), or the organisation simply won't work.

The question you should ask yourselves right now is what is more important to you, as a SL Volunteer: helping new users, or "bickering" and forum drama? Hopefully, most of the 1,300 will chose the first answer over the second one... and in that case, the road to better support new users should be clear to you. I expect people to recognize that growth and change in SL imply that the volunteer groups have to change as well; everything should be questioned if it's still aiding the purpose of helping new users, or if it's actually preventing new users to get the good volunteer support they're entitled to (as we were entitled to volunteer support when we were newbies as well!). This means rules have to change; mentality has to adapt; and organisation has to come.

I have absolutely nothing against the "old mentality" myself; it's thanks to the older among you guys that I actually got some of the necessary help to be here today and type on the SL forums! But the SL of 2003/4 is not more the SL of 2006; although this is a cliché that should be obvious to each and every one of us, it clearly is something some people don't really believe when they hear it; the "idyllic SL of the past" (a tiny community where we all got well among ourselves, and every new user was a close friend for life) is a nice concept, important for us to remember our roots and learn from the past, but does not apply any more to the "current" SL.

The "current" SL needs a change of mentality; and I'm obviously all for it.

You mean you would like 1300 people to organize, coordinate, and educate themselves in the absence of leadership and the steadfast refusal of LL to give anyone any power or authority?

It doesn't work that way, it never has, and there are a few millenia of experience to the contrary in which just about every conceivable alternative has been attempted and failed. We haven't invented a way to acheive that level of coordination without heirarchy, control, evaluation, reprimands, responsibilities, delegation - in other words, all the trappings of a bureaucracy. Even volunteer organizations fall apart without these, and wishing otherwise doesn't make it so. Also, volunteer organizations typically compensate their leaders because it is ugly, tedious, distasteful work which without compensation and *shudder* judicious appointment of leaders (which would make non-appointees feel less "special" fails too.

The current LL needs a change of mentality, as their utopian, anti-authoritarian, non-heirarchical, "why pay the cow when you can get the milk for free" predilections scale worse than their asset server system.

One remark about the greeters being set.well we are far from it. We have alot a problems in there as well that needs to be addressed.

You know i been trying to get into HL for 10 months now. I am around the euro time zone watch. Have i been added no! why? I don`t have a reasonable idea why????? But what i do see is others that have been on sl getting in left and right. You tell me if there is no butt kissing in these groups! there is alot! and its not helping matter at all....

1300 people can organise, coordinate, and educate themselves in the absence of leadership of LL. Not in the absence of any leadership at all: I know, the distinction is subtle. The point that LL does not always know how to "deal" with their user base is made by LL themselves; they ask for "help" more often than not...

The concept that it's only LL that knows what their users need is, sadly, another fallacy; to give due credit to LL, they're aware of that issue, and prefer to rely upon the users to know what is best for themselves...

Note that "the users" are not "the 166,932 users" (or how many they are at the moment). As "the 1300 people" are not all that are able to organise, coordinate, and educate themselves.

Some can — and some can't/won't/don't care.

The whole point is that the correct encouragement by LL is not to autocratically coordinate every aspect of the users' lives — but instead by encouraging resident self-organisation to grow (instead of crippling it). From what I've seen, they've got a mixed success doing that — in some cases, things worked; in some other cases, the groups that worked well became isolated; and in several other cases, this simply didn't work at all. You can get examples for all the three types everywhere on the forums. The good thing is that at least LL keeps an open mind about the issue.

The trick will be to have "Our World, Our Imagination" while having LL as a successful, profitable company. This is actually not too hard; every major software house has its shares of "user groups". They do not decide everything; but they self-organise, with strong company support, and fill in the gaps where the company does not care/is not able to reach the common user.

Second Life does not really have a "user group" (like Microsoft, or Apple, or Oracle, or Linux...) in that sense. But we should have similar structures. I don't wish to type again what I wrote here under the header "Linden Lab and its Partners and User Groups"; the SL Volunteers are one of the "user groups" handling volunteer technical support — not unlike what happens with lots of other applications (open source or not, that is hardly the point here).

In all those cases, there is a big distinction in what is "user self-organisation" and "company-directed efforts". LL, as a company, has the Liasion team; those are the "company technical support". LL, as a software application developer, has a very loose "user group", which emcompasses the SL Volunteers as well: this is "volunteer technical support". Like Microsoft (or Apple, or Oracle, or Linux...) with their user groups, there is a need for better communication and closer relationships between the two teams — one corporate, the other volunteer — but that doesn't mean that Linden Lab has to run the whole show.

Speaking strictly for a small group of people (and definitely not for everyone else in SL), we consider ourselves skilled enough to be able to self-organise ourselves as well as Linden Lab: we don't need them as a patriarchal figure, always holding our hands and expecting us to follow their pre-established paths and routines. This is not arrogance; this is simply RL experience, nothing else. Dozens of thousands of users in Second Life work (or worked) for companies just like the one Philip has created; these same dozens of thousands have dealt with technical support, or with organising volunteer organisations, or worked for volunteer organisations — in some cases, with decades of experience. You can't hardly expect people to discard their past experience like a shell; what most do is simply look upon SL as "escape" and pretend their own skills/know-how doesn't exist at all; but a few don't and bring their talents and skills into SL.

In a sense, it's not a question if LL "wants" these things to happen or not. They will happen, despite LL's interest in either setting them up or not (and luckily for us, they're much relieved to know we're here to organise ourselves, and even have the required know-how and experience to do so). The question is only how LL will relate with the self-emerging organisation — because we already know how many residents view that: most often with scorn, sometimes with fear/paranoia, sometimes with anxiety.


I agree that LL needs a change of mentality in several aspects. But it's easier to change the mentality of the users first Or at least some of them. In certain circles we call this change of mentality "educating"

And I totally agree that it's time LL changes their utopian, anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical way of dealing with things — SL is simply too big for that. Delegating authority is an alternative many don't wish even to discuss, much less to contemplate; the alternative, of course, is working without "authority" (it works for so many volunteer groups, why should we 1300 be different?) — as long as initiative is not crippled or stamped upon.

According to what I was told around 14 months ago when I applied for Live Help, Linden Lab had actually much more people signing up for Live Help than they needed for the next 2-3 years, and they'd keep the long list of volunteers for LH ready and on stand-by if the need arose, but that was hardly any need for more LHers. That was the 'official' answer I've got back then...

I don't have any idea how many people are on the "queue" right now, but I'd say it's still quite long since people from November 2004 haven't been "called" yet... and yes, I'm on the Euro time zone as well. Although I'd say I'd probably give my turn to the next willing person on that list; I've got my hands full at the moment anyway

Usagi - Speaking as a Live Helper, I can tell you some of the neccesary skills that I think you need in order to succeed in that kind of role:

-The ability to have a gigantic amount of patience with folks that are frustrated, and remain professional when some may come across abusive.

-The ability to keep your cool when Help IMs are coming at you faster than you can respond. When its busy, sometimes you have to prioritize and let some wait.

-Even though you don't need to be an expert at everything to be a Live Helper, having a good cross-section of knowledge about SL is critical, as questions run the gamut of everything.

While I have absolutely no idea why your application to be a Live Helper has sat for so long, maybe it is possible that the Lindens making the selection feel that you may have difficulty with one or more of the skills above.

If you disagree and feel that this is an unfair charachterization of you - possibly it might be useful to send an e-mail to Jeska, and explain to her why you are a patient person, that you can keep your cool under pressure, and that you have a wide understanding of SL.

Good luck & Hope this helps

I think that the self-organization of the real world groups that you may have in mind may lack titular authority but have implicit authority nonetheless. That is, there will be people who rise to the lead in a hypothetical group and people will follow. But there are a raft of sanctions that are available to a "leader" in real life that are not available in-game.

Suppose (hypothetical example which does actually happpen) that there was a contrarian who advocated that the group do exactly the opposite of what the leader suggests. In real life, the contrarian will at first be listened to, then politely ignored, then less-politely ignored, then ostracized as the level of contrarianism escalates. These actions are all carried out through the collective action of the group and does not require real "power". Unfortunately, for all its advantages, the internet puts all voices on an equal footing regarding the amount of contrariness they wish to emit and typically lacks the social sanctions listed above. A sufficiently verbose contrarian can grind the organization to a halt and out of 1300 people, you are likely to have at least one of those.

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that you are facing staggering odds with the numbers and tools at your disposal.

I have had trouble receiving any IMs from Group IMs lately (I hear it's some kind of bug). I type in a Group IM box, and nothing appears. Never see anything from others as well. I wonder if others are having the same trouble, and this could be part of the cause that some of the Group IM channels seem so dead as of late. (Or, could just be me! )

Not just you--yes, it is a known bug... one workaround you can try... TP to another estate (like a private island) and get into a Group IM again. If that doesn't work, relog on it. Eventually you should see them again. This should be fixed shortly too, spread the good word! ^.^

I totally agree, especially when you add the fact that a disruptive member is certainly not answerable before ToS/CS, if that member is very clever in their argumentation and rhetoric. As the old saying goes, you can get a long way by being polite. Thus, assuming that the "verbose contrarian" doesn't actually violate ToS/CS, your assessment of the kind of damage they can do to a group in SL is actually quite correct...

But I also don't think it's impossible What is important is to strive a balance between the ratio of supporters of a certain organisation/leadership vs. the "verbose contrarians". It's hard to be the only one in a group of 1300, no matter how strong your opinions are. This is mostly how group dynamics work on online communities: the "minorities" tend to get excluded and shunned, simply because they fail to capture enough attention. The problem is naturally if you think that a large group can be evenly split among two contrary opinions (in our case: the onset of a structured, organised group vs. keeping an egalitarian [libertarian?] group without hierarchy). That is the "worst case scenario": the one where you cannot expect any of the groups to hold.

A tiny "verbose contrarian minority" tends however to fade and disappear among the masses; their harm is usually controllable — the idea behind this is that while it's utopic to believe that everybody will agree all the time with a certain opinion, most will prefer a compromise on the opinion hold by a majority, and only a few will leave. SL abounds with these examples (think about the telehub discussions ). For me, the only sad part of it is the unnecessary drama that these questions arise publicly. The Volunteer groups have a certain reputation and standing in SL (for good and for bad!). This is a sometimes a "privilege", but I personally view it more as a "danger". Shaking the reputation of the volunteer groups has repercussions — as the old saying goes, bad news travel fast. And this is something we need to avoid.

Mantaining the "status quo" also means "stability" in terms of reputation. People know what volunteers are up to and expect a certain attitude from them. What is happening at this moment, from the few anedoctal evidence I've gathered, is that the volunteers have created mixed mental image in the resident population. Older residents, specifically the content creators and estate agents, tend to view Mentors and Greeters as having "first pick" on newbies, which are crucial for their own businesses to succeed, and "unfair advantage" because they can deal with newbies on a one-to-one base before the rest of the world "gets them". The older residents that are mostly consumers (and not producers) tend to have a completely different image: they vaguely remember how they have been helped by a Mentor (more recently: by a Greeter...) and are happy to know the group of volunteers is still active. Newer residents have a completely different set of reactions, and this varies so much from individual to individual. Some are absolutely awed; some think we're insane because we spend so much time online without payment; some think we're Linden Lab employees, or that we're getting anything in return if not payment (say, God mode ); and some, coming from virtual worlds where "volunteers" get all sorts of benefits, are used to us, and expect us to exist anyway.

So it's hard to say what exactly the SL world population at large thinks what the volunteers are. The only thing they seem to have in common, as a group, is that people tend to view them regarding the quality of support they've received. But this is sometimes not easy to measure; some newbies (by choice) never get in touch with any volunteer, and thus, the image they create about us is biased by the kind of people they associate with on their later time as SL residents — they don't know what to think. On the other hand, someone having an extremely good experience with any volunteer on their early stages of SL, will almost certainly remember that experience forever, and tend to view "verbose contrarians" on the volunteer groups as exceptions, never the norm.

All in all, this long post (and most of the thread) is really targetted at this very same point: how to plan and organise a rather large group, to have them focus on quality(1) education of new users, giving them a very favourable opinion about the volunteer team, and present an image of professionalism of the group at a whole.

- Gwyn

(1)Quality in the sense that all volunteers present the same information in a similar way; use similar techniques and tools to convey this information to newbies; are empowered with tools and mechanisms to provide good information; and are inside a feedback loop to help them improve. Mind you, all these are just the groundwork upon personal initiative and individuality are founded: as so many we have noticed, we don't need "volunteer clones" talking like robots, we need different personalities and skill sets, to adapt to the so many different types of newbies that pop in every day. "Uniformity" is boring and really not the goal here; giving all volunteers background & tools that they can employ successfully to better be able to convey information is the whole purpose. (Just being able to talk and discuss about it is "a tool" too!)

You know travis i given up with jeska since she place fav`s with some people. I sent around 5 IM to her about LH, have a few lindens leave her Ims.....But really travis, It seems like i have done all the right things to make LH, never had any minor problems always kept clean not abused anyone etc......What i might do is go directly to a live helper meeting and see what if that helps. Franky i really don`t know myself why i have no been asked..If they just don`t like me well..........who know sl is like the real world.....if your hated you never advance any where....

I agree-it's unfortunately very easy to be seen as a nuisance by the Lindens'. I just today got an IM from Jeska today (30/04/06) which was this:


Jeska Linden: *coughs* no chat spam *coughs*


I have never spammed a group that I don't host or own, and I certainly haven't used the instructor group that I'm a part of as a forum for spam, yet I get this IM'd to me directly from her, although I've never spoken to her. Anyone else had a problem with Linden spam, or find this rather rude and unneccessary?


As for muting groups, I really wish I knew how to, and the SLettiquette classes I'd definately go to! They seem great!

See my thread on mentor spam

/204/a9/103136/1.html

Omg I am so happy someone said it. I try not to be rude and just exit out, but it can be quite annoying not being able to understand an avi standing next to you because IMs are going at 200 mph... Seriously, this needs to stop.

spam in this group is nothing new.....Its far from new.....Oh well..