As you may know, Linden Lab has made a significant shift in viewer development through Project Snowstorm. Rather than the viewer being developed in a separate code repository from the open source initiatives, it will be the main repository for all future Lab efforts.
OK, but what does this mean for you, the Resident of Second Life? With a more open process for improving the Second Life experience, you can play a role too! It makes sense to solicit feedback from Residents, after all….they know the Viewer and can probably suggest a hundred improvements.
Well not to worry. Oz Linden needs your help, as he said at the recent Second Life Community Convention (emphasis added, and on video near the end of the session):
“I want everyone in this room to consider themselves to be a stakeholder. I want everyone in Second Life to consider themselves a stakeholder. And I want you to (voice rising) SHOW UP. I’m also going to assist that you’re civil about it frankly. I want productive, useful input, and if I GET productive, useful input we promise we will use it. We have office hours multiple times a week. SHOW UP.
Show up with something intelligent to say. Show up with something that you’ve actually thought about. Don’t show up and tell me we want Viewer 1.0 back. We’re not going back, we’re going forward to the future. We’re going to find new and better solutions to all the problems we’ve got together.
No flaming. Just come and do the job!
If we don’t do what you need done and you haven’t told us what it is in a way we can understand and use, then you’re at fault too.
Please help.”
So there you go – an invitation to DO YOUR JOB (on a platform many of you pay to be on, but you didn’t think you needed to simply pay MONEY did you?)
And an invitation to BE INTELLIGENT! And CIVIL! No idiots, whiners, mopers, or complainers, please. Have you been tearing your hair out for the last 3 years because of some bug fix that’s been sitting in the queue? Don’t bother – you clearly didn’t understand the process.
The Process
It’s really not that difficult to contribute an idea but it’s helpful to have some insight into the very quick, easy steps you can take if you’re one of the 80% of Residents who can’t make it to office hours (and if you can’t SHOW UP then maybe you shouldn’t be in Second Life – every Resident, after all, has an obligation to attach themselves to a Scrum team).
So first, use the handy wizard to make sure that the idea you have isn’t already listed:
Make sure you cross-collate the feature set request to the version number of the viewer. You may find it handy to quickly toggle the priority issues. Once you’ve figured out the proper filter to use, scan the listings to see if your idea for, say, a slight change to the “Snapshot” feature is already there.
Listings are easy-to-follow. It’s not much more complex than reading the table of contents of People magazine or something!
So, you’re ready to check whether your idea is already listed. If it’s an interface change, for example, simply read through the 1,605 matching issues. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that, um, 1,602 of them seem to be unresolved or unassigned – persevere! SHOW UP!
Check with the Product Teams
Now, please understand that Second Life is a highly complex process. It’s quite possible that your request for a change isn’t actually a change to the viewer, it’s a product request. Don’t confuse things you see in the Viewer with things that are done by the Viewer team!
Here’s a simple chart that explains how this works:
Good – so now you understand how the central development stream coordinates with the feature streams. Those feature streams are embedded within products, which are assigned to Scrums. While you may have, organizationally, one person who’s in charge of product development that’s monetized, you’ll have another group within the Lab who is in charge of, say, community segments.
Please don’t confuse the areas of responsibility related to product with the Scrum teams related to projects or sub-sets of the feature development. Also, please note that experimental features are often prototyped AHEAD of being fully developed as products and assigned to Scrums, so what may seem like a feature is often actually a use case.
If your feature is best described as something being covered by the product development efforts of one of the Scrum teams, you may want to first touch base with the Linden in charge of the product before liaising with the Scrum team. This will avoid the Scrum team needing to circle back to the Chickens, because the management of the product team is more closely aligned to the community team, and both report in not to the technology road map but rather the business road map. Also, please don’t bother the developers, because while they may be quite clearly engaged in a Scrum, they’re probably too busy on a sprint to take your suggestion in context.
But that’s fairly simple – and once you’ve assured yourself that your issue is both not in the tracker and does not more appropriately reside under a product team, you can now log your issue.
Getting Your Issue Out There
OK, so now’s the part where you SHOW UP.
Don’t be shy. But please don’t bring up issues that:
a) Have been reported
b) Can not be further reported without additional replication capabilities
c) Have been overly reported, because the presence of issues and ideas in volume is not an indication that the volume is indicative of any sense that it should be taken seriously
d) You have a solution for. (“Do not add comments about how to build a solution.”)
e) Are bugs
f) Are not expressed in a way that Oz understands
g) Are not productive
h) You haven’t thought about
i) Goes backwards.
Improvements Wanted!
But most of all, please do NOT suggest things that are not improvements. Oz was very clear about that – because it’s only IMPROVEMENTS that Linden Lab is after. And thankfully you don’t need to do any thinking or analysis because Linden LAB will decide whether your suggestion is an improvement or not.
But can you judge in advance whether the Lab will consider your idea to be an improvement?
This is the easy part!
Just ask yourself a simple question: you’ve seen Viewer 2.0, you know what the Lab’s idea of an improvement was – so would your idea have made it into Viewer 2.0??? If not, then don’t suggest it!
Only suggest things (locked windows, itty bitty chat chiclets, black interface elements) that likely would have made it into Viewer 2.0 and you’re probably sitting on a winner.
Actually, I’ve just confused things a little. Because interface ideas don’t really fit the format of submission. Your ideas MUST be phrased as a story and it should be no more than a sentence or two (no fantastic design suggestions please! There are waaaay too many people with Photoshop out there!) The story should follow this format:
As a resident, I would like to be able to make changes to what items of clothing I am wearing now by displaying the current list of items and selecting items to remove.
PLEASE, do NOT submit thoughtful assessments of what it takes to be a landlord, a merchant, a club owner, an event planner, a shopper or a creator. If you can’t break your thoughtful assessment of the overall experience of being in Second Life into a 2 sentence chunk, if you can’t show up at office hours, if you can’t figure out the difference between the Viewer and product teams well….then just remember:
“If we don’t do what you need done and you haven’t told us what it is in a way we can understand and use, then you’re at fault too. Please help.”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dusan Writer and Botgirl Questi, Doubledown Tandino. Doubledown Tandino said: via @DusanWriter Show Up: Your Guide to Helping to Improve Second Life http://bit.ly/aFPHoG [...]
im NOT a “resident” im a freaking CUSTOMER. if you want my professional design asistance…PAY me and become MY customer.
If you continue to make products that offer no or less benefits to me… ill stop paying to use them…simple.
what is it with this new religion of believing everyone has the same experience… even if were forced to suffer through the same machine.
borg you.
*snort*
I believe I just laughed up soda through my nose.
Ow.
Dusan -
It gets harder to trust that this consultation process has any reliability when within the last two days we’ve had the launch of the “Display Names” and the closure of the Community Gateways with, for people like Desmond Shang and Carl Metropolitan of Caledon Oxbridge, eighteen hours notice.
Saffia
Wow! So clear. So simple. Thanks you! Now I don’t have to create my planned “Second Life Guilde to Agile Development” Comic.
You, sir, are hereby rewarded one shiny Internet. That was inspired. Thank you.
You know…I find the saddest thing about this is…………..he believes it. (or was told to “believe it”.
c3 said it as clear as can be….
Quote:
“If you continue to make products that offer no or less benefits to me… ill stop paying to use them…simple.”
I don’t want to go…I love Secondlife…but I’ve commented before…You (Linden Lab)force me to use viewewr 2.ought oh and I’ll take my inconsequential $5880USD yearly tier somewhere else.
i just endured an hr of that video…. and made sure i heard the “voice” of oz… in the last minutes speak the words above….. egged on by some grandpa groupie….
what a mess.. really, between that presentation and the “live streaming of facebook faces” and little buzzing things to tell me where my parent first kissed….. geez…
its like people having to tell toyota that they didnt want to go faster when they hit the brakes…and toyota telling them they didnt know– cause we only were baby toyotas and had only heard of brakes for 3 months….
delusional..really. a totally delusional system that can only focus for 2 weeks at a time…
erasing and retabulating….scrumped.. cause its the focus on the code working… not on the reason its being written
tell me about the rabbits phillip.;)
lol, not sure anyone at LL listens to any of us – their venture-backed shares took a 20% dive this month . . .
I wasn’t sure this was a parody at first and was getting mad at you (as was somebody else) until I read this:
Only suggest things (locked windows, itty bitty chat chiclets, black interface elements) that likely would have made it into Viewer 2.0 and you’re probably sitting on a winner.
I am still roaring at the identification of the main hobble in viewer 2 these days — the itty bitty chat chiclets. They are completely stupid.
Basically…Scrum…
It’s a scam.
It’s a cult.
It’s rigged.
It’s authoritarian.
It’s power-mongering.
It’s BDSM.
You have to understand what this is about — forcing people who are normal paying customers to become cultists. Cargo Cultists, at that.
To fit into this ridiculous prescribed template that itself is wrongheaded.
I know and you know and Zha knows that to give an avatar a notecard, or to change a role in a group has too many steps, too many counter-intuitive moves, too much hidden.
It takes a paragraph to describe this that any twitterer who isn’t an English major can do.
That should not require “showing up at a scrum” SNORT. .
It should not require shoehorning your plain and simple obvious report into the arcane JIRA and fighting with all the JIRA furries to get it accepted.
It should not require being “civil” — which is a rigged set-up, meaning “never reopen your JIRA if one of the furries closes it” or “never criticize the JIRA FIC” etc. We all know how this works.
A simple matter like fixing up their silly NESTS OF HORROR as Zha aptly termed them shouldn’t require these JIRA gyrations.
Mind you, I’m all for making a separate JIRA to try to blow the furry-controlled JIRA out of the water.
But I’m also for insisting that these idiotic cultic Lindens have an outward face that talks in normal language and accepts normal input. That’s just basic, basic stuff.
Customers with a serious following of SL who are seriously conversant don’t have to be playing this silly scrum cult game.
They should be encouraged to contribute in forums without all these silly authoritarian rules. That’s just whack.
They should not be told to patch or GTFO.
When cube says this is delusional, he is NOT KIDDING.
If the search results contain within them the product advertising lingo on every page of the land store messing up the land searches, then it’s a simple matter of saying: get that frigging thing out of the search. You don’t write sappy little love letters saying that you as a user would like to enjoy an optimal search experience. You tell them to get the crap out of the search.
So…the only thing I think we can say about all this is — keep parodying it. Keep getting angry. Keep thinking of apt ways to describe the idiocy. Keep banging on it. Eventually, these Lindens will be fired, or they will realize it’s stupid to have this particular cult, or they will change to another less authoritarian cult.
This bit has me scratching my head…
“if you’re one of the 80% of Residents who can’t make it to office hours (and if you can’t SHOW UP then maybe you shouldn’t be in Second Life – every Resident, after all, has an obligation to attach themselves to a Scrum team).”
I am hoping the parenthetical is a tongue-in-cheek. After all, some people do need to sleep. And most need to work (and be paid) as well. Nonetheless, for argument’s sake, let’s say you believe there is an element of truth behind the words. With this in mind and for starters, I am not obligated in any way whatsoever to attach myself to the lab’s latest software dev proc du jour (ala scrum today, scrubbed tomorrow). Moreover, crowd-sourcing development has fail written all over it. It’s the old, too many cooks in the kitchen problem. Then again, perhaps all of this is just “busy work” to distract from the decimation that is occurring inside the “walled garden”… Who really knows?
For those interested in the development process, I’d suggest this post by Grace McDunnough – “How to Be a Good Chicken”
http://phasinggrace.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-be-good-chicken.html
I’m a bit puzzled by this post.
ive never been kidding about any of this stuff…
chicken george c3
“Project Snowstorm” Just how long do you think it will take the customers to start calling it “Project Snow Job”
I’m trying hard to imagine what I’d do to the guy serving me at McDonalds, if after I told him my fries were cold, he told me “It’s your fault”
Well, I said before….You broke it, You fix it.
….and I a bought a sim on InWorldz with 45,000 prims for 75US$ per month.
That’s the only REAL vote I have.
When their perceived company valuation drops another 40% maybe someone with a brian will buy the remnants.
or a brain…
LOL, one of the best blogs posts I’ve read in some time. Brilliantly executed… and (alarmingly) quite accurate.
Linden Lab management process: GAP
Goofy… Abusive… Propaganda
Dusan, you’ve only disappointed me once (and that’s water way way under the bridge, diluted and far out to sea now), but in this post — as in most — you display your brillance.
Excellent.
Heh, I loved it!
The Scrum process itself is a pretty well known means of development in the software community. That part is fine.
The part I have a problem with is the Booming Wizard of Oz Linden voice, trying to intimidate everyone into not daring to hope for the 1.x interface. We need a Toto to draw the curtain back.
I also an open question: Oz (Scott) has only been with LL for 3 (count ‘em, 3!) months. Was he in SL before? Is he really that new to SL, and trying to tell us what we can suggest?
@ Dusan, nothing short of brilliant satire and accuracy. Albeit, like a story, but nonetheless honest, straightforward and intelligent. This is one of your top posts, may it be historical in insight, and in the present your insight is astounding!
@Prok, I take back all I’ve thought about you, I see you in another light.
Your a “reality check” to us all. Don’t stop, please 
On the subject of Philip and this whole SCRUM/SL Viewer thing:
My understanding is most GOOD software apps. that are Open Sourced, were built from the GROUND up. Exposing the source code as LL did some time ago, allowed innovation of the Viewer experience and there are various great viewers out there. Maybe WE might to well in opening a development of the SL Viewer or say Open Sim viewer at SourceForge as a full fledged TRUE development community and not this “cultic” approach.
For the first time.. I’m not feeling the LOVE (that’s been so supposedly present from the past of SL (in the way of Phillips original reason for the idea of virtual worlds. I’m feeling manipulated, coerced, and almost brain washed!
Luckily, most of us OUT here, have a level head and see the light before it consumed us.
Don’t stop eveyone!! Trust includes with it.. or pre-disposed along with Betrayal. Well, I think we know what’s present now.
Gary
beyond the looking glass…lol
proks a hero and dusan’s historical…lol
sorry. but its funny…
First off,thank you,Wayfinder for letting me know about this blog,and second,thank you Dusan for writing an insightful and fun to read post. Well,..after reading this,which once you hit the “Getting Your Issues Out There”bit seems almost a game to wiggle through,it makes one really think about some things. In the end,I came up with an idea.Operation Short Temporary Boycott.
The only thing I think will shake those idiots up will be if everyone suddenly leaves SL for say,..two days.That would be a real wake up call to anyone if their Login numbers dropped close to less than a thousand,or so,for that two days.a 0 login would be incredibly fun to see,but I dont think a lot of those who dont pay money would join in.They really have nothing to lose,until the end of SL comes.Gather all the people you trust,and send it by word of mouth,so to speak,and let fly with it.Just dont login.Do this only AFTER-’SHOWING UP’,-and wading through that process of finding the right place for your issues and posting them.Perhaps this might make their fuzzy little heads clear of that fog long enough to have a momentary panic.It wouldnt harm any one of us(well,except for a few withdrawals,
heehee)to just fix a date and not log in for two days.Even one day might do the trick.Perhaps they might listen,just a bit.
Just my idea,my two cents at the thought.lol.
PS,..
It was just a fun thought,..not a serious idea.(though it really would be fun,wouldnt it?To see those numbers plummet and wait to see if there is any response to it by the LL)
hahaha… now this post I understood!
In Oz’s defense, what he’s actually trying to do is tell people how, as a matter of fact, they can be most effective in getting ideas directly to the dev team, in a way that’s most likely to get adopted.
In most companies, no one would have any hope of doing that at all, and the only way to express ideas or opinions would be to waft notes out toward the CEO’s office or something and never hear anything back (for ideas) and to either remain a customer or not (for opinions).
Oz does tend, though, to be a bit derisive (is that the word I’m looking for?) toward things that customers might do wrt the dev team that *aren’t* the most effective possible ones.
I’m fascinated by the idea of letting any of the thousands of Resis who might feel like coming, attend actual developer work sessions. It’s weird and radical, and I love it…
IMHO, the people who have never used SL at all are most at fault for the state that SL is in. Talk about not showing up…
Seriously though, what I find to be the worst about this appeal for help is that the Lindens think of us as stakeholders when they need our labor but not when making the most important decisions about policy and strategy. I have personally come to accept the latter but then calling us stakeholders is just manipulative.
[...] you are a newbie with no money). A miserable experience which made Dusan Writer’s recent post Show Up: Your Guide to Helping to Improve Second Life all the more relevant. Dusan quotes Oz Linden’s recent entreaty to SL residents to help [...]
I’m right to oppose Dale Innis every time he shows up in these sorts of discussions because he advocates the same sort of totalitarianism that Oz does — the idea that there is some “scientific” or “right way” or making software; the notion that people “have to be constructive”; the idea that only certain paths are “effective” — these are all fictions, and sinister fictions that are merely designed to keep certain people in power.
There’s nothing radical whatsoever about having a fake open call for residents to “participate”. No thousands or even tens will come. Only the same groupies come, because only those groupies will jump through the hoops and fit through the sieves that that these nouveau totalitarians cook up.
A case in point is the outrageous creation of a brand-new JIRA just the other day by the cutesie “Snowstorm Dev Team” — a collectivized non-individual account now storming the JIRA. The JIRA is about the long-noted problem of non-detachable menus from that awful sidebar thing. Back in *February* a resident posted a JIRA and got 120 votes *for the same thing*. That’s ignored, and an entirely new JIRA with the identical wish list is created. A resident puts in a note that this is a “duplicate” — but of course it doesn’t matter. Votes, discussions — these are all irrelevant to the Snowplow. Instead, fake “user stories” are put up by not the users, but the software makers based on dumbed-down and denatured user proposals.
The goal is to disempower and tame the user or wear them out by attrition.
Thanks for the good laugh.
New slogan, same old Lab…
[...] Show Up: Your Guide to Helping to Improve Second Life [...]
John,
I didn’t snort soda, it was hot coffee, but I share your sentiment. Ouch both in terms of the coffee and the process. When will LL get that we are paying CUSTOMERS? You know customers, right? We pay you so that you provide a service we want to use, not so we can help you fix your messed up product. Even then I wouldn’t mind so much if they made it simple, cordial, and effective. I got tired just reading Dusan’s post. I’m off to make more coffee and wrestle with the current viewer so I can get my work done.
dam that’s funny…