SLCC10 -- An A+ Memorable Event

Family-style SLCC10 organizers' dinner

The Second Life Community Convention was an A+ event, one of the most important in my own personal lifetime. The organizers are to be commended for their selfless hard work and community spirit and application of "lessons learned" from past years to make this a reall stellar occasion for intellectually stimulating workshops, fun social occasions, and plenty of time for those all-important conversations in the corridors where you learn more about the Facts of Second Life than you ever could learn in six years of logging on to the virtual world itself...

I'll have a lot more critical things to say about the content of the conference in due course -- I left absolutely determined to fight the open source cult even more, and had new insights about how awful the educators are -- but first, credit where credit is due.

First, a few vignettes to try to convey the impressions...

o For the first time, the presence of this event inworld, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Ustream, seemed greater than the actual RL event itself, and certainly *richer*, because you couldn't possibly go to all the interesting talks in RL, but the magic of social media let you peruse it asynchronously, or even sit in one session and read the tweets from another and relay them -- it seems like an i-phone is a 'must have' accessory these days to perceive and consume not only reality, but virtuality...very strange to feel that on the way to and from an event you are still in an event... All the synchronicity and asynchronicity was attended to by the organizers, from the hash-tag to the Flickr group to the inworld build, and it was all good.

o So...I'm walking down a long street at twilight. I've gone in circles a few times, wider concentric circles in search of a 7/11 store with cheaper Diet Cokes (I figured I wouldn't get in trouble to smuggle those back in to the hotel, although bringing your own alcohol was strictly forbidden). I'm starting to feel lost, as it's the *second* time around the block-wide hotel building and in and out the Irish bar looking for Jack Linden (I should have known an Englishman wouldn't be in an Irish bar...). I'm starting to wonder if I'm lost, merely because I can't see a hotel facade and front door. But...Looming up ahead, there's a cigarette end glowing in the dark...I step closer...The air is slightly foggy...The moonlight shines on a plastic badge...and I see the name "Metaverse Engineer" lit up. I am home!

"Can you come to my sim Winnipeg on the mainland and look at the top colliders? Maybe you have a gadget to do that? You can't see them otherwise...and the Lindens are too busy..."

Happily, he knows what I'm talking about! He says he doesn't have a widget...but that he makes machinima and does building and such for Remedy...He doesn't have a cigarette, but then, I don't smoke...

o Night One. The first big social event of the conference. The ice isn't broken yet, and the bar is just opening. Someone has set up the tables like a cafe, with candles burning. The music starts up and a signer named Debi Latte appears, glamourously, and sings "Cry Me a River," which I've never heard sung so nicely...interestingly, her repertoire includes a Santana tune that should finally get people up and dancing, but they are reluctant...A woman in a wheelchair confidently rolls up -- I believe she works with GimpGirl -- and begins to dance by rolling her chair around and having a great time. Shame on us that we were too chicken to come and dance!

o The scene is outside the ballroom after Philip's keynote, and he's mobbed. Layers of people trying to shake his hand, ask him questions, make special requests, and circles of people standing a bit back, too awed apparently to come forward. One man, the author of a book on scripting in SL, comes up and asks Philip to sign his book. Of course, if anything, he should be signing his own book and giving it to Philip and Philip should be amazed that he produced a product that made people write books about it, but there it is! Philip cheerfully signs. I curse myself for not having brought a copy of Snowcrash for him to sign. That would be the ticket. He had already told us in the keynoter, showing a slide of his wife, that she was the one who got him to read Snowcrash, imagine!

But, I never come totally unprepared to conferences on virtual worlds. For my bus reading on the way, I had selected the new translation of Guy Debord's The Society of The Spectacle. Of course, it's awful 1968 Marxist French clap-trap, but it's terribly fascinating to see how much analysis there is in this work of the last century from more than 50 years ago that predicts the privacy-free social media revolution, the commodification of the worker through media and the mediating of all experience in media and all the rest of it. "All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." (Of course, it's a cute exaggeration.)

So instantly I knew that the universe had offered me one of its serendipitous moments, and I asked Philip to sign this work, explaining that it prefigured the issues of social media and virtual worlds. He cheerfully autographed it, using my real-life name, which was strange, and I observed that he was a southpaw.

o The scene is the ballroom again. First, Esby is showing a funny slide of a prehistoric cave painting and joking that it is the first Ozimal herd, and then suddenly we are plunged into a horrible story -- but one with a happy outcome -- in which we're told that Q Linden (Kent Quirk) has had a stroke and is in the hospital, but is recovering and will call in from his hospital bed. Q proceeds to dial in and talk about the viewer. He apologizes for the viewer -- more on that later. And then puts up a funny slide with a tag like "Always wear clean underwear," i.e. you know how your mother always told you, be sure to change your underwear every day, you never know, you might get into a car accident and people would see your underwear.

o Again, the ballroom (you would think the entire time was spent there, but it was, a good deal). We've just watched the show Life 2.0 (more on that later). Pooky Amsterdam is sonorously begging to differ with the naystayers in the crowd who didn't like the movie, saying what a triumph it is that this man in the film is admitting that he was sexually abused as a child.

o At a friendly Italian restaurant, there is a huge long table. We're serving stuffed mushrooms. I ask Filthy Fluno what he thinks about Viewer 2.0. "I'm waiting for Viewer 3.0," he deadpans. Somebody starts a game of "telephone," or "gossip" as we used to call it when we were kids. You pass a phrase down a long line of people like this, and then see what it winds up as when it comes back. It might start as "Linden Lab is opening up the server code!" and come back as "The Lindens are toast!".  It starts...yet I never heard if it ever came back, because I leave a bit early...

So, what did the organizers do right? Lots of things, pretty much *everything*:

o The hotel was beautiful, in downtown Boston hear the swan park, with gorgeous foyer, lots of restaurants and seating, and the rooms easy to find. To be sure, the expenses were great after the room deal, like all hotels, with the $30 hamburgers and $18 breakfasts and nowhere just to buy a diet coke. But that's how all hotels are and the meals planned for the group were great -- the organizers had an inspiration to make the first day's lunch like a picnic, with hotdogs and cornbread and cupcakes and lemonade, which made it very homey, easy to serve, and hopefully cheaper for the budget, and then the second day, they made a fancier sit-down and served chicken and salad luncheon with the fancier chocolate drizzled cheese cake. The restaurants nearby were all good too.

o There were plenty of breaks between sessions for socializing in the hallways, which is vital because otherwise, people ditch the sessions or straggle into them. It was perfect.

o Lots of well-marked colour-coded signage, a booklet handed out, a website, with up-to-the-minute breaking Twitter updates, i.e. on Philip's arrival, after all. I never found any confusion about where anything was, and it was all within a few doors of each other (by stark contrast with Chicago).

o A 24/7 community room where people could come to get info, hang out, leave their luggage, share room service, etc. There was always someone hanging out and playing guitar or chatting or ordering something.

o Clear-cut social occasions to pick from with RSVP lists, addresses posted online, etc.

o The main avatar ball stressing "comfort level for norms" -- that is, you didn't *have* to come dressed in a furry costume, and the theme wasn't BDSM. It was more just like a nice big low-key party. There were no whooping Woodbury party buses and graffiti of Linden Lab with "Ban Prok" being chocked as Lindens and griefers Lol'd. In general, the tone was one of moderation, without the sense that panels you went to contained jaded and hungover FIC who hadn't prepared (again, Chicago, business track, virtual stock markets, Shaun Altman anyone?!)

o Interesting speakers with really good presentations and plenty of time for managed Q&A. To be sure, there were a few clunkers but by and large, the equipment worked, the inworld streaming seemed to work, the presentations were quickly put up on Ustream and thoroughly twittered, etc. Back of all of this were professionals, as you can read on the website. These people were the ideal "seen but not heard" types working tirelessly in the back of the room, not loudly bitching in the foyer that it was all the hotel's fault if the broadband was down. Yes, hotels notoriously have problems with broadband at conferences. This one didn't, and it was because the Stream Team and other AV helpers did the trouble-shooting they needed to do.

Now, a few things that didn't work -- and this is mainly not anything to do with the organizers and their planning and capacity but just stuff that happens:

o nobody in the foyer to meet and greet and no foyer sign directing conference goers. It was confusing first coming in, especially after registration was closed, and see that the hotel's signage was showing that SLCC was there, but there wasn't a foyer sign with details (maybe that was some huge extra expense) saying "Go to the 4th floor" etc. Of course, you didn't have to look far to eventually find Loki holding court or Wiz in the lounge, as they seem to at each conference, but it took awhile.

o poor attendance at live music events. I don't know why this is. Certainly in theory, for me and I know others, hearing the live music acts you hear in SL in real life is a big part of the draw for SLCC. But when you come to the concerts or gigs, they seem very sparsely attended. And being sparsely attended doesn't make you want to stay -- it makes you want to go, where the other green dots are.

I feel bad about this, because I thought the musicians were great, I was glad to discover them, and it was particularly nice to be in a Grace Oclock-Free environment, even if the Grace Oclockers were in evidence and lurking around the coffee bar.

Is this because people are dying to talk to each other "in real"? And they don't feel it would be polite to talk during a live music act? That's part of it. Certainly the playing of music at meal times where people didn't feel discouraged from talking worked better, but maybe didn't give the musicians the greatest satisfaction that they had an attentive audience.

I don't know the solution, or even if this is the problem I saw it as, but there it is

o Presenters who will not stop clearing their throats, telling you a 101 ways that they are "just a guy," or "don't really represent IBM" or "are not lawyers, etc. etc. Couldn't you just put that stuff on one slide, show it for 30 seconds and move on to the substance of your talk? If you're spending 10 minutes clearing your throat this way -- and the one IBM guy speaking about IBM in SL did just that -- you don't have much to say. And he...didn't. More on that later. But I contrast that sort of caveating with a woman in the business track who used to be in the Navy years ago who just jumped right into her presentation and started right from frame one to talk about people scared of having baby unicorns with the stones in SL -- she wove in her backgrounds and her asides later, but she had her audience gripped from the first minute, and that's how you have to do it.

o Presenters who won't STOP and just TALK WITHOUT THE DAMN SLIDES when their powerpoint breaks down. Powerpoint is still ubiquitous, although in this world of Facebook and Twitter and i-phones, you'd think it would go away by now. It persists, like the flu.

o No communal laptop in the community room. When they tell you there's free wireless in the rooms, that's great, but not everyone has a laptop. The business center costs $7.00 per 15 minutes or at the Internet station. I always laugh that when I come to these conferences on virtual worlds, I can't actually log on to one if I didn't bring a laptop. I would have liveblogged it way more if I could have had occasional use of such a terminal.

More to come soon...

Comments

[Steam Bunjie]

Truly amazing how a meal and well versed bunch of PR lies can change someones mind, while those of us sitting back in the real reality of what they have done to Second Life and continue to not do is evident day in day out.

It's nice to have that human touch and sure can change someones perspective, but Philip & Linden Labs track records speaks for itself.

Fool us once, shame on you; fool us ten times, shame on us.

All this comes down to is celebrityism, where meeting or not meeting but being in the same room as someone or such people who they consider have power becomes intoxicating to the point where it appears everyone in the room has a frontal lobe lobotomy.

[Dusan Writer]

Steam - I hardly think that a post commending the organization of a conference is indication of a lobotomy. In the absence of evidence of a changed mind where is the changed mind?

I wish I had written this post myself. The organization of the conference was pitch perfect for both the community and the state of Second Life. It felt like a true community, grass roots, conversational, diverse, eclectic, thoughtful, but not over-the-top or expensive or 'hype-y' (well, except for my own presentation but that's another story)....and nothing like what I imagine a "Linden Lab" event would look like lol.

And the organization was incredibly impressive. The volunteers and Avacon team managed to pull off in mere months what it would take a paid team of dozens half a year.

P.S. Hotels usually don't allow signage in the lobby, not sure what that is, they're afraid of diluting their brand with posters or something, but I got lost too.

[Adric Antfarm]

I don't know who you are, but if you give Prok back now, I will not try to find you. If you do not, I will find you and I will go all Liam Neeson on you.

Seriously, very well written post. Glad you enjoyed yourself.

[Prokofy Neva]

Steam: Again, each time you post, my estimation of you lowers, and fits my hypothesis that you are an asshole. There's a difference between appreciating some people's hard work, their organization of the very venue for the conversation, the efforts that even people you are critical of make (the Lindens), and criticism of the substance, which I also do, and stay tuned.

You're obviously not able to make these refined distinctions and you're ready for the accusations of me somehow "selling out" (like the obnoxious Adric) because you're stupid. Um, talk among yourselves.

Yes, Dusan is right. This group pulled off in a few months superbly what others took a year to do, badly.

Dusan, it might be in Canada there aren't signs -- I don't recall them myselves in Canadian hotels. But in New York, signs are definitely accepted and needed and allowed. If you go into the Walldorf, you will find a big electronic sign that tells you all the seminars and workshops being held on those premises that day.

If you noticed, another group in fact got to put their event's billboard up in the foyer, and even a literature table. In fact I saw two groups on two successful days doing that. But, I imagine that does cost more.

[Toxic Menges]

I think my post got eaten or something, but I wanted to say that I enjoyed your live tweeting during the sessions.

[Skylar Smythe]

Amazing post! :)

I was sorry that I couldn't make it but reading this helps and reassures me that the event might be worth going to again after the botch job of SLCC 2009.

Seems like they really took all feedback from 2009 and applied it to making the event more community focused. Awesome...

And sounds like you had a blast. :) Bonus...

xoxoxo
Skylar

[Treasure Ballinger]

Now I"m all emo that I decided not to go, dammit. I won't make that mistake again. Great post.

[Yesha Sivan]

2009 was so bad, i decided to skip 2010. Because of your post, I hope to come at 2011. Good post. Txs. Yesha

[Prokofy Neva]

If the same company is organizing 2011, by all means, go. It was completely different than the past ones organized by the drunken frat boys and prim-a-donnas who were FIC friends of the Lindens.

[cube inada]

i had only gone in 2006. back then the "linden speaker seminars" were in the "buy the books and tapes of how to get rich" ilk....

BTW- i had met/seen Esri Speak then,, she was a nice gal,had dinner together/ but i still today question the truth in the actual money made as spoken about.

after watching the Philip/Dusan show and the Oz/Tattoo/stroke show...and the attempts at "white house correspondants prok and a few others//( mainly pissed edus) i could see the difference...
and the company of gurus forced to be on the defensive for spiking the koolaid.

watch the facebook places announcement it actaully took much from the Linden communications/3 card monte playbook...
and that my virtual "freinds".. is very frightning.