The 16th anniversary of Second Life’s opening to the public at large – SL16B – is just around the corner (starting June 20th). And, as has been the case with SLB events over the last few years, the celebration will feature a series of Meet the Lindens sessions featuring members of the various teams within the Lab who work on Second Life.
The sessions will run daily through the week of the SL16B celebrations, and will be hosted at the SL16B Auditorium. They offer an opportunity to hear from – and likely ask questions of – Linden Lab staff who work on the platform.
All of the sessions will take place between 14:00 and 15:00 SLT, Monday, June 24th and Thursday, June 27th, with the schedule lining up as follows.
| Day (14:00 – 15:00 SLT) | Lindens |
| Monday 24th June | Patch Linden, Senior Manager, Product Operations |
| Tuesday 25th June | Oz Linden, Technical Director for Second Life and April Linden, Second Life Operations Manager |
| Wednesday 26th, June | Ebbe Linden (Altberg), Linden Lab CEO |
| Thursday 27th June | Xiola Linden, Lead Community Manager, and Strawberry Linden |
Friday, June 28th will see a (currently unadvertised, as awaiting names) session with some of the Moles.
For those who may be unfamiliar with some of the above names and their areas of expertise:
- Patch Linden oversees the content development teams, the Mainland Land Team, and the Linden Department of Public Works – LDPW, aka The Moles. As such, he oversees things like the development of the new Linden Homes continent, the Lab’s games and experiences such as Linden Realms and Horizons, and so on. He is also responsible for managing the individual Second Life and Sansar support teams, and the account support team.
- Oz Linden oversees the engineering side of Second Life – this encompasses viewer development, simulator development and a lot of the back-end services required by SL (e.g. the asset service, the appearance and baking services, etc.). This includes managing the development and implementation of SL projects and features such Bento, Animesh, the Environmental Enhancement Project, Bakes on Mesh, etc. On the simulator side of things, His team works closely with the Operations team.
- April Linden manages the team responsible for keeping all aspects of Second Life’s infrastructure – servers, network, etc., running. This involves more than just the simulator servers, encompassing as it does core systems such as the log-in services, and the back-end services as well. This is the time that is directly engaged in handling service outages, protecting SL from things like DDoS attacks. When things do go sideways, April also takes responsibility for informing Second Life users on what happened and why (and LL’s efforts to avoid any future repeat) through her excellent post-mortem blog posts (like this one) which are recommended reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of Second Life.
- Ebbe Linden, as the Lab’s CEO since 2014, really needs no introduction. Open and honest, he has always endeavoured to keep SL residents appraised of business at the Lab – including Sansar – and on the manage perspective on Second Life. Should anyone want a potted biography on him however, I offer the one I pieced together when he officially joined Linden Lab.
- Xiola Linden oversees the Second Life community team, which includes Strawberry Linden. Like many at the Lab, both Xiola and Strawberry are “former” residents of Second Life (quotes used as both remain active in-world on their personal accounts outside of their official capacity as Lindens). Part of the Marketing Team, the community team is responsible for community relations, running the Second Life social media accounts, working on marketing projects, etc.
As with previous years, I will hopefully be recording each of the sessions, and will be producing a series of audio reports for each. These will comprise bullet-point summaries of the topics covered (I regret to say that producing full written transcripts of every session is too time-intensive for me to commit to), with accompanying audio, as well as links to the official video of each session.
Again, all these sessions will take place at the SL16B Auditorium – but please note that this SLurl will not work until SL16B officially opens.
Catch the SL16B page in the Destination Guide for more information on events and activities during the celebrations.
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