Tag: SL16B

On Friday, June 28th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the last of five Meet the Lindens sessions took place at the SL16B Auditorium. This was a special session, featuring as it did members of the Linden Department of Public Works – aka, the Moles.

A veritable host of Moles surfaced for the session, along with Patch Linden, comprising Abnor Mole, Naughty Mole, Squeaky Mole, Missy Mole and Alotta Mole, all of who can be heard in the video. They were joined by Glowing Mole, Quartz Mole, Spiffy Mole, Lost Mole, Squishy Mole, Glamorous Mole, Ancient Mole, Garden Mole, Paranor Mole, Shimmy Mole and Magic Mole.

The nature of the event, with so many people available to answer questions makes producing a summary a little difficult; instead, I offer an outline of what the Moles are, and the feedback of the key speakers on how they became Moles, and notes based both on comments during the session and the LDPW wiki page on how to become a Mole. For the rest, I recommend watching the video in full!

Who or What the Moles?

As surprising as it may seem, lot of SL users are not aware of what or who the Moles are.

Officially called the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) the Moles are SL residents from all over the world who have either applied to the Lab, or have been asked by the Lab, to work as paid freelance contractors. The LDPW is specifically geared towards enhancing the Mainland, as noted in the official wiki page, but they actually do a lot more than this.

The Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) is a programme focused on improvements related to the experience of living on, or visiting the Linden Mainland. The LDPW will organize teams of Resident builders, artists, and scripters (the Moles!) to create new content on Linden Lab’s behalf and to the benefit of all.

– From the official LDPW SL wiki page

The LDPW initially formed in 2008, and so is now in its eleventh year, and many of those involved in the programme today were recruited back then. The team is managed be Derrick Linden, the Product Operations Manager for Second Life, who reports into Patch Linden, and the team includes a number of Linden staff as well, including Guy Linden, Madori Linden, Kona Linden and Izzy Linden.

Within the Mainland, the Moles are probably best known for their infrastructure work – the roads, the railway lines, general continent layout, and all the many elements thereto. There have also been responsible for the development on Mainland projects such as the infrastructure within Nautilus City and, perhaps more particularly, the development of Bay City – which in their honour hosts an annual Mole Day festival.

Most recently, the Moles have been responsible for – and perhaps most visible with – the new Linden Homes continent, Bellisseria. They also produce the infrastructure for Lab-led events, including SL16B, the Lab-run shopping events, the town hall meeting spaces. But they also do far more than this, and work in many different areas, for example – and as a short list:

• They produce content such as the Premium gifts.
• The build and script the Lab-provided games such as Linden Realms, Paleoquest, Horizons and the grid-wide Tyrah and the Curse of the Magical Glytches – all accessible via the Portal Parks.
• Their work is often used as an example of what can be achieved in SL, particularly with regards new functions and capabilities.
• They work with multiple teams at Linden Lab, such as Marketing and the engineering team (Moles participated in projects such as Bento, for example, producing test content used in the development of Bento capabilities and in testing the Bento skeleton).
• Helping with QA activities.

As residents, how much time Moles spend on their resident  / personal accounts understandably varies in accordance with the work they’re engaged in. Some of the longer-serving Moles perhaps tend to focus predominantly on their Moles accounts / personas, while those who have more recently joined the team might spend more time split between their personal accounts and Mole accounts.

As freelance contractors, Moles also get to pretty much choose their hours of work – providing tasks are completed on time. An advantage here is that as the Moles are based around the world, some projects can at times move forward on something of a round-the-clock basis.

Over the years, the Moles have to deal with a with a lot, starting with selecting their Mole name. For this, they have to put forward three preferences, and either are award the one that’s available, or get to pick from those that are available – although there can be opportunities for them to change their names. They also have to deal with the more unusual in Second Life, as Abnor Mole explained:

With the games, we’ve had a lot of people who try to find a lot of creative ways not to play the game as you’re supposed to … In the Paleoquest game [in which tasks must be completed against the clock] … at the end, where you’re supposed to take a giant swab and you have to go and find the dino DNA, and you do that with the giant cotton swab … we found that somebody was going around and they would always find the “good poop” to swab the very first time, and we were, “how are they doing this?” And we’re looking and we’re looking and we’re looking, and finally we realised there was a time stamp on the creation of the object that was a  little bit different on the “good” ones … they had gone that deeply into it to tell that that was how to do it [find the right item and complete the task]! 

– Abnor Mole on one of the weird things Moles sometimes have to deal with

How Did You Become A Mole?

Abnor Mole: read about the formation of the LPDW in 2008, put in an application – back then this could be done via the Second Life website (and later the wiki), was interviewed by Michael Linden, who at that time managed the LPDW, and was accepted – so has been a Mole for 11 years. Among his many roles as a part of the team, he produces some of the videos associated with the like of the Paleoquest game.

Naughty Mole: was approached by Jack Linden (who used to manage the SL land team) as the LPDW was being formed with the aim of improving the Mainland, and he asked her if she’d like to join. One of the first projects she worked on was Barney’s Bay.

Squeaky Mole: is one of the “youngest” Moles, having joined the LDPW just over a year ago. He was “discovered” as a result of exhibiting at SLB, and the Lindens visited his region after which he received an invitation from Patch to become a Mole – and initially thought it was a joke!

Missy Mole: is also one of the “younger” moles, having joined the LDPW on June 28th, 2018. Also like Squeaky, she was approach by Patch to join the team, specifically in taking photos in support of Marketing work. She and Squeaky are two of the Moles who have done a lot of the work on SL16B.

Alotta Mole: like Missy, was approached by Patch as a result of his in-world photography, and joined the LDPW initially in support of Marketing work.

What Does It Take To Become A Mole?

• Drop your resume (note card) on Derrick Linden or in-world or to Patch Linden. Include your areas of expertise and any links you have where the Lab can see examples of your work (in-world, Flickr, You Tube, etc).
• Fully rounded content creators are encouraged to apply, but the Lab will also accept specialists.
• Be outgoing, communicative, willing to work within a team.
• Have a genuine passion for SL.
• Remember, it is an actual paid job, and is treated as such. You will be interviewed, you’ll be expected to have a résumé (c.v.), and be able to demonstrate your SL-related work.

Everyone on the team has their specialities, what they’re strong with … we do have Moles who specifically do scripting; we have moles who specifically so mesh content work and texturing or just texturing; we have Moles who do texturing and photography; we have Moles who do sound work, animation work. So, if you can think of each thing, or each area you can do content creation work for Second Life and in Second Life – we pretty much have to cover every single one of those areas, and in some of those areas we need more than one person.

There’s folk that specialise in terraforming, folks that do region décor work [trees, road, etc] … people who have got an eye for putting that stuff together and out there, being good with Land Impact … maybe they don’t have a lot of capability in making that stuff, but the other people in the team that make that content do that for them,  and then they’re the ones that carry through that next step.

– Patch Linden on Mole skills

Catch the rest of the session in the video below.

On Thursday, June 26th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the fourth of five Meet the Lindens sessions was held at the SL16B Auditorium. It featured Xiola Linden, Lead Community Manager and Strawberry Linden, Marketing Content Specialist.

The SL4Live TV video of the event is embedded below, with a couple of brief biographies on Xiola and Strawberry, based on comments they made during the session and in Xiola’s case, at past events.

An alternative video has also been recorded by  Pantera Północy.

About Xiola and Strawberry

Xiola Linden

Xiola is the Lead Community Manager at Linden Lab. she originally came to Second Life in 2006, and joined the Lab in 2011. Her role is broad-ranging, including elements of customer support,  through blogging and social media output for the Lab, to organising events such as the in-world get-togethers. For a period of time she was also responsible for community management work on Sansar, but has been back working full-time on Second Life for around 18 months. She will celebrate her eighth anniversary with the company in November 2018.

Born and raised in California’s silicon valley, she naturally immersed her career in technology, working for the likes of Yahoo!, with a particular interest in creative communities. It was a friend’s invitation that she try Second Life that got her started on the platform, and she remains active in-world on her personal account. Her engagement in the platform led to an interest in joining the Lab as an employee, so she started keeping an eye on the Lab’s career page and when a community related post to opened, she applied and was recruited.

Strawberry Linden

Also known as Strawberry Singh, she is one of the more high profile lab recruits to come from the ranks of Second Life residents, thanks to her work in building her own brand – blogging, vlogging, fashion tips, tutorials, etc., – that has been hugely popular among Second Life users, particularly those with a focus  / involvement on the fashion aspects of the platform.

It is her personal brand that played a role in her decision to carry her fist name over from resident to Linden in becoming Strawberry Linden – although she notes that she had advice from Patch Linden and others to keep her Linden persona separate from her personal SL persona and admits to perhaps regretting not heeding it!

As a Marketing Content Specialist,  she is focused on Second Life (no involvement in Sansar), her current focus is on tutorial videos to help incoming new users, starting with the basics: signing-up, walking around in-world, etc. From here she plans to move onto more intermediate subjects and onwards to more advanced topics, covering a broad range of subjects: buying Linden dollars, editing the avatar shape, dressing, use mesh avatars and mesh heads, etc., with videos aimed at more established users, rather than being purely for newcomers.

She had no major preconceptions about working at the Lab prior to joining, but has been impacted by the degree of love staff have towards the platform. She also loves the fact she can continue with a lot of what she did as a resident: dress avatars, create looks, take photos and make videos, and hopes to be able to carry over her blog challenges to the Lab.

On Monday, June 24th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the first of five Meet the Lindens sessions was held at the SL16B Auditorium. It featured the Lab’s senior Director of Product Operations, Patch Linden. The following is a summary of the session covering the core topics raised, with  audio extracts where relevant. Note that there are three videos of this event that I’m aware of:

Table of Contents About Patch Linden Who or What are the “Moles”? SLB Organisation Linden Homes and Bellisseria Release cadence: Houseboats and Traditional Homes Campers and Trailers theme Bellisseria Fairgrounds Bellisseria commercial options and railway Additional Commercial Option General thoughts on the Linden Homes parcels Welcome Areas Second Life Roadmap

• The SL4Live – TV livestream recording.
• An audio only recording via the official Second Life YouTube channel.
• A recording by Pantera Północy.

When reading this summary, please note:

• It is not a full transcript:
  • Discussion points have been grouped by topic, and not necessarily in the order raised during the session.
  • I have focused on those topics liable to be of the most interest to readers / generated the most informative answers, so this is not a summary of all comments. etc., but of those up to the 51:00 minute mark, after which the session includes more general feedback / comments from the audience. Please refer to the videos for these.
  • Topics are give as bullet-point highlights for ease of reference.
• Audio extracts are provided.
  • These have been cleaned-up in places to remove repetition or pauses, etc.
  • Audio extracts may concatenate comments on specific subjects that may have been made at different points in the discussion, and so do not always match the chronology of the video.
  • There are some unavoidable instance of audio break-up (notably from Patch’s microphone).
• Timestamps to the SL4Live – TV video are provided for those who would prefer to listen to Patch’s comments “in the raw”. This video is also embedded at the end of this article.
• Note that the session was interrupted a couple of times by an 18-carat blockhead deciding to shout abuse over the voice channel, and this is reflected in the videos, although I have intentionally not include audio from my own recording where this noise occurs.

About Patch

Patch started as a Second Life resident, first joining the platform in 2004, and has been a male fashion designer, mentor, and community lead. His efforts with the latter brought him to the attention of the Lab, and in 2007 it was suggested he consider applying to work for the company.

Initially working as a support agent, he spent a brief period as a support liaison before moving to the Concierge team, eventually becoming that team’s manager. He later moved to the role of Operations Support Manager for a year prior to pivoting away from support entirely and joining the Product group, the team responsible for defining the features, etc., found within Second Life.

Here he developed the Land Operations team, which includes the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), which is really his most visible role, from a user perspective, in Second Life, as he tends to be very hands-on with the LPDW projects.

As the Senior Director of Product Operations, his role encompasses the LPDW and all of the Lab’s user support organisation – a total of five teams – and also the Sansar support team, which is managed on a daily basis by one of his line managers, Patch having little day-to-day involvement in that side of things.

As a part of his role in managing / overseeing the support teams, in 2018 Patch established a support centre in Atlanta, Georgia, and  is currently overseeing an expansion to this centre, which is doubling in size in terms of staff and also about to move to a larger office space as result.

There are a lot of aspects of SL he particularly enjoys, notably the social aspects, interacting with the residents. He’s also attracted to the power SL gives to people across the globe to connect to one another, support one another in multiple ways, to form friendships and relationships, provide broader social interactions (e.g. links to physical world event such as Pride Month), etc.

He regards his biggest challenge as seeing and feeling the pain people so often feel when they feel threatened by the deployment of a new aspect / feature / capability of Second Life. However, he also sees taking the upset and the often negative reactions to such things as learning experience to help inform future projects and work to try to ease the sense of pain / upset as they are announced / deployed.

We like to have ears all over the place. We pay attention to the forums, we pay attention to groups in-world. There’s all sorts of places that we tend to be, and that, I think, gives us a lot of insight. We can’t catch everything, though, so sometimes somebody will come to me and say, ‘Hey! did you know such-and-such a thing was going on?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I had no idea. Tell me about it.’

So as much as I like to say we can try to be everywhere and listen to everything at the same time, there’s a whole lot more of you [residents] out there than there is us, so I try to give everyone as much attention and time as I can to make sure that you know that we hear you.

– Patch Linden on trying to capture user feedback, thought, concerns, etc.
[Video 14:45-15:34]

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Who or What are the “Moles”?

[Video: 9:02-10:09]

As surprising as it may seem, lot of SL users are not aware of what or who the Moles are.

• They are generally SL residents who have developing skills in building (originally with prims, now with mesh), texturing and scripting.
• They work on a freelance basis for the Lab under the title Linden Department of Public Works (LPDW), aka “The Moles”.
• Moles support the Lab in a number of ways:
  • They build things like the Premium gifts.
  • They develop and maintain Mainland infrastructure (roads, railway lines, seaways, Linden-developed buildings, etc), working with the Mainland Land Team.
  • They help build out large-scale projects for the Lab such as Nautilus, Bay City, the Horizons residential regions and Bellisseria.
  • They lay out infrastructure and facilities for a wide range of events in SL, including those at SL16B, the Lab-run shopping events, the town hall meeting spaces, etc.
  • They construct and maintain the physical aspects of the various Lab-provided games (e.g. Horizons, Paleoquest, Linden Realms.

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SLB Organisation

[Video: 15:36-17:10]

SLB used to be driven by the Lab, but more recently (SL9B through SL14B in particular) have been community-driven, with the Lab staying in the background. LPDW was more involved in SL15B, and SL16B sees the Lab back driving things.

• See this as a means to leverage engagement with users.
• Recognises and appreciates the work done by residents in organising the SLB festivities over the last few years.
• Are again trying to learn from the lesson of those events.
• Believes the LL teams involved have had a lot of fun bringing the regions together and working with residents (e.g. exhibitors and performers).
• Has received positive feedback from people whilst in the SLB regions.
• Again, lessons are being learnt and will be folded back into future large scale events organised and managed by the Lab.

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Linden Homes

[Video 18:15-29:13]

Note the order of these discussion points is not representative of the MTL session with Patch. The subject covered have been re-ordered compared to the video to hopefully provide a more structured presentation of the information given during the session.

Release Cadence: Houseboats and Traditional Houses

• Linden Homes Have been and continue to be extremely popular.
• Starting on Monday, June 24th, the release process for the available themes of houses will be changing:
  • It is planned to release one region of homes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
  • This schedule may slip a little as a result of things like holidays, any QA issues that might crop up, etc., but the Lab aim to try to maintain the cadence.
  • This is why the current development of homes on Bellisseria has been “in the open” and observable by residents.
  • [Note that obtaining the homes will still be the same process – via the Linden Homes registration page.]
  • See Special: Patch Linden on the new Linden Homes release process for more.
• Developing regions like this offers some transparency to the process and helps demonstrate that regions in Bellisseria are not (as has been claimed in various places) “cookie cutter” region layouts that are simply replicated across the continent. They are all individually laid out to offer variety in road layout, parks, public spaces, land elevation, coastline, etc.

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Camper and Trailers Theme

• SL16B offers a preview of the next major theme – Campers [Caravans] and Trailers.
  • Four styles of these new types of home were initially previewed at SL16B prior to Meet the Lindens with Patch.
  • In all there are eight styles (4 camper and 4 trailer styles), and the remaining styles were revealed at the SL16B Spellbound preview area during Patch’s MTL session.
  • The units are designed to fit both 512 sq m and 1024 sq m parcels, and will initially be issued on 512 sq m lots.
  • When ready, these types of home will be initially released as a large deployment to Bellisseria, including new landscaping that encompasses a very large communal social space.
  • After the initial deployment (date still TBA), these homes will roll into the new release cadence described above.
  • See A Look at the Camper and Trailer Homes with Patch Linden as well.

The Campers and Trailers are going to come in a large release initially. We kind-of feel like rolling out that entire area, because it is a bit of a scenery change, a theme change and stuff like that. Thematically it doesn’t quite line up [with the current home types and styles], but it is designed to all blend together so you’ll transition from one area of the continent to another.

But as we go through that process, you’ll see a who bunch of regions get spun up, for those of you who keep an eye on these things … You’ll probably see the building versions of those regions come soon, and we’ll start building those out and then at some point we’ll have a really large release for those as well; and then those will enter that same process of this more frequent release cadence.

– Patch Linden, SL16B, Monday, June 24th, 2019

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Bellisseria Fairgrounds

• A large communal events space located on its own island regions.
• Connected to Bellisseria via airstrip, landing pad, moorings and ferryboat.
• Intended to provide a space to a range of community fairs and events (it is not intended to be an amusement park – think of it as Bellisseria’s version of the Bay City Fairgrounds).
• It will be available for bookings for events – details are still TBA, but will likely involve a special group and sign-up process.
• Inaugural events already planned for July 4th and July 6th organised by the Bellisseria community itself.

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Continue reading “SL16B Meet Patch Linden – a summary with audio and video” →