ROBIN HARPER ON THE ISSUES - JANUARY 7, 2008

ONDER SKALL: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another session of Metanomics held in

conjunction with Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. I’d like to take a brief

moment to thank the sponsors of the Metanomics series. They are Generali Group, SAP,

Kelly Services, Cisco Systems, Saxo Bank and Sun Microsystems. And, of course, none of

this would be possible without SLCN, who are the best ones to talk to when it comes to

working with video in Virtual Worlds. Avatars across the grid at all event partner locations

can join the conversation by joining the Metanomics Group.

Today’s guest is Robin Harper, also known as Robin Linden, from Linden Lab. She is VP of

Community and Marketing and is here today to offer a special insight into the current state

of Second Life.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi, everybody. This is Rob Bloomfield from Cornell University,

and I am pleased to kick off another session, a new year of Metanomics, where we study

the business and policy of the Metaverse of Virtual Worlds. We’ve got a great year coming

up. We’re going to be in a variety of different Worlds this year. It’s not just a Second Life

event. Next week we’re going to be covering EVE Online. We will have Dr. Eyjólfur

Gudmundsson, the staff economist of the World, EVE Online. We will be having

Robert Gehorsam, the CEO of Forterra. Actually we have a commitment from Cory Bridges

in Multiverse. And I expect we’ll also be in a number of other worlds, including Twinity and,

let’s see, what else do we have: Kaneva. And there are more things coming up. We’ll see

how that works out.

But, for our kickoff session of the year, we have Robin Harper from Linden Lab, VP of

Marketing and Community Development. Robin, welcome to Metanomics.

ROBIN HARPER: Hi, Robert, and thank you very much for having me. It’s good to be here

today.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. Well, we’re always delighted to have people like yourself

who have been dealing with Virtual Worlds for a while. What I’d like to do is actually start by

just talking about you a little bit.

ROBIN HARPER: Okay.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: It seemed to me that you took a pretty traditional route. MBA in

marketing from Chicago. You, I guess, started out dealing with accounts for Novell,

Nintendo, PacificTel. So I mean that’s tech, but not exactly VP of Marketing and Community

in a Virtual World. So can you talk a little bit about how you ended up where you are now?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, it’s funny because I actually started out working with packaged

goods and spent a lot of years working with the Clorox Company, so it was a long way from

bleach to Virtual Worlds. But I think it started when I started working with the Nintendo

Company in the late ’80s launching Game Boy and Super Nintendo and things like that. And

I just fell in love with games. One thing led to another, and I ended up actually leaving

advertising and going to work for Maxis. I spent most of the ’90s then working on SimCity

and all of the various sim titles in building the Sim brand. During the time I was there, I really

never got too deeply into the idea of Virtual Worlds. The main experience that I had was a

text-based world and with Sork(?). So it wasn’t my goal, necessarily, to get into Virtual

Worlds.

But when I was looking for another opportunity and I saw Second Life--and this was in

March of 2002--and I thought, Oh, my god, it’s so much like SimCity. It shares so many of

the same characteristics. The ability to build something, to have ownership over something

that you have created, is a very, very powerful emotional benefit. And when we used to talk

to people who were using SimCity, they would never say, “Look at the city.” They don’t say,

“Look at my city.” And I saw that same possibility in Second Life, and that’s what got me

excited about Second Life. It was everything we had always wanted to do, but better. It was

the ability to get down to the ground level and walk around and talk to people that I found so

compelling. And so that’s what got me to Linden Lab and to Second Life.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now the job description, that’s one of the things I’ve puzzled over

a little bit. Your job description has actually changed. The title has changed from VP of

Marketing and Business Development to VP of Marketing and Community Development.

Can you talk a little bit about what the substance is underlying the change in name?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, I would say there’s not a whole lot of substance in that. When you

start at a company and there’s 12 or 13 people, I was the first business executive to join

Linden Lab, and so, for lack of anything better, we called me Marketing and Business

Development. We didn’t really know where it was going to go. Initially, my job was all about

brand development and communication. We were just getting Second Life into Alpha. We

had to give it a name. We had to come up with a logo. We had to start getting some interest

among the press. And so that’s what I did: naming, logo, PR.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So you take responsibility for the “I” in the hand?

ROBIN HARPER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was me.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Congratulations.

ROBIN HARPER: Thanks. Not that I’m a designer, but I’m the one who worked with the

design firm and said, “Yeah, that’s the direction I want to go.” Business development sort of

fell by the wayside because it was just not something that we needed to be focused on at

the time. For several years then, I managed marketing and PR and customer support. When

it became more obvious after a couple of years that we were actually building a platform for

development and not so much an entertainment service, that was when we split things up a

bit, and David Fleck joined us and spent about 18 or so months working with us to build the

solution providers programs, to look at how we could help companies, like Electric Sheep,

be successful in working with us and supporting different groups within Second Life. And so

whatever business development work we needed to have done, he took on, and I focused

more, during that time, on our existing customer base. And that’s where the whole notion of

community development came into play.

So now--where are we? Let’s see. We spun support off. I managed it through the end of

2007, and Cyn Skyberg has taken that. The business programs are now back in my group,

being managed by Glen Linden. Business development has moved over to Ginsu Yoon. So

when you’re in a company that’s growing as fast as Linden Lab, things change constantly,

so titles aren’t really all that important, I think. What’s really important is how we continue to

try to manage the way we work with our customers and make sure that they have what they

need.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So the term “customer,” whether customer service, when you say

the word “customer,” it seems like it is missing one of the key elements that makes a Virtual

World like Second Life so unique, which is that, really, you have a bunch of people who

believe they are in a community together. So how does that change? Actually let me say, so

Ginsu Linden, Ginsu Yoon was on our show back in, I guess it was, October, and he

actually was very up front saying he really didn’t see the Virtual World business being all

that different from other businesses. He was being very prosaic about it. We’ve got a

product. All these things that we think of as like an economy, he sees as just different

features of the product. So I’m wondering, is your take that really what you’re doing is pretty

much like any other customer service in any other business, or do you see features that

really are unique?

ROBIN HARPER: Let me think about how to come at that. I’m going to start with the notion

of residents. There has been a lot of question over the last year or so about the word

“resident” and why do we use that word. We talked a lot when I first started about whether

or not we thought people were going to be members because, at the time, it was a

subscription. Or “citizens” because, at the time, we were thinking about things in terms of

building Worlds. And we also looked at “users.” And we dismissed “members” because we

didn’t want to focus on the business model. We dismissed “citizens” because we thought it

was too political. We dismissed “users” because we thought it was too technical. And we

ended up with “residents.” But, again, what I think that that word reflects is that there is a

high degree of involvement in Second Life among people who participate that goes beyond

certainly things that I’ve worked with. I mean clearly it’s a different level of involvement than

you see with Bleach. And so I think it is different. I think that’s why we have community and

community initiatives, community development, as a job function at Linden Lab because we

recognize the high degree of involvement and the importance that Second Life plays,

particularly for those people who have taken advantage of the economic growth and have

been entrepreneurial.

That said, to Gene’s point, it is a business. It’s why we make some of the choices we make

about what we do or don’t allow. That’s why there’s not a representational government, just

as one example, because if everybody voted that we weren’t going to let anybody else

come in to Second Life anymore, we’d have to say, “Well, you know what? No. That’s not

going to happen because it’s a business.” So it’s a balancing act, I think. We have to

approach what we’re doing as a business. It’s a for-profit company. We have investors that

we’re responsible to, but it’s a different kind of business, in my view, because we’ve made

promises to people, and we’ve given them opportunities that I think are somewhat unique,

not only in the world of business but among Virtual Worlds.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So probably the way in which you are known most by residents in

Second Life is that you’re actually talking to them. You hold weekly office hours. You are

interacting with people in a number of public forums. I am told people are in awe of your

ability to respond to personal emails and IMs with very rapid turnaround. So one of the

questions I have for you is: How much of your job, how much of your time is actually spent

dealing with the residents on these types of issues you were describing? And how much of it

is stuff that we just don’t see at all?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, again, I think that’s in a state of flux. As Cyn takes on more

responsibility for customer relations, I think you’ll probably see that more and more when

people contact me I have to say, “Gosh, you know what? I can’t really help you with that. I’m

going to point you in the right direction.”

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So are you relying there a lot on sort of the Linden mentors and

people like that for help?

ROBIN HARPER: You mean the resident volunteers?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, I’m sorry. Yes, the resident volunteers.

ROBIN HARPER: Well, actually that group is still part of my team in community. But what

I’m talking about is, you’re asking about me being responsive. I believe that it’s very

important that we be as responsive as we can be, for all the reasons I’ve just been giving

you.

Personally, as the World grows, it’s increasingly difficult for me to answer every question

that we get. At the same time, we’ve significantly built up our customer relations team. Cyn

and her team have gotten the response rate on phones down to something like 20 seconds.

It’s pretty impressive.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: That is impressive.

ROBIN HARPER: Yeah, it’s definitely under two minutes, whereas, it used to be quite a bit

higher than that. So I think we’ll continue to see some changes. I think we’ll see that the

need for people to feel like they have to contact me when they have a problem will decline

because they’ll get the level of support that they need. But I always think that part of my job

and my responsibility is to be available and to be responsive to what people in Second Life

are asking for and for what they need. I don’t see that changing. I see it continuing to

change in the sense of what I get involved in, not so much that I am involved.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Much more delegation presumably.

ROBIN HARPER: Well, delegation on the support questions and, hopefully, more

involvement on the bigger questions of policy and direction for future development for

example.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let’s move on to some of those issues. What I’d like to

start with, in this part of the show, is just going through a list of some of the big challenges

that residents face in their Second Life experience and that they’re likely to come to you or

Linden Lab more generally for some help then. And some of the biggies here are

resident-to-resident business disputes: zoning and then privacy and trying to figure out how

to develop software for a platform that is constantly changing. That’s sort of the big list, but

let’s start out with a resident-to-resident business disputes. So I think most of the people

who have been to prior Metanomics shows have heard a lot about the various issues that

can arise, anything from, you know, you buy a television, and it doesn’t work, to someone is

copying something that you’ve made, to you bought stock in a company or put money into a

bank that has gone under. So I guess for starters can you talk a little bit about your

perspective on what Linden Lab’s policy is regarding resident-to-resident disputes?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, I think, as you know, we’ve taken the stance that residents should

try to resolve disputes themselves. The reason for that is that we’re generally not party to

the transactions that occur or to agreements that are made between people, and so it’s

difficult for us to fairly adjudicate a dispute. You have to think about in terms of the number

of disputes, it’s also just, again looking at it from a business perspective, a very difficult area

to scale. So what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to focus our efforts on those disputes that

interfere with someone actually being able to use Second Life. We focus more on abuse

and griefing kinds of issues than we do on transactional or resident business disputes.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. So now if someone were involved in a systematic process

of allegedly stealing in some way or engaging in fraudulent transactions with a lot of people

over a long time, is that something you would view as then moving into abuse or griefing?

ROBIN HARPER: Absolutely. And certainly, when we get abuse reports that say that

somebody is behaving fraudulently and we see a pattern of events along those lines that are

associated to one person or group, we spend a good deal of time investigating them.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. There are some resident groups that have arisen that are

trying to get themselves in a position of dealing with these disputes. Some of the more

well-known are, I guess, the Virtual World Business Bureau, which used to be called the

Second Life Business Bureau. In the stock markets, we have the Second Life Exchange

Commission. And then there are people like Gwyneth Llewellyn, who are working on

mediation of disputes and arbitration of disputes. And I’m wondering, first of all, what is your

perspective on these as they currently are being run?

ROBIN HARPER: We’re actually very happy to see residents create groups that attempt to

address disputes. I think what we’ve seen though is that they have a big challenge in

building trust, which is very difficult. One person will say, “Well, why should I abide by what

you say?” And so what I think would be very beneficial would be if there was some sort of

rating system in place similar to the one that’s used by eBay. And something like that then is

a combination of resident-to-resident commenting and rating and then escalation either to

us or to a group maybe such as the one that Gwyneth is putting together.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Are you thinking of something that would take input from

residents, but use a structure that Linden has created? So for example, eBay, it’s eBay’s

structure for rating, but then everyone gets to recommend they did or didn’t like someone?

ROBIN HARPER: Certainly that’s one possibility. We’ve talked about different ways to go,

whether we were to build it or somebody else was to build it. There have been several

efforts made by residents to build that kind of a rating system, and we would just as soon

see it come from the community, if possible.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Another thing that some people have looked forward to and other

people have been concerned about is the possibility that Linden Lab would sort of put their

stamp of approval on one of these resident groups and say, “We recommend you go to X in

such a group to resolve your disputes,” and, in fact, that Linden Lab would take their

evaluation, their conclusion with more weight than just, say, a typical abuse report. Do you

see anything like that on the horizon?

ROBIN HARPER: Not at the moment. No. I don’t know why we would do that at this stage.

Keep in mind that so much of these disputes can be associated to specific land holdings.

And I think it’s more appropriate for the owners of the land to decide how to manage that

land than it is for us.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. So yeah, this is something that a number of people have

talked about giving the estate holders, the land holders, more power, more granular power

over specific--for example, I know I’ve seen on the JIRA, the issue reporter, people

requesting that someone who owns land be able to prohibit or allow different people to do

different things in a way that’s much more precise and sensitive than sort of the all or

nothing, which we have now. I guess before we talk about that too much, I mean is that

something that is still in your jurisdiction, or is that much more now on the technical support

side?

ROBIN HARPER: Oh, that’s something that we’re working with them on. We tested the

option of giving estate owners the ability to receive and review abuse reports through email.

And what we found was that there are some estate owners who are interested in doing

something like that, but, as with most things, there are others who aren’t. So to my

knowledge, we haven’t made a final decision yet about what direction to go with that.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. But that is still part of the bailiwick of the VP of Marketing

and Community. Is that right?

ROBIN HARPER: The governance team is part of customer relations, so it’s no longer a

part of my team.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about zoning. So right now Second Life

has fairly limited zoning regulations there. A sim can be PG or Mature, and certainly the

person who owns the land can ban people. But there are a couple things that I’ve seen quite

heated discussions about. One of them is abandoned land and ad farmers and extortion

when someone will allegedly buy a very small amount of land, put up a hideous sign, and

the story goes they’re selling the land for an excessively high price, and it’s basically

extortion. To let people see a nice view, they have to pay someone off. What is your take on

this issue, and where do you see Linden going in addressing them?

ROBIN HARPER: Okay. Well, that’s actually, I think, three questions. So let me--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, sorry about that.

ROBIN HARPER: Let me start with zoning. The only zoning that really exists right now is

PG versus M ratings or Safe versus Unsafe areas. And we know that zoning has been very

popular with some residents. We tried several different experiments over the years, and

there are some zoned regions. There’s only four, I think, but there are some zoned regions

in Second Life. And, judging from the land prices, the fact that there’s some level of control

there is recognized in the value associated with the land. However, what we have found is

that managing the zoned land is very, very time intensive and difficult. And, again, in making

choices about where to allocate our resources, we’ve had to decide that that’s not

something that we can continue to do. So we’ve looked at other ideas. We’re certainly open

to other ideas for zoning. One simple step that we could do would be to create some

noncommercial regions where we don’t allow selling or advertising. But, again, that requires

policing, and we’ve focused our governance and policing efforts in the directions of griefing

and safety. But, as I say, we’re open to other ideas. We would love to hear what other

people think might be possible.

With respect to the extortion, which kind of goes along with that whole idea, we know it

happens. It doesn’t just happen on 16-meter plots. And we’ve looked at various ways that

we could give people the ability to deal with it. Content muting, for example. But I’m not

convinced--

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Can you elaborate on what content muting would be?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, so if there’s something ugly that you don’t want to look at, content

muting would allow you to basically make it invisible so you wouldn’t have to see it.

However, because of the way that we’d have to do that, it’s something that’s pretty easily

circumvented, so we’re not convinced that that’s really very useful, that it becomes more of

an arms race. You know, we figure out one way, and somebody builds a different script, and

then we have to start over. We’ve also looked at various ways that we could use pricing,

price caps, for example, to discourage behavior like that. But, again, that’s playing with the

in-world land economy, and we’re very reluctant to do that. We’re much more oriented

toward maintaining as free a market as possible. So what typically happens if somebody is

consistently abusive of these policies and enough abuse reports are filed, it allows us to

have our governance team go into action and use the terms of service as a way to address

the problem. It’s very difficult for us to allow people to have a free market economy, to

maintain the right to put on their land what they choose and to still address these things in

any sort of reasonable way. So again, we’re open to ideas. We’d love to hear them.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, maybe those political words like “citizen” weren’t too far off

the mark because the way you describe it doesn’t seem so different from some of the things

I heard in Iowa and New Hampshire over the last few days. Let’s see. Oh, go ahead.

ROBIN HARPER: Well, you’d also asked about abandoned land. Quickly, what I can tell

you is that is an area where we have been able to make an impact. There’s two kinds of

abandoned land, and it’s all on the mainland. One is when somebody just lacks the tier to

hold the land, for example. We are in the process of reclaiming that land. At the beginning of

December, we had about 16 regions’ worth, and now we’re down to about ten, and you’ll

continue to see us clean it up and put it back up for resale. Similarly, land has been

abandoned because the accounts are defunct. We had a substantial number of regions’

worth of that kind of land. We have reduced that one as well. Again, it takes a while because

we have to clear the content. We have to make sure that it is, in fact, abandoned. And, if

there are tenants on the land, we have to alert them before we do anything. But we expect

that we’ll be down for both of these types of abandoned land to fewer than ten regions by

the end of Q-1. So that’s our goal.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I mean it sounds like, for a lot of these, it’s really an issue of the

allocation of your time. I mean not your personal time, but the time of Linden staff to be able

to deal with this.

ROBIN HARPER: Absolutely. Whether it’s new feature development or fixing bugs or

chasing after abandoned land, it’s always for us a question of resource allocation.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And one possibility, I guess this goes back to relying more heavily

on people in-world and giving some of them some power and possibly some pay to make

decisions and deal with some of the sort of more cookie cutter boilerplate issues of notifying

people and so on. But I assume that’s something you would only do with a fair bit of

trepidation?

ROBIN HARPER: Not necessarily. Well, trepidation would definitely exist around

implementing and advocating some sort of representational government. That aside, we are

eager to see entrepreneurial activity geared toward building these kinds of systems. We are

certainly willing to support the ones that are successful. And there have been places, like in

terms of when we bring new land online for the mainland, where we’ve looked at hiring

residents to help us get the land ready, to make it a more appealing kind of place to be.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mm-hmm. Okay, but that’s less of what might be viewed as a

political decision, but--

ROBIN HARPER: Not a political decision, no.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: --but more landscaping, decorating, things like that? Yeah.

ROBIN HARPER: Roads, hills, whatever.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mm-hmm. Let’s move on and talk a bit about privacy. Virtual

Worlds, just by their nature, provide incredible amounts of data which residents can collect

through software attachments on their avatars, through bots. I know there are people who

have bots that travel the entire realm of Second Life, I think, making the circuit in a matter of

hours and recording land prices and land use and so on. And, of course, Linden Lab itself

has much more data that they could look at. First of all, let’s talk about what data Linden Lab

takes in and what you analyze. Do you spend a lot of time analyzing data? Are you finding

useful ways of improving people’s experience?

ROBIN HARPER: We have so much data. Sometimes it feels a little overwhelming. But we

try to look at the data that will help us make better decisions about the experience, whether

it’s how much time people are spending in Second Life or how much time is being spent

creating things as opposed to in social contacts. And we evaluate that through things like

how many events and of what sort. But there are lots of different ways that we can look at

stuff. I should stress though that that kind of information is only evaluated in the aggregate.

And it’s evaluated in much the same way that you see it on our website. The kind of

information that we collect is, for the most part, published on our website so that anybody

can do the same kind of analysis that we’re doing.

The other thing, with respect to privacy, we have gone to great lengths to protect the

information that we do have and the logs that we do have, not only with internal policies in

terms of who can look at the information, but also in terms of what we actually save and how

long we save it. For example, we don’t store credit card information. It’s not available for

anybody at Linden Lab to see. So I think both for the Real Life information, it’s also Second

Life information, we try very hard to make sure that we live up to the policies that we state in

our terms of service. Separate from that, the information that’s being collected by Second

Life residents, we know that there are people collecting data, and it’s kind of happening in

two ways. The bots that you’re talking about that track land pricing or the scripts that people

have at their store so they can both understand who’s shopping at their stores and also

better serve those customers, all of that data is done for Second Life businesses. To my

knowledge, there’s no way to tie that information to Real Life information. And, certainly, it’s

not done by Linden Lab. We have encouraged people who are collecting data both through

bots as well as through surveys to make sure that they let people know when they’re

collecting the information. And, certainly, those who have not let people know and then who

have been discovered have had some very negative responses to deal with.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, you used a couple words there I just wanted to ask you to

clarify. One is that you encourage people who are collecting data. So I mean how would I

know if I were to create a bot that would go around and look, say for example, try to figure

out who is coming to Metanomics events, something that sounds like you would view that as

fairly innocuous, but would you somehow know I was doing this and be able to contact me

and say, “By the way, you should make sure you’re letting people know”?

ROBIN HARPER: I wouldn’t necessarily know that you were doing that. No. When I’ve

been asked, and I’ve actually had meetings with groups of people about this issue, we have

stressed the importance of alerting people to the fact that you’re collecting information.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But there’s no way you have to directly enforce it, I assume. I

mean it seems like there would be ways to modify the software so that someone might be

able to know when certain types of data are being collected or detected. But that’s not in the

plan?

ROBIN HARPER: That is not in the plan right now. I don’t think that we’re in a position to be

able to enforce the privacy policies of other companies. So we deal with the information that

we collect.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mm-hmm. Okay, that’s fair enough. Let’s move on. Let’s see. I

think we’ve hit sort of the biggies that I had as far as challenges that residents have been

facing. I’d like to move on to a few challenges that I believe you have been on the record as

having--I’m sorry--a few projects that you’ve been on the record as having supported at one

point or another and just give you a chance to let us know sort of where these projects are

and where you think they’re headed. And the first one I’d like to talk about is actually one

I’ve already gotten two questions on through various channels during our talk on managing

groups and, in particular, the 25-group limit has been fairly unpopular. Can you just talk a

little bit about how you see groups, the status right now of the group tools and what you’d

like to see happen in the coming months?

ROBIN HARPER: When we originally built the group tools and we designed them in 2002,

we had this idea that the kind of groups that people were going to be making were clubs,

that it was almost exclusively going to be social. And, obviously, then as Second Life grew

and people started buying land and groups became associated with land ownership and

then subsequently with businesses, the group tools became wholly inadequate for the

purpose that they were being used. So the first thing that we did, and a project that I spent a

lot of time on last year and the year before, was to expand the way that groups could

account for different roles within the group. So what you see today, the ability to not only

have more roles, but to become fairly granular with what people in those roles were allowed

to do, was the first effort at recognizing that particular tools were being used for many more

than just social purposes. Wealso expanded at that point the number of groups that you

could have, from 15 to 25. So we have already made that expansion once.

There is now, I think, a whole new layer of work that we would like to do around groups, and

it runs the gamut from improving communication tools, IM communication as well as group

chat. We’ve already added voice capabilities for groups and such. But then, beyond that,

there’s tools that I would love to see us build that would give people better accounting

capabilities because so many people are using the group tools to run their businesses. We

need to give them the ability to pay employees, to track revenue, to do market research if

they want. And by that I mean just better analytical tools for looking at transactional

histories. There are different ways that we might be able to do that. We could do that

through a web service and an API so that people could build the tools on the web. Or maybe

we’d want to build them into the Second Life code. Right now we’ve been talking a lot about

the design of those tools, but we don’t have an implementation schedule. Hopefully, we’ll

get to that in 2008, but, at this point, we can’t promise that because we have a lot of things

that we’re working on.

We have been talking about expanding the number of groups beyond 25. There’s some

worry at the developer level that that might have a negative impact on some of our

performance metrics, which is something we really do not want to see happen. So we’re

looking right now and trying to estimate how much use there actually would be for--expand

the number of groups and what the impact would be on the various systems in Second Life.

When we have a better evaluation, we’ll be able to come back and say, “Sure, we’ll increase

it,” or, “No, we can’t, and here’s why.” So that’s where that stands.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. How about BanLink? This I know has been a fairly

controversial proposal that would allow people to essentially subscribe to Linden Lab’s and

other residents’ lists of residents who have banned from land or from groups, and they could

simply mimic and say, “Well, I trust so-and-so. So-and-so has banned someone, then I

guess I want to as well.” So is that something that you have supported, I believe. What’s

your take on that now?

ROBIN HARPER: I did not support that in isolation. What we were talking about when that

idea first came out was how do we, on the mainland--it’s less of an issue on the estate--but,

on the mainland, how do we find a way to enable people to come together and create

associations, for lack of a better term, where there are, let’s say, standard codes of

behavior, as you might have in an estate. And so what we were talking about at the time

was how we enable people to either more easily create large contiguous spaces or, in the

absence of doing that or along with doing that, come together and create covenants that

say, “We have this common notion that we want behaviors to look like this,” whatever it

might be. And then one of the ways that they might enforce those covenants would be

through shared trust lists. Now we haven’t been able to implement the notion of covenants.

Again, it’s just an issue of priorities and resources. And so what has been implemented and

not by us, but by a resident group, is the idea of BanLink. It’s the tool, but it doesn’t have the

covenant that goes along with it. And so I think there is a risk there that somebody who’s

unpopular, for example, could find themselves closed out of a significant part of the

mainland, and, obviously, that was never the intent.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You mentioned mainland, and I have a question here from one of

our participants, Dnali Anabuki, who’s asking: Is Linden Lab committed to maintaining

mainland in the long term?

ROBIN HARPER: Yes, we are.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And I guess this gets to one of the issues that I think--actually I

see a number of issues coming up in the future. And, actually I see we only have about ten

minutes left, so maybe this is a nice time to move on to these. There certainly has been a

huge expansion in the private estates and islands, which impose a very different set of

challenges I guess more to you than necessarily to the Second Life community. There’s also

been a big influx of businesses and educational institutions, and that would seem to confront

you with a couple very different types of communities that you’re trying to deal with. So can

you talk a little bit about how you see those trends, the growth of private land and the growth

of educational and business institutions in Second Life affecting the issues that you deal

with?

ROBIN HARPER: I think the biggest challenge we have is that we have increasingly groups

of Second Life residents or groups of customers with different agendas. And I think that’s

the nature of the evolution that we’re in toward becoming more of a platform. That platform’s

going to be used in different ways, and so where it becomes challenging for us, and just in

terms of marketing, is in making sure that the promises that get made are delivered to

people with very disparate ideas about what they need. Where it becomes a challenge for

us, in terms of development, is in setting priorities. Again, for those features. So it’s not like

there haven’t been platforms out there before that have catered to consumers, to

universities and to corporations. It’s just for us it’s an evolution, and we are looking at it to try

and decide how do we best serve these different groups that are all interested in using the

platform. The mainland as a community, I think, is going to look more and more like the

place for what some people might call the consumer business to be located.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. That makes sense. Sort of the food court of the mall.

ROBIN HARPER: That sounds awful.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Sorry. I was never in marketing and promotion. I guess you could

tell.

ROBIN HARPER: Oh, it’s more about if you are interested in exploring a Virtual World for

entrepreneurial or social reasons, then the mainland is a logical place for you to start. You

may decide, after some time, that you want to join a community that’s located on an island

or that you want to start your own business and buy an island. But the mainland is an area

where I think smaller communities or individuals who are more casual users will find their

beginning. So it’s very important to us that that be a positive and a valuable experience for

them. And right now I think we have some work to do there.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let me ask you about a couple of changes that have

happened recently and how you see them affecting the community. The first one is voice.

That was fairly controversial when it came in. What’s your take on whether that has been a

success [AUDIO GLITCH] you’re happy?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, yeah, we’re happy. We’re not using voicemail though, which I think

it suggests that we still have some ways to go. But it has been adopted and very happily

adopted by a variety of Second Life users and Second Life residents. Certainly, it’s been

very valuable for the educational communities, and there are many businesses who are

using it. It’s used less in some of the social contexts. Although I was over on the teen grid

recently, and the kids are all using it. So I think it’s being adopted more slowly. I think, over

time, as new people come into Second Life, and it’s less of an oddity or less of a habit to

use chat, that we may find that the adoption grows. But we want it for people to have a

choice. Like everything in Second Life, it’s use what’s here to your best advantage and for

whatever suits you.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now another change has been the JIRA, the introduction of the

JIRA Issue Tracker. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly, but I’ve only seen it typed. My

understanding is that the goal here is a little bit of crowd sourcing and letting the residents

let Linden know what they would like to see addressed and maybe even a sense of

priorities. My concern, just in what I’ve seen the discussions on it and about it is, I wonder

whether Linden might worry that this is creating a false sense of entitlement among

residents who feel like they put an issue up there, and then it’s not resolved, and they feel

like then they’re being ignored. How do you see JIRA working out so far?

ROBIN HARPER: Well, I don’t know if you were around when we had the Feature Voting

Tool, but the original intent with the Feature Voting Tool was to allow residents to make

proposals for various features that they were interested in, to vote on them, and then those

that received more votes would be evaluated for feasibility. There were some problems with

that, and I don’t want to get into all the details because what you were unhappy with

depended on who you were, to some degree. But it wasn’t really working that well for us.

We wanted to implement JIRA as a way for the Open Source community to communicate

about what they were working on with bugs. And so we thought, “Well, let’s give this a shot

and see if this wouldn’t be a better tool for us than the Feature Voting Tool has been to

surface ideas and proposals as well as bugs.” I think what we’ve discovered is that, as a

tool, it’s too difficult to use, and things are getting lost in there.

So I’ve actually been looking at kind of another compromise option, which would be to take

the original Feature Voting Tool code and Open-Sourcing that and see if there’s anybody

interested in taking that code and fixing it, making it something that could be web based,

more accessible, easier to use in all that PJIRA isn’t, and we can leave PJIRA to the Open

Source community for the work that they’re doing. So if anybody’s listening to this and has

interest in that, just let me know.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Oh, well, there you go. A fair number of people listen to this, who

might well be willing to weigh in so I wish you luck. We’re just about out of time. I’d like to

give you the last word and would also just love to hear about what you see as any big

priorities that you have, or that Linden Lab more generally has, in the coming year,

particularly something we haven’t touched on yet.

ROBIN HARPER: Wow! There is so much going on. I think one of the biggest challenges

that we all face here at Linden Lab, as well as for the people in Second Life, is dealing with

the fact that we’re in a situation of constant evolution. And what I would love to see is that

we continue to keep those channels of communication open as we go through all of these

changes. The down side to so much growth is individual voices are harder to hear. We’ve

attracted the attention of governments, and so it’s often unpredictable what the effect is

going to be of having more attention paid by those governments. And we’re all in this

together. We all want this to be successful. So what I’m hoping is that we’ll just continue to

work together to make this what I think it can be, which is something truly special and

unique in technology and in the world.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, it certainly is different, and it’s been a learning experience

for me. Just simply running this show with sort of every week the technology is slightly

different. We try to add something new. And we try to have guests like you. So thank you so

much, Robin Harper, for coming on to Metanomics to kick off 2008.

ROBIN HARPER: And thank you. And to all of the Second Life residents out there, I think

you all know my email, but it’s robin@lindenlab.com, and let’s do keep those channels open.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Great. Will do. I guess I’d also like to pass on a very quick thanks

to Gwyneth Llewellyn and Prokofy Neva and Fleep Tuque for providing me with some

questions and topics to cover. So this is Rob Bloomfield signing off. We’ll have another

Metanomics session next week, with Eyjólfur Gudmundsson, of EVE Online. So thank you

all very much.

[END OF AUDIO]

Document: cor2016.doc

Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer