Flip/Tim and I have been entrepreneurs in Second Life for the better part of the past four years, in which the use of “Second Life”, “Linden”, “SL” etc. as part of a business name or url has been widely accepted and endorsed by Linden Lab. This is evident in the numerous Second Life related websites that have cropped up over this time.

I believe the process for naming the Second Life Community Convention and for using the SL name and logo within our own only involved an email expressing permission, a direction to download said logos from the website and eventually this was put into writing in mid-2007 as part of the formal contract between the convention and Linden Lab.

Beyond the SLCC, Flip/Tim has worked extensively on SLBoutique (now OnRez), SLTrivia and SLPTO. The later two I suppose fall into the trouble zone and will need some appropriate attention whether it is filing for use of the url or changing the name entirely. I know that we are not alone in our contempt for this new decision.

Granted some of the language is vague with no indication of how strict or lax the enforcement will be. The change seems sudden and on the heals of the recent announcement that Philip Rosedale will step down as Linden Lab’s CEO, one can easily wager to guess what may be next coming down the virtual pipelines.

For now, I view this action as a slap in the face to all of the enterprising individuals who helped to build Second Life into what it is today. Linden Lab developed the product and platform, but without the countless enterprising residents engaged in forging the vision for virtual worlds far and wide since late 2002… Second Life never have grown to its current size and popularity.

Read more about changes to trademarks and Linden Lab:

Second Life Corporate FAQ regarding Trademark Use

Second Life Brand Center

Linden Lab Asserts Control of Name and Image @ Massively.com

Despite my recent apathy towards Second Life, I was looking forward to seeing my SL friends again and seeing how the new SLCC organizers are fairing since Tim/Flipper and I retired from the SLCC team this year. Unfortunately, our biggest annual fundraising event is September 24th, which means that I most likely will not be able to take any time off for the convention. At best, I would probably be able to fly to Tampa on Friday after work and then head home Sunday evening. Seems fairly pointless to exert that much effort. As far as I know, Tim/Flipper is still planning on attending the convention.

I understand the lack of availability of scheduling dates for conventions depending on the size and location. The beginning of September is really a hard time of year for anyone working in academia — whether they are faculty, student or administration. We ran into similar problems last year though it was a couple weeks earlier.

- The first recommendation I can make is to clearly define roles and responsibilities. Board members should not be lead organizers and/or track leaders. Their responsibility should be minimal and for official proceedings only. In most non-profit settings, board members are a group of consultants who tap their respective contacts for funding for special events and other fundraising opportunities. Often, they participate in different committees. They are the decision makers and advisors, but not the doers. I would also recommend a process for hiring board members, organizers and track leaders. Define lengths of terms (Two terms (conventions) should be the maximum). It is easy to get burnt out on such an endeavor.  PS. Hire an accountant.

- The SLCC is a labor of love. Once involved you cannot “sort of” be involved or try to maintain (especially on site) other priorities. You may end up not spending any quality time with your friends or getting much sleep. Its just what you have to do. The more involved you are the more it will dominate your free time and your life. The time it takes on all parts to coordinate a growing event of this scale is monumental. The Catch-22 is that the more people who are involved the more people you have to manage and the coordination effort becomes much like herding cats.

- It is nearly impossible to be all things to all people. This may call for a segmenting and separation of “tracks” in the future. Perhaps, for instance, the educators hold their own SLCC – Education Conference and the companies have SLCC – Business Conference etc.. There may be a need to have multiple events or some sort of restructuring. Education conferences are different from Technology conferences, which may be similar and divergent at the same time to business conferences.

- One of the things I regret the most even since its inception is the problematic nature of streaming audio/video to Second Life for the “mixed-reality” portion of the in-world convention. This is one of the areas where we have failed massively though not for lack of trying. I think this year that the in world convention management and structure held its own and that Vivianne Draper and Zatzai Asturias did an amazing job with it. The number one problem will continue to be the stability, scalability and feasibility of streaming media.  Hotels and conference centers often promise you a Prius and give you a Hummer. Sure, its a vehicle, but not the same caliber and performance. Second Life has become more and more mainstream along with interactive media technologies. However, the universal understanding of the persons who staff the events management teams at hotels and conference centers do not fully understand the kind of technological demands involved with Second Life. My advice in this area would be to 1) contract with an off-site host for audio/video streaming that can handle the technological demands. 2) finding a conference location with proven technological capabilities for large scale tech events. Perhaps, the corporate headquarter or campus of a large tech company would be ideal. 3) research other high tech conferences that stream media on the internet or into virtual worlds. 4) have a back-up system in place. 5) emergency whiskey is critical and absolutely non-negotiable.

- For the time being, the SLCC is still a non-profit volunteer run organization. No one is being paid to do this. At best, you can expect some complimentary drinks or meals. The SLCC may have to become a for-profit entity like most professional event organization groups in the future.  Sitting at a registration desk for a couple hours won’t guarantee you a free pass. Even sponsors are responsible for making their own hotel and lodging plans. This is what makes it affordable for as many participants as possible. Everyone chips in a little something. As much as I wish it were owned by some company and had paid employees even though I think it would lose the community vibe. I’d also think that it would be a good idea to hire a grants researcher and writer for alternative funding opportunities. -This may afford paid employees and volunteer compensation without having to be owned by a corporate entity.

- I really wished that we did not use the word community in the title. It made sense for the time and we needed something to call the event. Second Life Community Convention sounded decent. Plus community was the theme of the first convention. It may be too far along on the non-profit processes and branding to rename it and remove the word community. Its such a vague term anymore. What community? There are a vast array of communities in Second Life. There really isn’t one singular community of residents. Perhaps, network is a better description than community. Network is very Web 2.0 New Media oriented term.

- Ditch the live music, machinima viewings and art type events as a official events coordinated by the convention events management team. This is not to say that those groups should not be involved or should be overlooked. I think they should be organized by their respective communities separately from the organizers of the convention or with as little involvement as possible. Stroker Serpentine did an amazing job organizing the masquerade ball with very minimal involvement from any of the organizers and board members. I think this should be the model for extraneous involvement from different subsets of the community.

- Where possible have signed contracts for EVERYTHING even for on-site volunteers. Conventions are hard to run when people flake out, take on too many responsibilities and then falter or flat out leave the organization abruptly. This will happen. Heck, I’m guilty of it myself. All legal contracts should be written by an attorney and not cut and pasted from boiler plate documents found on the web.

- There needs to be one person on the team whose sole responsibilities is press/media relations. This is the person who posts and comments to all SL related forums and blogs. They should handle press releases and dissemination of all pertinent information and should assemble press kits to have on hand year round.

- There needs to be more involvement from Linden Lab. It was a huge honor for the SLCC to be named the official convention of Second Life by Linden Lab per their sponsorship terms and contract this year. Keeping in theme with the convention being resident run is fine. There involvement should, however, be beyond sending the executive staff to present and filling panels with moderators. This assistance should extend to contractual negotiations, non-profit dealings, financial management and press/media releases etc.

- You are never ever ever going to please everyone. You can do your best – it may or may not be good enough. Some bridges will inevitably be burned. You have to have faith that in the end it will all come together and work out as best as possible. There will be drama. There will be technical glitches. The facilities will never deliver on the tech needed to pull off an event of this magnitude. More and more people will be clamoring for a piece of the pie and the visibility that comes with having said pie. You can do you best to accommodate, but not everyone will get exactly what they want and many of them will piss and moan up a drama storm of epic proportions. It may seem dire, but things have a way of working themselves out in the end.

- Areas of interest and topics that should have more time devoted to them: Fashion, Technology, Libsl, Open Source, OpenSim (Competitive Platforms), Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0 applications and technology, improved interface design, Second Life as a green technology, grid stability and Subcultures/Communities (Furries, Gor, BDSM etc). Less focus on big business. Its been done to death at this point. Second Life is MUCH more than just a business platform. If you want that sort of thing there are a multitude of business and marketing based conference focusing on new media and virtual worlds.

- Never lose site of what the Second Life Community Convention is about – its about the people who make Second Life what it is – The Lindens, the content creators, the companies, the educators, the furries, the vampires, the sex industry, the machinimists, the artists, the musicians, the scripters and the residents far and wide. The SLCC is about bringing those people together in the real world.

Lastly, many thanks to everyone over the years who has persevered to make the SLCC what it is today. Special thanks go out to: FlipperPA Peregrine, Randy Moss, Nethermind Bliss, Jeska Linden, Jerry Paffendorf, Nexeus Fatale, Taco Rubio and Phreak Radio, Moo Money, Buddy Sprocket, Fizik Baskerville, Jeremy Kabumpo, Crucial Armitage, LilyEliska Kralmoc, Misty Rhodes, Stroker Serpentine, Baccara Rhodes, Valadeza Anubis, Vivianne Draper, Zatzai Asturias and Hiro Pendragon and all our sponsors whomever else I have omitted by mistake.

In a recent article, the Cambridge Evening News proclaims a new fangled first by stating that PA Consulting has had the world’s biggest Second Life conference, with 90 people in attendance. Otherwise the article is fairly minimal and there isn’t much information on their conference. It also does not state whether this was a real world event or an in-world gathering.

In this case, a simple Google search would reveal (among other things) that The Second Life Community Convention began in 2005 with approximately 150 people in attendance at the New York Law School and countless other people attending simultaneously within Second Life. In 2006, 500 people attended the SLCC in San Francisco and the attendance for the upcoming one in August 2007 is expected to reach 1000 participants. If I am not mistaken, the SLCC 2005 may have been one of the first mixed-reality events in Second Life.

Preceeding the inception of the Second Life Community Convention, there were many other virtual worlds and/or virtual reality related events including the Avatars conference series pioneered by Bruce Damer beginning in 1996. More recently there was the Virtual Worlds Conference in NYC and an upcoming one in San Jose. There is also the SLUK meet-up in England. There is an additional Second Life conference happening in Dusseldorf, Germany this September.

As far as Second Life in-world conferences go, in addition to simulcasts of the SLCC and the Virtual Worlds Conference, the SL Educators arranged a Best Practices in Second Life Conference in world that was attending by over a thousand people and Zatzai Asturias has held two Second Conventions in world.

How long did it take me to find those links? Maybe a half an hour. Sure, I knew what I was looking for, but doing a Google search for “Second Life Conferences” drew several pages of results. I know that its not possible to account for all the firsts and the biggests and bests in Second Life. Perhaps there should be a searchable database somewhere of registered firsts in Second Life.

Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture recently wrote on this subject in an article about IWOOT’s proclamation of being the first ever Second Life store where real life products can be purchased with Linden dollars and delivered to your home , which of course was untrue. Tony pointed out that, FlipperPA Peregrine made this possible in 2005 through then SLBoutique website where you could order software and computer parts for Linden dollars. I can personally attest to this since I am married to Flipper. This was covered in the press. Of course, IWOOT and SLBoutique’s offerings and delivery systems are different, but when you claim “first ever” it should really be the first ever. In this particular situation, the issues get resolved in the comments. I don’t think that people claim their superlatives maliciously and most of the time they are just mistakes in judgement or a failure in doing proper research.

The earliest of Second Life residents and Linden Lab employees joined Second Life in late 2002. Second Life has exploded exponentially over the past year or so and the population has grown to 8.5 million from 500,000 since August 2006. It is important for the newcomers to be aware of the fact that some of Second Life’s eldest residents have been here for almost five full years now. I am sure that there are a few firsts left that have yet to be done, but I cannot stress enough the value of research in terms of big picture thinking, growth and sustainability.

It is no secret that Flipper and myself are leaving the SLCC Team and Future United Board come August 27th. We’ve already put the wheels in motion to turn over the “keys” to those that will continue on with future SLCC endeavors. Some were easier to turn over ownership on than others. Blog ownership, e-mail passwords, Google groups and SL groups are easy. Bank accounts and the registration code are a bit trickier and will take time. I think it is important that we are 100% uninvolved with future conventions. Even the remotest bit of involvement can landslide into full blown organizer status.

Neither of us wanted to be involved this year as we publicly stated numerous times. We remained on board so that we could get all the new organizers up to speed and get the proverbial ball rolling for them. It just did not feel right leaving our friends and colleagues to start from scratch in figuring out how to organize the convention. Unfortunately, we both got more involved that we initially had planned on and as a consequence got sucked into the public drama vortex. Even though our involvement this year was much less by comparison with the first two conventions people still see us as the two people in charge running the helm regardless of how many other people are involved.

The SLCC has dominated two full years of our personal lives and I really have come to resent it in some ways. I always joke that between the two of us we’ve probably logged upwards of $100,000 USD in billable hours given the time we have donated to working on the conventions. It has been a thankless task. It has caused considerable stress in our personal lives. The pay off is having a place to connect with our friends from Second Life that we see once a year. The mantra of the past few months has been ” I want my life back” and I am happy to be on the road towards that end result.

Certain people think that I can’t handle criticism, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Over the years, we have taken much of the criticism to heart and made changes with processes and decisions accordingly. We are human and we make mistakes from time to time. It happens and is part of life. We also have been realistic in what we have the ability to do versus the lofty grand ideals of what we want to do. No one has ever set out to screw over the community or bilk the SLCC for personal gain.

What I do have a problem with is when criticism and opinions are expressed in the form of personal attacks on our characters; and/or stated as a concrete indelible facts impervious to logic, reason and truth and/or used to fuel drama for the sake of drama. We are far from astoundingly evil, mullah, bolsheviks, cyberaristocracy and what not. We are Second Life residents just like everyone else and thats why we helped to create the Second Life Community Convention. We thought it was important to have a place for people to connect from the virtual world to the real world under the common interest of Second Life.

All this brings me back to the initial point I was going to make. I think simply put in a nutshell I am over Second Life. As a result of riding the run away drama train for the past few years I’ve grown apathetic towards Second Life and the community of Second Life. No this is not one of those zOMG I am leaving and never coming back posts. I realize that the process of leaving would probably be more annoying and time consuming than actually staying. I’m hoping that I can reinvent my Second Life experience in the coming months and learn to love this crazy world and its community once again.

We will release registration details and hotel rooming information in the weeks to come. We can share that the cost of registration will be in the range of $165 – $195 and will include breakfast snacks and lunch on both Saturday and Sunday as well as some awesome musical performances and conference materials.  The event is being held at the Hilton Chicago and the hotel rates with our block is $159 per night before tax. THE ROOM BLOCK IS NOT SET UP YET SO PLEASE DO NOT CALL TO BOOK A ROOM AT THIS RATE YET! We are all very excited about SLCC 2007 and will get you all details as soon as we have them.

For more information and commenting please visit:

http://slcc2007.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/slcc-date-and-location-announcement/#comment-296

Flipper and I are still involved in advising the convention planning, but really have taken a back seat and let the other organizers run with it this year. We were and are still burned out from taking the lead on the first two conventions.

Speaking of which, it was brought to my attention that the SLCC got some nice mentions in Second Life: The Official Guide

Keep an eye on the The Official SLCC Blog for announcements this week.

http://slcc2007.wordpress.com/

After what seems like eons, but in reality only a couple of months of waiting Flipper received some of the SLCC footage, which he has had to edit a bit. So here are the first two videos up on Google Video’s. Enjoy!

Over the past two years the many organizers and volunteers for the Second Life Community Convention helped to have two successful events. Last year, The Future United Group was created as the non-profit owner of the SLCC event so that we could get better convention rates so that we could continue to keep the SLCC affordable.

After having both conventions dominate our Second lives for the better part of a year we decided that we didn’t want to be lead organizers anymore. In other words, we don’t want to be the ones responsible for doing everything. To some, this apparently means that we just walk away without any resolve and wash our hands of any and all involvement. It is not that easy to just say (insert eric cartman voice) “Screw you guys I’m going home” and just be done with it. The proverbial torch needs to be passed and we are in the process of doing that. There is no need to screw over the people we have worked closely with in the past two so that we can make a hasty withdrawl to avoid public scrutiny.

We have been actively recruiting new organizers for the SLCC over the past couple months and have brought on such amazing talent as RC Mars from the Relay for Life / American Cancer Society and not to mention Daniel & Jeremy from the Educators group who did an amazing job coordinating the Sunday Educators Event at the SLCC 2006. We’ve spoken to the glorious Moo Money about doing some official SLCC Machinima events. Some of the past organizers and volunteers are sticking around for the SLCC 2007 and some have retired after their respective tours of duty. Many people have contacted us about being involved on varying levels and we are doing our best to address our needs and bring on people who will be amazing assets to the SLCC organization process.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to wade through all of the responses to the survey we released after the convention. We received so many wonderful suggestions to make the SLCC better. We have a lot to think over and mull when it comes to sustainability given the massive growth spurt this year. We’ve listened to the criticisms and compliments and have worked towards making the right decisions. We are taking the results very seriously and trying to do our best to make the necessary changes.

Stay tuned…. you might be surprised as to how the SLCC 2007 turns out.

So, how do I see myself being involved going forward? In a perfect world, I would like to shift more towards an advisor role than a direct hands-on organization role. I think Flipper feels the same way. We don’t mind lending assistance where needed, but neither of us want to have it overwhelm yet another year of our lives. The only way I can see this changing is if for some reason Philadelphia becomes a viable option for the SLCC 2007, but even then I think we would just be regional coordinators (doing walk throughs at the event site, catering stuff, etc.) Its a longshot as Las Vegas, Chicago, Toronto were also strong contenders for the SLCC 2007. The location selection is going to come down to cost and availability of regional coordinators to do some footwork.