Second Life: How are User Groups Doing?

There is a page in the Second Life™ Wiki listing the official user groups. Currently there are four weekly meetings;

The Bento Development group has changed to the Content Creation group. There was another Content Creation/Mesh Import group that stopped meeting in 2014. The meeting transcripts for that old group are still available. They are not the same groups but, similar.

Imagination

Imagination

This week and next there are no Content Creation group meetings. The next meeting is February 17.

Currently the Content Creation group meeting in Hippotropolis is the most interesting. They are dealing with the challenges of creating Bento Content. As problems come up the Lindens look at ways to make fixes or changes and users work to figure out work-arounds and better methods for creation. Various Lindens attend the meetings. 

The Server Beta group meeting in ADITI deals with changes to the simulators. There are not a lot of changes happening on the servers. The pace of simulator development has slowed since the Lab pulled people for Sansar. From an ‘updates’ perspective, I would say it is less than half the rate of change of the pre-Sansar days when we often had three different RC server packages running. These days we have a single new update running in the three RC channels ‘most’ weeks but, not every week.

The Open Development group is Oz Linden’s liaison meeting with open source developers, meaning viewer development. This meeting is open to anyone, as are the others in the list. Oz lives on the east coast. I live on the west coast and I am usually just getting out of bed as they start. So, I seldom attend the meeting and I don’t see Inara writing about the going ons there. Also, OZ doesn’t do transcripts. So, to know what is happening there, you have to attend. The other meetings are covered by Inara Pey, Pantera Polnocy, or myself.

The Server/Sim/Scripting group is more of a catch all meeting. Various Lindens are at this meeting. Oz Linden often attends. They are interested in simulator changes and scripting problems and changes.

Linden attendance beyond the Linden facilitator is unpredictable. Other Lab related internal office meetings often conflict with a user group meeting. That means the user group meeting is usually canceled.

The most productive and interesting meeting is the Third-Party Viewer Developer’s group or TPVD. This meeting is not promoted to the general user base. You have to know about group and how to search for the wiki pages to find meeting time, place, and agenda. You can generally see a video of the meeting that is made by Pantera Polnocy on YouTube. Pantera usually has the video up soon after the meeting. Uploading an hour-long video takes some time. So, I look for the Friday bi-weekly meeting to appear on Saturday. I generally watch the video and summarize the meeting. Inara does a similar article.

Typically there are 20 or so people attending the UG meetings. I’ve written before how few people are interested in what is going on in Second Life. However, there is no shortage of ignorant people running around complaining.

There is a second page… page link below.

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