Organising the SL anniversary has taught me a lot of things. I’ll likely talk about a bunch of them in time, but here’s one.

SL communities (at the present time), form around seed people. If there aren’t any pre-existing ones, or they becomes absent for a long period, the community self-selects them.Usually it’s one or two. Rarely as many as four. SL communities organise themselves around who they see as the key person or people.

One of the downsides of this is the tendency for a community to suffer from organisational paralysis if the person or persons are absent, unavailable or just too busy. We encountered a lot of that with the community groups for the anniversary, many of who were just not able to get anything together in the temporary absence or preoccupation of their chosen folks.

In the end, nine out of ten of the communities who we were in touch with never got it together. Many more never contacted us at all. Certainly a lot of groups thought “Who? Us? Why would people be interested in us?“. We missed you folks. Please – whoever is organising next year – contact them. SL is full of diverse communities and viewpoints. It’s worth showing what you’re all about, and any celebration of SL is diminished by your absence.

We got some of you, at least. I wish we could have gotten more. SL doesn’t seem to lend itself to very well to non-hierarchical autocratic communities (there are some wonderful exceptions, of course), but the constraint of having a first life, makes it easier for people to pick someone to follow, and just follow along. When the majority do that, it makes things harder, both from the point of view of the leader(s) and the remainder who have other ideas.

I’m sure that will change over time – while SL has the tools to let you run a business that makes or loses real money, it’s support for communication and collaboration is much more limited, and that puts very high prices in time and effort on better organisational models. Those prices are higher than most people with first-lives can afford. Perhaps by the next anniversary things will be very different on that front.

So..

• What do communities need to organise themselves in better and more effective ways?
• What tools do we – as residents – need to communicate and collaborate more effectively?
• Remember to put yourselves forward next year, darnit! So many communities got missed that should have been showcased.