Just over a week ago I asked how should we, the users, and LL communicate with each other.

I laid out four groups of communication as well:

1. Business decisions - raising the starting price of mainland sim auctions
2. Emergency content - OMG the grid is really poorly
3. Development issues - anything from the interface of the new communications system to the plans to totally rewrite the UI
4. Technical issues - why can't we have 100 groups?

So, what are my takes on these issues?

For purely business decisions, these should be taken internally and announced, much as they are now. I would like to see the bias lie at the "if in doubt, consult" end of the spectrum, but some things must be available to be internal decisions.

Emergency content: this has been dealt with rather well recently I think. Posting to the blog asap, regular updates, and a reasonably detailed post mortem as well. Keep this up and consider adding more inworld and log-in messages.

Technical issues, to take them out of order: between a friendlier JIRA and a wiki that is actually laid out in a nice fashion, you should be able to cope with most of these. I would love to add an "ask the experts" system, much like town halls to this. Every month, say, a different team leader is up to answer questions. Said questions to be asked in advance via email or specialist blog/forum system. Something where you send in the emails and they're automatically parsed to the of the list isn't that hard to write. I don't know how LL sees teams, but I'd say UI, graphics engine, physics engine, statistics, economy, scripting engine, groups, building tools (there are probably more, but that's a good start) means that the head of team isn't up that often (actually, having seen the list, maybe we should find 13 items and have it weekly, so we get a session once per quarter per team) would also help with this. This will also let the knowledge base system expand - rather than getting answers to questions LL think we want to ask, we get to see answers to questions we actually want to ask.
Finally, development issues. I think this should be done by public announcement and an invitation to present your thoughts. Make the plans available, with as much detail about the options as possible, (a wiki page say), and invite comments via email, in-world meetings etc. Add Q+A sessions as for technical issues above. Maybe a few of these will fill up to the 13 meetings a quarter even.

Oh, the meetings need to slide around for time too, so people in different time zones can attend easily. If there is a meeting each quarter about a specific topic area, having one in the SLT morning and the next in the late afternoon for each topic makes it likely you can get to one every 6 months or more, regardless of your time zone.

Whatever you do, until we can have any number of groups we like do NOT require joining a group for these meetings. I'm sure the terminally paranoid will scream "FIC" regardless, but for those of you that have been here long enough to remember the groups overhaul, this is, pretty much the process they did then. It hasn't solved every issue, but, aside from group numbers, we're generally pretty happy about the outcome of that overhaul. If it was a good system then, why isn't it a good system now?

Any thoughts?