1. Hmmm...JIRA is known as "bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management software." I believe it's similar in many respects to Bugzilla. It's highly configurable, though, which is probably how they managed to turn it into a "Love Machine."

Posted at 3:16AM on Dec 5th 2006 by Erbo Evans

2. And not to mention, they have talked about Jira many times, and have said that they use it as the love machine by sending notices to each other when they think someone does something cool/great/good.

But great find mate. ;)

Posted at 4:04AM on Dec 5th 2006 by Frans Charming

3. I wrote about this a long time ago, and found a scary-fascinating interview with Philip, too, in a comment on Philip's blog, "Tao of Linden". Here's an excerpt:

Prokofy Neva Says:
August 17th, 2006 at 7:16 PM PST

It strikes me, upon reflection, re: this “transparency” built into this system (btw, you can read more about the software used for it here, including a Q& A with Philip Linden: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/casestudies/linden.jsp
that sometimes, transparency is fake. That is, when there’s lots of transparency and everybody is forced to report all the time, they might reach for various elaborate lies, the way, in the Soviet system, for example, people made up their work production figures and lied about reaching their targets to prevent pressure from the center. Consumers learned never to buy anything with the date-stamp on the product toward the end of the month (and the excessive amount of information in the USSR had information like that on products). If they did, they knew that people were rushing to make targets so that they could look good on their reports, and were doing a shoddy job and cutting corners.

I’m thinking with the noise of everybody being “all about transparency,” nobody is there to hear. That is, without a top-down management that has people answerable to higher powers above them - the kind of transparency that just has one person listening to just one other person instead of an entire bee-hive of busy-ness — that nobody might notice that somebody is eagerly working away, reporting up a storm, but in fact doing a crappy job. The signal-to-noise problem just got a whole lot bigger.

Posted at 9:07AM on Dec 5th 2006 by Prokofy Neva

4. I also analyzed it extensively here in August 2006:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/08/the_legal_nihil.html

Posted at 9:11AM on Dec 5th 2006 by Prokofy Neva

5. Oh, and reading this article in The Age, I now see where the problem lies with the game:

""We use JIRA for all task-in-progress tracking in the company - everything from ordering food in the kitchen to releasing a new feature to fixing a bug."

Somebody ordered jello in the kitchen, and the command got re-rerouted to SL itself and turned it into jello. Oops!

Posted at 9:14AM on Dec 5th 2006 by Prokofy Neva

6. I've mentioned numerous times on my personal blog that Linden Lab uses JIRA — dating back to Jul. 27, infact!

http://torley.com/on-time-management-hi-im-torley-how-can-i-help-you-d/

Another morsel of trivia: I'm one of the more prolific Lindens using JIRA.

Love Machine usage tends to get higher when there's more stress @ LL around crisis times, and yes, it is *very* motivating to see the recent crises solved. I just sent Love to Sabin for helping coordinate fill me in on parts of the Search functionality being enabled again.

I wanted to write longer — sorry, gotta get back to my CommMonkey duties. Just wanted to say a big friendly HI!


P.S. What does JIRA mean? http://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=192544

Posted at 9:02PM on Dec 5th 2006 by Torley

7. Most companies use JIRA for issue tracking. Calling it Love Machine seems to be a good way to turn the attention to the positive side (solved issues) and away from the negative side (bugs, blame, responsibilities).

Posted at 6:00AM on Dec 6th 2006 by Stefan Wei�

8. JIRA and The Love Machine are two totally different things.

JIRA is a tool used to track projects and open them up to the entire company to see, comment on, help with, etc. As has been reiterated before, it's a tool used for transparency, but I personally feel it's mainly for collaboration. One of the greatest things about SL is the ability to collaborate, and it's distictively displayed in LL's culture, as well.

The Love Machine is simply like a public congratulatory for something well done. It can be anything, as long as it's related to LL employess, LL itself, or SL. Again, honing in on transparency, as all of LL is able to see the last couple love that has been given. As Torley stated, during times of high-stress, love DOES increase, as people are working harder and keeping longer hours - as an example of the effectiveness of this; how many times have you worked late and gone home exhausted, then later was upset at the fact that no one has thanked you for your work? It's highly possible no one knows what you're working on, nor it's status; it's also possible that if they DID know what you were working on, not only would they help, but they'd also tell you "good job."

Is it so bad that we keep the entire company up-to-date on the status of our projects, then enjoy giving congratulations? I personally find deep value in a company that fosters this type of environment, and every Linden will passionately defend it.

Posted at 11:41AM on Dec 6th 2006 by Dustin Linden

9. Linden Lab uses Jira for bugs and other things that need to be done. The "Love Machine" is distinct from Jira and is a very simple system that we've implemented ourselves.

Basically, if someone helps you out, does something impressive, or otherwise makes you happy about how they're doing their job you can send them "Love". Giving Love is as simple as typing the person's name and the reason why (within 80 characters). When you give someone Love the Love Machine sends an email to that person from you with the reason. You can review all of the Love you've handed out, or the Love you've received, but not the Love given or received by your co-workers. You can view the last six most recent Love donations, and who they went to, but not who sent them. There is no enforced limit to how much Love you can dispense, however the suggested rate is about 1 Love per day on average. After about three or four months the Love is tallied and envelopes of cash are handed out proportional to how much Love each person received within that period. One Love is worth $3.

Some other bits about the Love Machine:

The primary value of the Love is the communication of appreciation for help and hard work. People enjoy giving and recieving Love.

The monetary value of one Love was chosen to be low enough that it was not a big incentive to try to game the system but valuable enough that the person giving the Love feels as if they are doing the other a favor, and the recipient recieves some non-zero financial reward.

Another way to look at it is as a system where everybody has the power to make minor adjustments to the "salary" of everybody else. It is a small "bottoms up" method of distributing the company assets.

The Love Machine does has a few checks, balances, and oversight, but was not overengineered to prevent abuse. Instead, we took faith in the general honesty, intelligence, and goodwill of all of the employees at Linden Lab. It was intended to be an evolving experiment.

Posted at 11:47AM on Dec 6th 2006 by Andrew Linden