1. "We strongly encourage Linden Lab to be more consistent in their communication from this moment on. That means mostly that they think over their statements before they release them and double check them for legality, consistency, and possible reactions from the community as a whole, and not base their statements on what only seems to be a consensus, or an opinion pressured by media."

Confused. LL should base their communications "on the possible reactions from the community as a whole" while at the same time disregard "consensus". It should be noted that the will of the community as a whole is, of course, precisely 'consensus'. This is complicated by the different resident proposals and sub-groups working this issue where 'consensus' is most certainly not in alignment (including some nasty public feuds and power plays).

It is about time for someone do a parody open letter: one for the people who do nothing even remotely close to 'broadly offensive' and who are trying to escape exactly this kind of RL politico in SL.

peace!

Posted at 1:32AM on Jun 17th 2007 by HatHead Rickenbacker

2. This is a very wordy letter which, I think, misses a few things - such as the flawed abuse report system itself.

At this time it has 242 signatures, and this communicates an empirical message.

I agree with the premise of the letter, which one could boil down from cauldron size to thimble size - simply stated, "We do not like the axe over our heads dubbed, 'broadly offensive'". This is largely a matter of style. As for content - I believe if an open letter is done, it should contain more than a few paragraphs of pandering followed by a humble request, with a reminder that we are customers.

Umm. If we have to keep telling them that we are customers, there's a pretty big problem which they need to address. Maybe their bureaucracy, which now has apparently stripped their vision, is matched by their hubris.

Linden Lab is in a corner here. Statements were made public, and were made public in what could only have been a legal maneuver: Note that Robin told someone to write it... so they cannot back down and maintain that legal status.

What they CAN do is

(1) clarify their position - which the open letter does not really ask for.
(2) Fix the abuse report system so it is more clear, especially where lines are drawn.

In a video shot last month, the author of the ambiguous entry stated that ambiguity was necessary because some people would stand on the line and spit over it. That would seem to be an improvement at this point; at this point we just have people spitting all over with no line for the community to judge by.

Addressing the abuse report system in a coherent way would make things a lot easier.

The 'Big 6', as they are written, look fine. As they are applied - well - they suck.

Posted at 3:02AM on Jun 17th 2007 by Nobody Fugazi

3. slightly Off Topic, but the "spitting over the line" phrase is so perfectly descriptive of how people are with boundaries. I've just never been able to phrase it so cleanly.

Posted at 3:55AM on Jun 17th 2007 by Neural

4. I agree with Nobody Fugazi that the open letter is too wordy when in fact the message should be much simpler. And the message that I would like to see is: LL need to reconsider their relationship with the SL community.

I'm no legal expert but I don't think we have a legal right to tell LL what to do, or at least LL do not have a legal obligation to do what we tell them. However, we are one side of this relationship and we have the right to tell LL how we feel and what we think about what they do. And if LL want to have a good relationship with us they need to find ways to better listen to us, to better make decisions that affect us, and to better explain their decisions to us.

This applies not only to the issues regarding age playing but also to all moral issues and even technical issues.

Let me emphasize that better ways of listening to us is the most important part. Unfortunately for LL, we do not have one single, united voice (despite United Protest's attempt for it). ARs are not representative of the entire SL community. We also have the official forums and the unofficial ones and the blogs and all the comments to the blogs and open letters and so on. LL need to listen to all that (I know it's not easy).

Posted at 2:58PM on Jun 17th 2007 by Lem Skall

5. hmm. Yes, very wordy, and full of pseudo-legalese. Not well thought out at all. It will miss the mark with residents too, I think.

I have a masters degree, am over 30 and english is my first language. But to be frank, I was unable to understand what the letter was getting at in the first four paragraphs, so I cant see how people with poor English skills are going to follow this one at all.

I'm afraid I stopped reading once I got horribly confused - and I suspect that will be the same as many others. This is a shame, as it's an important issue, but I won't sign off on something I don't understand.

This needs a LOT more work.

M

Posted at 2:08AM on Jun 18th 2007 by Mabb Dilweg

6. I think this letter is very well writen and it represents very well what I think about what the SL Comunity should be
I signed this petition and I would like to see the petition sign number increase largely
I think that if this letter was seen buy a large number of SL users, the sign ups for this petition would increase in number of thousands
Freedom shall always exists in RL or SL and when that freedom is in danger we have to act and we cannot stand without doing nothing and with our mouths shut
Peace!

Posted at 7:08AM on Jun 18th 2007 by FreeLikeBird Martinek

7. I signed the first open letter and was at the town hall that followed. I did not agree with all that was in it but enough of it to do so. This piece of [fill in derogatory term] is wordy, pretentious and pointless. We the community want to know - what are we allowed to do? Because if I can't tie my partner up and spank them here I'll take them elsewhere.

Posted at 9:12AM on Jun 18th 2007 by sirhc DeSantis

8. I wonder why the first open letter is seen as a success. What happened is that a townhall was held at which no actual new information was presented.

My advice is still to attend office hours as all those topics are discussed there. And this topic came up of course (Nobody was there at least).

Here actually is Robin's reply from the townhall in question (just for the record):

" We have tried to create a world where everyone takes responsibility for their own actions, within some broadly stated guidelines called the communitiy standards. We’ve relied on the Residents to let us know when those standards are violated. Nevertheless, as we’ve grown and as we’ve spread out across the globe in RL, there are different sensibilities that we face in different places.

This is a new situation for us, and one we have to navigate through. We would like to maintain our approach where the community lets us know when they believe the community standards have been violated. Hence the reminder to use the reporting system.

That said, we may find there are times when behaviors that we have allowed in the past, e.g. ageplay, are viewed strongly enough by some jurisdictions that we have to decide, for the sake of the business that we aren’t going to allow them any more. I doubt very much that ageplay is the last behavior that will come under this scrutiny.

What Daniel said in his post is that we have standards, we have a reporting system, and we need to work to gether to try to maintain those standards. In retrospect perhaps it seemed like a new policy because it sounded more proactive than in the past. There may be times when we decide to fight something that the RW tries to impose on us. One case I can think of would be if some government asked us to give them information about political activities among their citizens.

But there will be other times when we have to decide that non-compliance will result in a harm to Second Life and we can’t allow that to happen. The reason I can’t say that this or that activity, or slant on BDSM, or degree of forced sex is or isn’t allowed is because I don’t know the answer.For now I would say use your heads, live by the laws of your own jurisdiction, try not to be in other people’s faces with activities that you know might draw ciriticism in the RW"

(of course LL should post these things in theory ;-)

She also said that there is a warn-warn-ban policy in place instead of direct banning.

I'd also expect that something like this statement will come out as a result of this open letter, be it at townhall or blogpost.

(writing this not to speak for LL or defending them, just wanted to paste it here as it is sort of a statement from LL which is relevant. I just see them in a not so easy situation but it's not LL alone, look at flickr where it's much worse at the moment).

I also would like to hear some legal expert in international vs. national law but unfortunately experts in that area seem to be rare.

I also would like Robin to post chat logs of her office hours so everybody's in the loop of the conversation.

Posted at 11:06AM on Jun 18th 2007 by Tao Takashi