Democracy in Action at Linden Lab
In Linden Lab's virtual online game, Second Life, players create alter egos in a virtual world where there are few rules and a lot of experiments that sometimes work out and sometimes don't. Life at the San Francisco company's headquarters is much the same. Back in 2000 "we started with the feeling that this company would be a system where people would be largely self-directed," CEO Philip Rosedale says.
Because Second Life itself is so multifaceted and amorphous, Rosedale figured that Linden Lab's managers could not control or understand every aspect of it. So executives created a structure in which engineers and the rest of the company's 250 workers have a lot of say over their projects and how they work.
Transparency is the key to making things run smoothly, Rosedale says. The company's online wiki board is filled with lively discussions. Employees meet in Second Life, allowing workers in different offices to work together as a team. People send weekly E-mails tracking what they plan to do and what they have accomplished. Because employees don't know who will be reading the progress reports, Rosedale says, the E-mails keep them accountable.
That openness also means coworkers have a good sense of who is doing what. Linden's "Love Machine," an E-mail feature, lets workers send positive notes to one another acknowledging their accomplishments. They send about 90 a day, which are archived. While the system may seem touchy-feely, Rosedale says that managers look through the notes during reviews to evaluate employee performance.
Not every experiment in democracy works out. Last year, Linden tried a system in which employees got credits that translated to time units they could distribute among projects. But because the credits were tied to real cash, the whole thing "stressed everyone out," Rosedale says.
Rosedale insists that Linden's open structure encourages employees to express their opinion, even if in the end he still gets the final say. "In a complex, rapidly changing market," Rosedale says, "our system allows everyone to take risks, not just me."
Reader Comments
Democracy?
Would that this word applied to the resellers and partners of LL's service. We've consistently asked for more participation, more stabilty, and better communications. Instead, we've consistently gotten crashes, outages, and system failures. Where would Visa be if several times a day credit card orders didn't work?
Innovative management needs to be judged by the quality of the product. In fact, Rosedale just gave an interview where he said that he stepped down because he isn't a "people management" person.
Second Life is an amazing platform, when it works, and could be an amazing environment for business, if they communicated with their partners and resellers more effectively.
I think Linden Lab's employees work a great deal on stability and bug-hunting, but there is something more insidious about this odd mixture of socialist collective and utopianist hippie commune wedded to California technolibertarianism. And that is the ruse of transparency. People forced to constantly lifelog just engage in the Big Lie more efficiently.
I wrote about this at length here: http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/12/the-leninism-of.html
This method of management is a complete failure. As a result of it the customers of LL get a continuous stream of useless, unwanted, changes that remove functionality that is actually used in favor of new ones that are more obscure and much more difficult to use not to mention find. They reguarly remove or break useful functions with these changes. Even if there is a team working on stability the shiny makers are working against them and consistantly re break anything that gets fixed. This management style is a complete failure and needs to be scrapped.
Democracy - More like Dictatorship
Linden Labs Recently has acted more like a Dictatorship along the lines of Sadam's Regime in Iraq prior to the USA led Invasion. Linde Labs Dictates to it's Residents what they can and can not Do "Your World, your Imagination" is thier tag line, however when it comes to Protecting The imagination of it's residents from Copywrite theft they take the "NAPSTER vs METALLICA" stance. ".... we just created this world, we are not responcable for how People use it...." yet they still take 9.95 $us a MONTH from thier residents AKA (Customers) and Dictate New Rules and Requlations every day as to How people should Conduct themself while in SecondLife. Creative Theft is Rampent, Exploitation of Child Like avatars is around every corner, Female avatars are exploited as well. Sexual Harassment is Worse then any Game I have ever seen and is Rival to that of XXX Chatrooms. The Governance team (what linden labs calls ther Make shift Gov't) NEVER LISTENS TO IT RESIDENTS! How is that Democracy in Action? all I see is a Bunch of Fat Cat Dictators at the top getting rich while the rest of Secondlifes Residents are getting poor.
Скажите, это уже коммунизм или будет еще хуже?
SL resident of MN makes a very good point. The Lindens claim a policy of transparency, but try messaging them in-world to discuss an issue. You'll typically be greeted with "I can't discuss that" and extremely vague copy/paste solutions such as "please file a support ticket." This asynchronous relationship between LL customer support and residents creates a barrier that the Lindens LOVE to hide behind. If this was democratic, residents would be voting on governance issues and policy changes. There is absolutely nothing democratic about the way Linden Lab operates, outside of maybe JIRA which is completely FIC in and of itself.
I think it's time that the world is introduced to the real Linden Lab, not the flowery euphoric picture that Philip and Mitch have painted in the public eye. The original Linden World name would have really been a much more appropriate for this totalitarian, "technolibertarian" high school clique.
They'll never go public as an IPO. We all know that Sarbanes-Oxley would force the real numbers to be exposed. lol! Cory claims 2008 will be the age of enlightenment. Ya... right. Companies will be enlightened that pouring time and resources into this proprietary science experiment will yield no return on investment. Ever visited Geek Squad island? You MIGHT see one or two green dots on the map.
~Tizzers
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Deciding what you want to work on is great...
...except when no one wants to work on the less glamorous things like fixing the stability of the Second Life client, the stability of the asset server database, the stability of in-world transactions that are the lifeblood of the Second Life economy.
Instead it seems that many Linden Lab employees focus on packing in new features which would be nice if all of the above issues didn't make the platform so unstable and unpredictable.
I'm all for giving employees freedom to keep them happy and make their work more enjoyable, but at some point someone has to take care of the more mundane tasks that may not be as glamorous but are far more important in many cases.
Apr 25, 2008 01:18:21 AM [permalink] [report comment]