At Hamlet’s instigation, today I got a chance to visit the San Francisco offices of Linden Lab and Techsoup. Along the way I smet (There, you happy, Hiro?) a couple of prominent residents who I had only known in-world prior to today: Jeska Linden and Glitteractica Cookie.
Jeska was kind enough to give me a quickie tour of the Linden Lab HQ. Linden Lab is rockin the open office architecture, with everyone from Philip on down crammed into one huge cluttered space. A fairly utilitarian office environment, they do have a small game room with a pool table and a "Street Fighter II" stand up console.
LL had just put out a new museum piece, Sim One, the first in the series of servers where Second Life data is kept. The display doesn’t even have a plaque yet, just a small handwritten note on the side of the computer. I was tempted to kneel and kiss the motherboard.
The entry to the office sports a huge dry erase board, which residents sign when visiting Linden Lab. I added my own little "Rik Riel" in one of the few empty spots. Clearly they are going to need a bigger dry erase board, perhaps the size of an airport hangar door.
On the way out, I spotted Philip Rosendale, the CEO/demigod of SL himself, chatting with some guys outside the office. Looks just like his avatar, without the chaps.
Later I got to hang out at the offices of Techsoup, a cool non-profit that helps other non-profits use technology more effectively. Techsoup has been slowly expanding their in-world presence, under the leadership of Glitteractica Cookie.
Glitteractica interviewed me on camera as part of a short video they want to produce on non-profits in Second Life. I hope they got something useful out of all my hemming and hawing.
All-in-all a very interesting day of Second Life / real life meetings.
reposted your resident board photo on my Flickr (yay CC licensing!) – can you add a note and show us where you put yours? 🙂
The resolution on the photo is not the greatest, but I will see what I can do.