SLCC: How Do We Move Forward?

So, last month I went to Second Life Community Convention 5, held this year in San Francisco. There were about 350ish attendees, a mix of professionals developers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and various other Second Life users. Along with the superbly talented and friendly Hydra Shaftoe, I co-ran the Business Track; I was very pleased with the fact that the Business Track rooms was almost always full or nearly full, and we had strong speakers who engaged the audience. I did not have *too* much time to experience much of the other tracks personally (except music, which had a lot of artists and was well-executed), but I've heard positive feedback about the content of the other tracks.

There were some very high points at SLCC this year, and there were some areas that definitely need improvement. After talking with a number of the track leaders, organizers, and attendees, I've come to some conclusions about where SLCC needs to go from this year forward.

Time

The most troublesome aspect of SLCC was the fact that planning always gets started late. Some background - I co-founded SLCC back in 2005 with 4 enthusiastic individuals and strong support from Linden Lab and New York Law School (via Beth Noveck, a technology saint). While I was only active the first year and part of the second year in planning, I'd watched as every single year the convention planning get on late.

Normally, planning doesn't get underway at least until February, when you'll see the first blog posts about possible locations, some polls for where it should take will inevitably wind up on some message boards. This needs to happen, oh, 4 to 5 months earlier in October. The same goes for selecting track leaders, getting themes and visual design done.

By November, sponsor packages should be complete, advertising and outreach should be planned, and a location narrowed down to a few choices. Track leaders should be reaching out to the community to feel out what topics and speakers that people would like to have.

By January, the first few sponsors should have already paid money, so that deposit can be put on the hotel, and there's money to advertise, hire web designers if needed, etc. Track leaders should have curriculum set up with overview of the types of topics.

By March, speakers should be starting to be booked. Conference tickets should be on sale. The press should be in full swing talking about the convention.

... by comparison, this past year, none of that started *until* March.

Advertising

The convention is not well advertised. Here are a variety of suggestions:
- Don't just reach out to Second Life related blogs. Hit up all of the virtual world blogs, as well as gaming blogs.
- Once there's some buzz, reaching out to more established tech blogs should be relatively straightforward.
- There's a few dozen major tech and gaming conferences that happen in first quarter and early second quarter of each year. SLCC should have a presence at many of them, even if it's just paying for an insert into grab bags, or paying someone to go to the convention and hand out fliers. There's no reason SLCC shouldn't be advertising at SxSW, E3, GDC, MacWorld, Virtual Worlds Engage (or whatever it's going to be called this year), and other cons.
- Blog early, blog often, feed it everywhere. Info should be spreading via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, e-mail lists, and in-world Second Life groups.

In-World Convention

This needs a dedicated staff member just for this. During Year 1 this wound up being a significant revenue stream from sponsors, and we did events throughout the week leading up to SLCC. It has atrophied since I've stopped personally doing it. Not everyone can make it to SLCC in-person. This needs to be beefed up and run properly with mixed-reality streams, content that's only available in-world, giveaways, user-generated infrastructure and themes, etc. Think more like SL's annual birthday party. Think reaching out to different metaverse and Second Life meetup groups around the world to have local tie-ins.

Dedicated Organizer Roles

Probably the messiest thing at SLCC this year was the fact that the organizers were running around doing a million different things. The organizers all put tremendous energy into the convention, and it's clear that they're both understaffed and needing specialists. But realize, none of the organizers were any of the original leaders - these are all volunteers who have had to join mid-stream and deal with leftovers of a system that was a bit micro-managed and designed for a smaller set of attendees and content.

In short: it's time to grow.

What came out of discussions with organizers and track leaders is that roles need to be specified and organizers should choose what they're best at, and find more people to fill extra slots. We had great success with the track leaders this year, and a great variety of content was provided to attendees; that's because each track leader knew their role and had freedom to do it. The same philosophy applies to organizers. The roles I can identify:

- Convention Organizer: Should be experienced with running conventions, and will focus on creating the overall schedule and making sure everyone is making their deadlines. That's *all*.
- Hotel coordinator: Books the hotel, deals with all hotel things through the convention
- Treasurer / Accountant
- Volunteer Organizer
- Content Manager: Supervises all Track Leaders
- Technical Supervisor: In charge of in-person tech, bandwidth, website and social media running
- Advertising / Marketing Specialist: In charge of making sure a solid theme is created and everything in the convention adheres, including blog posts, logos, t-shirts, ID badges, advertisements, websites, in-world convention, etc.
- Sponsorship getter
- Social Event Planner: In charge of all parties, etc.
- Linden Lab Liason: Deals with Linden Lab and takes their input for the convention.
- Track Leaders

Transparency

This really just goes along with the advertising plan. Share what's going on as it happens. SLCC got this pretty well right this year, though there were complaints early on (some less grounded than others) about the choosing of the convention.

Choose a Good Location

Firstly, it should be clear that while polls are one source of input as to the location, it's not the end-all be-all. There were some very vocal few this year crying out for Vegas as the location. Seriously? Vegas is a horrible place for a convention that: (a) Wants to attract more than just social attendees (b) It's ridiculously hot in August / September when SLCC usually occures. That doesn't mean that San Francisco was necessarily the best choice for last year - but the vocal minority wanted the public to think it was either Vegas or San Francisco or nothing. There were other cities more affordable than San Francisco that weren't Vegas, certainly. There's also a few considerations, first and foremost that Linden Lab basically foot a significant portion of sponsorship.

Some considerations for location:
1. People other than Americans and Canadians might actually want to attend. A city on the West Coast allows easier access from Asia, a city on the East Coast allows easier access from Europe.
2. Having the convention at a city with a Linden Lab office does help secure sponsorship and speakers.
3. The location is supposed to change every year. Where has it been? Where hasn't it?
4. The city needs to be tech-friendly. Houston: Bad Idea. Austin: Better Idea.
5. Price is a factor, though what's more important is finding a hotel that can provide a good deal on rooms. If I'm saving $50 a room for three or four nights, that adds up fast.
6. Hotel needs to have good, free wifi. Period.
7. There need to be interesting places to eat nearby. Lots and lots of networking and birds-of-feather type things go on each year. Tampa was a pain, for this reason.
8. Locality to developers, educators, and sponsors.

Some of my suggestions for next year: Boston, Philly, Seattle, Denver, Austin.

Crowd Control

I'm not talking about the attendees; I'm talking about communities: education, healthcare, developers, artists, musicians, etc. Track leaders have a big role to play - to reach out to community leaders and to do so *early*. This year, education was nearly a disaster because of some pretty blatant in-fighting between factions in the Second Life educators. Some of them got vocally scared because of some comments on SLUniverse.com's forum that they took as some sort of community outreach. There was no good track leader - at the time - to say basically, "No, seriously. It's a rants-and-raves forum, it represents a small percentage of voices." Instead, it snowballed out of control, and by the time the new education track leader stepped it, it was all clean-up work.

On the other hand, the music track leader had (even before being officially tapped as the leader), reached out to the musician community. Consequently, there was a ton of live music and mixed-reality music at the convention and that went off smoothly.

Next Year Will Be Great

This thought I don't doubt. This year's SLCC had great content for attendees, though the convention was somewhat disorganized. I've heard from a lot of folks interested in helping SLCC. Really, it comes down to getting an early start and getting people into appropriate roles. Everything else should flow from that. The organizers already have been taking feedback about this year, planning, reorganizing, trying to continue the momentum from this year's convention. I have every reason to believe that difficulties experienced this year will be addressed, and there's a lot of good people putting in a lot of work and money into SLCC.

Volunteers Wanted!

Addendum: If you're interested in volunteering at any level, and/or you have expertise you'd like to share with the organizers, you can email volunteer@slconvention.org, or contact me privately and I'll route you to the organizers personally.