Yesterday at the morning Second Life mentors' meeting, Linden Lab staff announced that Linden Lab's sponsored mentor group, which had been functionally closed (in all but name) for approximately a year now, would finally be disbanded in practice. The move doesn't really come as much of a surprise to observers of the Lab's sponsored volunteer programs over the last eighteen months.
Almost immediately more ex-mentor Second Life social groups than we could comfortably count sprang up, as people prepared to maintain their network of contacts without the overarching group umbrella. While there was surprisingly little actual yelling, some members of the organization feel the blame lies squarely at the feet of Linden Lab's CEO Mark Kingdon, though there's not a lot of apparent evidence to justify that.
Linden Lab's position is that the mentoring system doesn't scale. Others feel that it could have scaled orders of magnitude beyond what it had achieved, but that Linden Lab did not make the necessary decisions in order to allow it to do so. The Lab's support for the group has been progressively scaled back for the last 18 months, and the volunteer team at Linden Lab has now been completely repurposed.
It is unclear as to how orientation experiences on the Second Life Help islands will proceed. No existing users apparently will have access to them. There's been some talk of Big Spaceship revamping orientation processes, and the possible use of bots to replace mentors was mentioned at the meeting.
Instructor, Mentor and Mentor Q&A groups will be terminated on 11 December.
Linden Lab continues to utilize volunteers for the Wiki, the Second Life Answers project, the Community Translation Project, and is working on the next stage of the Resident Help Network to promote existing user-run volunteer organizations.
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