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Andrew Linden Talks About Havok4
Second Life Insider
Sep 29th 2007 12:58AM I just discovered that I'm not going to be able to make the Saturday office hour after all. Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to sleep in my wife scheduled some adventure that requires us to leave the house at 07:15. Sidewinder Linden is going to cover for me.
The Love Machine Unveiled!
Second Life Insider
Dec 6th 2006 11:22AM Linden Lab uses Jira for bugs and other things that need to be done. The "Love Machine" is distinct from Jira and is a very simple system that we've implemented ourselves.
Basically, if someone helps you out, does something impressive, or otherwise makes you happy about how they're doing their job you can send them "Love". Giving Love is as simple as typing the person's name and the reason why (within 80 characters). When you give someone Love the Love Machine sends an email to that person from you with the reason. You can review all of the Love you've handed out, or the Love you've received, but not the Love given or received by your co-workers. You can view the last six most recent Love donations, and who they went to, but not who sent them. There is no enforced limit to how much Love you can dispense, however the suggested rate is about 1 Love per day on average. After about three or four months the Love is tallied and envelopes of cash are handed out proportional to how much Love each person received within that period. One Love is worth $3.
Some other bits about the Love Machine:
The primary value of the Love is the communication of appreciation for help and hard work. People enjoy giving and recieving Love.
The monetary value of one Love was chosen to be low enough that it was not a big incentive to try to game the system but valuable enough that the person giving the Love feels as if they are doing the other a favor, and the recipient recieves some non-zero financial reward.
Another way to look at it is as a system where everybody has the power to make minor adjustments to the "salary" of everybody else. It is a small "bottoms up" method of distributing the company assets.
The Love Machine does has a few checks, balances, and oversight, but was not overengineered to prevent abuse. Instead, we took faith in the general honesty, intelligence, and goodwill of all of the employees at Linden Lab. It was intended to be an evolving experiment.
