Italian Newbie community kickoff done with good results..

We did our "Italian kickoff in CloudParty" this evening and we were around 15-20 avatars in PyramidCafè mostly newbie who didn't ever know what CP is (but people who knows very well SL or OpenSim). I used Voice from SL and kamedia voice support and in this way people was able to follow me. The meeting started from 10PM to 11.30PM without major problems, and mainly I introduced some very basic concepts in CP like how to login, how to move, how to fly. It is always very instructive for me to see where people is getting stuck, and usually is getting stuck in places I didn't considered dangerous. * For instance many people got stuck in the login process: the weren't able to understand how to login (!) To be sure there is apparently a bug in CP with chrome where if you are not connected to Facebook it keeps in a loop, so I advised people to first login in Facebook and THEN connect to CP. * Then I noticed that they wanted to TP where I had the meeting and it was not easy to tell them to look in the cellphone for navigation or from contacts. * Third many of them had difficult in understand how to stop music from playing in the sim. Apparently that loudspeaker icon is not visible enough, so I had to explain this at least 5-6 times :( * I had to insist in asking them to complete the tutorials to have the free land plot. Many of them just skipped the tutorial, but when I said them that there is a gift at the end they enjoyed making the tutorial and were very happy with their new land. * A person found out that if asking Chrome to translate page from English to Italian chrome is apparently taking the task to translate by its own and seamlessly chat and all the other UI in Italian, so this can be an important thing to note and to teach to not English speaking people On the whole I noticed that people were quite gratified by this experience and probably a good percentage of them (probably 20-30% will keep on stay here). Majority of them said they will come next Friday when I will start teaching effective building / scripting as I'm used in SecondLife opensim. No crashes happened and the load on the sim was something that could have put in serious trouble opensim and not so low impact in sl itself. I think that these kind of meetup/informal happenings are a good way to spread CP and to retain new users.

By Salahzar Stenvaag
forum http://is.gd/JCN6Zr