TLE Educational Network – Current Status & Future Plans

A great deal has happened @ TLE Educational Network over the past 6 weeks which has forced many changes in our plans and way of doing things. I am going to try to bring everyone up to date in this Blog Post, and explain exactly where TLE Educational Network is headed. This may not interest many of you, however, since we do use our Blog to disseminate information, this is the proper place to do it.

Past Events:

When TLE Educational Network was first created and began operations, none of us on the Board envisioned the success it would have. Of course, I personally had certain projections within the effort in Second Life but these were extremely conservative. As time went on, and due to the efforts and generous contributions from two of the Board Members, who understood and believed in the message of TLE Educational Network we were able to expand. However, we never sought out to purchase our own estate or Sims. This was due to many reasons, the most critical was that at each stage we were unsure what would succeed and what would not succeed. Today the membership of groups that TLE runs is near 12,000 members, which is an outstanding number for Second Life no matter how you slice the cake.

This also proved to be possibly a drastic mistake in not thinking pro-actively enough about the future.

As many know, TLE is not just striving for educational excellence in the Virtual World environment. Our plan was and still is, to incorporate the VW world of SL with Social Networking areas, such as Facebook. This is not as difficult as it may sound, nor is it an impossible task.

Another aspect of TLE, which began with our publications is part of the TLE Educational Network Publishing House was and is successful way beyond original projections.

Thus TLE grew and grew. And we experimented with different ideas and different layouts and different situations.

When TLE first established itself we decided upon Cove Islands. For a long time it proved to be a wise and good choice. Josue took care of us, and despite demands on the time and sometimes requests which took a great deal of time for him to do, he always had them done.

However, Cove Islands around two months ago, without any proper notification to any of their clients, began to fall apart. Swiftly. Josue left, and the two owners of Coves, never had the courtesy to inform TLE, their largest customer, that they were going to sell Coves. Just put a message up on SLEX and of course the word spread from there.

It is obvious that they were hoping to entice a buyer(s) by showing a fairly full Sim percentage of paying clients. While this is legitimate in and of itself, it becomes incredibly negligent when you do not bother to inform your current clients that you are selling what they paid you for.

At that time we began a short series of negotiations with Coves. However, not one of the offers that were made – made any financial sense to TLE in any sense of the term.

The Board quietly discussed other options we may have. But the next step that Coves took was beyond any ability to actually plan or do anything about.

TLE paid tiers on 2 full sims at Coves and purchased them from Coves with a full purchase price of 195,000L when they were first set up. This was beyond the weekly tiers we paid as well (obviously here the proper term is "leased"). One which housed the museum and the other which contained the Zoo. These sims were paid up for 3 more days when the following took place. (And since TLE paid its tiers on a weekly basis this is very regular and normal.)

I landed in SL and suddenly on the bottom right hand side of my screen blue messages kept on popping up about Moku Cove (the Museum) telling me that scripts were not working. So I made a TP over to the Museum thinking that perhaps it needed a reboot. To my utter astonishment and shock, what I found was that though our Tiers were paid, suddenly the whole Museum and the Zoo had been moved back to the ownership of Coves. In other words, though TLE was paid up, we were denied any abilities to do anything on these Sims.

This was done without, I repeat, without, any form of letter, or email, or IM. In other words, it was done behind the back of TLE, and if this is not Land Fraud I do not know what is.

So trying to be fair-minded, and thinking that simply some sort of mistake had been made I emailed Just Dinkin. When I had not received any sort of reply twelve hours later, I emailed him again. After 26 hours I received the following reply from Jenee Marten the owner of Coves:

Kitviel,

A TLE staff member informed us that you would be moving from Cove and when we saw your tier expiring we figured you were doing just that. And since you didn't take the opportunity to purchase the 2 sims you were leasing we decided to sell them off.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

1. I have no proof who this staff member is, that deigned to speak for me, nor do I care anymore.
2. I was not informed of any such sale.
3. The text of Jenee is a lie, as she sold off the sims more than 2.5 days before the tiers even began to expire, and I have all the emails with the headers to prove it including the emails of the Coveland Notifiers.
4. No matter what the case was, I should have been informed of the impending sale by email and IM and asked to confirm receipt of such information. This obviously was not done.
5. In other words, I am clearly stating here, that not only was this bad business practice, but it was cheating and fraud.

Another little aspect to this whole scenario, which made matters even worse for a bit, is by the time the above email arrived in my inbox, the Zoo and Museum had disappeared. They had been moved to new coordinates by Just based upon the request of the new owner.

Additionally, nothing was returned to my inventory. So what I was left with was the thought that TLE had just lost something bettween $5000-$7000 in USD on objects in those sims. Remember, the zoo is filled with animals which do not come cheap.

So over the July 4th weekend, this is what was done:

Here is what took place over the July 4th Weekend. Most of which you may know so just a recap.

1. First I placed a land fraud report against the owner of Coves with LL. True to LL, they have not yet answered me, nor have even acknowledged they got it except in a form letter.
2. Second, I stopped paying any and all tiers at Coves.
3. I started one by one picking up every single parcel of TLE. This was a gargantuan task, but it had to be done in a time frame so I had no choice. I was not able to rely on the Coves people to not sell the land from under us and thus loose all our stuff.
4. As of the writing TLE is no longer at Coves in any parcel. Every prim of ours has been picked up.
5. The headquarters for TLE has been moved to our LSJ campus.

Meanwhile, a very interesting thing happened, which shows us as well, that there are honest and decent people out there.

The new owner of the Museum and Zoo, realized when they moved the coordinates to his desired place and the Sims reappeared, that no one in his right mind would just leave over 5-7K USD of objects on a Sim. He did some quick math between the museum and zoo and realized something was really wrong. So instead of globally returning them to me, which he could have done and would have been a holy mess, he contacted me. When I told him about the land and the story, he was enraged at Coves. He showed me a log by Just, which was not only misleading but a downright lie about the status of the Sim. Then he gave me time to pick up the Zoo and Museum. Which of course added to the tasks at hand but at least I had control over it. This too was a huge task. But because of his honesty, we have all the animals, all our stuff, and all the museum pieces.

Current Status:

Due to the incredible generosity of many SL people TLE has been able to continue, albeit, on land donated for its use. This is a temporary stage.

I am now in the midst of what is known in the high tech world as “investor relations”. However, due to past lessons, and long experience in high tech, I am not rushing into anything.

The next time TLE is rebuilt, which will take time, it will be done with all the proper financing and tools in place to achieve what it set out to achieve. Any other way of operating is simply a prelude to disaster.

As to the owners of Cove Islands. I am publicly calling upon Linden Lab the owners of Second Life, who make constant and consistent reiterations that they take “abuse” reports seriously, to take this one as seriously as humanely possible. TLE has deposited all emails pertaining to this, with all headers intact with its legal representatives outside of SL as well.

If owners of land in SL can do what Cove Islands did with impunity, without any sort of repercussions or knowing that Linden Lab will just allow them to get away with it, the serious businesses and educational institutions have every sane right to ignore Second Life as a viable environment.

TLE Educational Network will recover from this unfortunate set of incidents. And notice I made no mention of what was going in the personal lives of all the members of the Board of TLE at the time, which was to say the least, very drastic.

We will recover. But unless Linden Lab makes good on its supposed guarantee that they do take abuse reports seriously, then it surely becomes an exercise in futility.

Through the summer months we will hopefully finish investor negotiations and begin to rebuild. This will take time, but the plans are all meticulously laid out.

We are always interested in hearing from possible investors, no matter at what stage. But TLE Educational Network will remain true to its original motto: Where Knowledge & Education Are Always Free.

This then is where TLE stands at the moment. Through messages to our groups and this blog we will keep you informed of all upcoming events, and plans for the future.

Kitviel Silberberg
TLE Educational Network