Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 6 Feb 2013: summary

[Marstol Nitely]

Attending the meeting:
Ada Radius
Bladyblue Bommerang
Dinero Wind
Ilan Tochner
Inga Wind
Marstol Nitely
Mat Mahogany
Paislee Myrtle
Virtualbelfast Ireland

Most of the mentors were able to stay for the entire meeting. A couple were only able to stop in for a short time, but were welcome for the time they were able to stay.

Ilan Tochner started the meeting with an update on improvements made to Kitely over the last week. The inventory selection control panel for the marketplace is completed. It is designed to handle large inventories with minimal load times. The selection control panel will be used when merchants add items from their inventory to create or edit their marketplace entries. It looks like a tree with checkboxes, so multiple files and/or folders can be selected.
Each folder in the merchant inventory will show up to 500 items when it is opened. There will be a link at the bottom of the merchant’s inventory page that can be clicked to load additional inventory items. Loading merchant inventory on demand will keep Kitely from having to download peoples’ huge inventories all at once. Unlike SL, merchants won’t have to submit items from inside the viewer and then use that in the marketplace. They will be able to view the entire inventory and select the files/folders they want to include in a particular product entry. It will be similar to selecting files you want to upload as an email attachment. You see your entire hard drive (inventory in this case) and once the upload has been completed there is no longer a connection with the file on the hard drive.

The Kitely inventory merchant control panel uses icons derived from the SL viewer’s creative commons share-alike-for-commercial-use licensed icons. So it will be easy to understand what each item is. For example, the icon for hair is the same as the standard SL hair icon seen in inventory inside the viewer. The icons were modified slightly for the white background they’ll be displayed on, but are still very much like the original icons.

There was a lengthy discussion about selling collaborative items on the marketplace. Kitely needs to be able to define the permissions for sold third-party items to be more limited in perms if the merchant wants. Kitely won’t allow wrapping an item in a bundle with more permissions and using that to transfer items with no transfer perms. Adding third-party items inside a marketplace entry requires those items to have both Copy and Transfer permissions - the merchant can sell them with less but not more perms. Content protection is reactive via DMCA: http://www.kitely.com/copyright_notice. Ilan pointed out that there are also less formal avenues that don’t use DCMA and give Kitely a bit more leeway in how they react. Like the “Report” link in world pages that can be used to file a complaint about what is going on in those worlds.

The group moved on to discuss marketplace attributes:

Building Material: Bone, Earth, Fabric, Feathers, Fire, Fur, Glass, Leather, Leaves, Liquid, Metal, Plastic, Scales, Stone, Wood, Other. – approved

Sound Type: Ambiance, Creature, Human, Machine, Nature, Synthesized. – approved

World Style: Arabian, Asian, Fantasy, Historical, Modern, Sci-Fi, Steampunk, Urban, Western, Other – tabled after lengthy discussion. There was some question as to if there should be a category for Real Places. It was brought up by Stio (Virtualbelfast Ireland) who has been involved in a number of realistic builds that are based on actual places. The group could not come to a consensus on this attribute.

Art Theme: Abstract, Erotic, Creatures, Landscape, People, Objects – approved

Note from Ilan: if you wish to contribute to the aforementioned discussion please do so in this thread.